The Guardian has been patient enough to blog its way through the whole of Vladimir Putin’s four-and-half hour televised Q+A session which featured much in the way of predictable, anodyne questions on the matter of pensions, Sochi, adoptions etc.  The live blog is nonetheless worth reading perhaps more for some of the hilarious tweets made during the marathon session than any startling revelations from the iron-tongued leader, who used the opportunity to praise Alexei Kudrin and his man in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.  The one moment where things got meaty, apart from some glaring insults directed at John McCain (who has evidently replaced Hillary Clinton as Putin’s Washington-based nemesis, to join his merry band of his London-based nemeses) came with the matter of the protests.  The PM was quick to dismiss the opposition street movement, though veered in tone between benign, twinkly-eyed praise of the protestors’ youth and vigor and intransigent stoney-faced mockery of their ideas.  From the Guardian: