Block the website if you must. The paper comes out on Thursday.

At about nine o’clock on Thursday evening, a few hours after this week’s issue went on sale, readers in Talas began to write to us that the website would not open. By midnight it would not open anywhere on Attelkom’s network. This is the fifth time since 2013. We have not been told why, and we do not expect to be.

We can guess. This week we reported that the two companies that appear to be the unnamed partners in the Sary-Bulak restart share an address and a director with a subsidiary of Trans-Chuy. We did not say they were Trans-Chuy’s. We said what the register says, printed the companies’ replies, and asked the Ministry of Natural Resources a question it has not answered. If the answer is innocent, it is a short one: name the partners.

Blocking a website in 2026 is a strange way to keep a secret. The site is hosted in the United States by our readers’ association, and it will stay up; anyone outside Irad can read it, and so can anyone inside who uses a VPN, our Tulpar channel or the copy of this page their cousin forwards. What a block does is tell everyone which story mattered.

In February 2007 this paper printed the drafts of a treaty to sell our country. We printed them because they were true and because people had a right to read them, not because they helped anyone into power, though they did. The men who quoted our special edition from platforms that spring called the Times the paper that would not be sold. We took them at their word. We still do.

The press is on in the yard on Printers’ Lane, as it is every Wednesday night. The paper will be on the stands next Thursday. This editorial is published online only; it will be in print on 22 October.