He says it was "a long-shot," but Berkeley professor Ken Light was hoping Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would take a moment out from invoking Allah and predicting the downfall of global capitalism at the U.N. General Assembly to mention the fates of three former Berkeley students who have been sitting in an Iranian jail since July. Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd were, for reasons that the more sedentary and warzone-averse among us cannot understand, hiking in the mountainous Kurdistan region of Iraq when they wandered mistakenly over the border into Iran. They got arrested, and now they're being used as political pawns, much like Laura Ling and Euna Lee were in North Korea.

Ahmadinejad had mentioned the American hikers in an interview with the AP yesterday, so friends and families of the hikers were hopeful he'd make them the centerpiece of his "conciliatory" speech before a half-empty U.N. chamber. Alas, he was too busy quoting the Koran, dissing the U.S.'s operations in Afghanistan, and calling the Israelis racist. Watch his whole speech here, but we'd recommend watching some of Qaddafi's 90-minute batshit diatribe instead.