OK, so what really happened?

There seems to be very little new information that's come out in the last 4 hours. CNN's focus is now on the "thousands of Uzbeks fleeing," and they (or whoever provides the content on the site - AP?) have backed down from the focus on "hundreds dead in Andijan" - here's how they are playing that now, and seemingly placing more distance between themselves and the source:

The exodus came one day after government troops fired on civilians in the wake of the anti-government protest, human rights monitors in Uzbekistan said. They say hundreds of people were killed, Russia's Interfax news agency reported Saturday.

Maybe that underlines the fact that reporting of hundreds of dead without hard confirmation is not really responsible journalism; however, I can understand the situation journalists are in with no access to Andijan and thus no ability to do real reporting on the situation there.

I would also mention that some Russian-language bloggers (some in Uzbekistan) have been urging people not to panic since according to them the fatality reports are overstated. Some of them are perhaps saying this because they don't want to see things change in Uzbekistan, but I think most are probably genuinely concerned about a snowballing epidemic of violence, which they may remember from the early 1990's. Other Russian-language bloggers have taken the reports of hundreds dead at face value - I am going to try to do a post on what English- and Russian-language blogs have had to say about Andijan, now that I've been able to find more content, but that won't happen for a few hours at the soonest (this is important, but I can't skip the Sunday morning banya run).