Uzbekistan in and out of the news

Saturday morning the headline at CNN.com was death of hundreds in a bloody crackdown by Uzbekistan's relatively authoritarian President Islam Karimov. Later in the day the story was gone and could not be found without searching, supplanted by god knows what, though it resurfaced in a more discreet location on Sunday.

Karimov blamed the uprising on Muslim fundamentalism, and indeed, who wouldn't? Putin always blames Chechens and other "blacks" when something blows up in Moscow, so far with great success. If it's Islamists, the story goes, a guy's just doing his part in the war on terror. And, who knows, he might be, but if so he's surely created a big ole bunch of martyrs. In any case, Karimov signalled that he will not, unlike his colleague Akaev of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, go softly into that good night.

Two transliterations of name of the Uzbek town which the blood was shed, Andijan and Andizhan, in linked CNN pages gave a sense of the story's editorial urgency.