TODAY: Navalny trial reopens, is adjourned; independent investigation blames police for Bolotnaya Square unrest; Syria chemical weapons reports offer chance for U.S.-Russia cooperation; Novosibirsk journalists attacked; Putin wants growth proposals; Rosneft unveils giant production plans; Navalny’s request for Rosneft disclosure is denied; Boston bombers; Abramovich is top philanthropist.

The trial against anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny reopened today in Kirov, and was promptly adjourned to allow the judge to consider a request by Navalny’s lawyers to return the case against him to his prosecutors, due to what they are calling procedural errors.  An independent investigation blames police and authorities for inciting violence at last year’s anti-Kremlin Bolotnaya Square protest last year, claiming that riot police used ‘excessive force’ against demonstrators – many of whom are now in prison or facing charges for participating in mass unrest.  The new investigation, sponsored by ‘non-parliamentary political opposition’, studied various witness testimonies, footage, and photographs, and alleges that ‘there were no mass riots on Bolotnaya but “separate actions of self-defense” by some protesters’.  New reports alleging that Syria used chemical weapons against its own population may at last provide an issue on which Russia and the U.S. can agree to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to hand over power.  U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, says that cooperation with Russia is desirable, but would be ‘very difficult’.  Reporters Without Borders has released information about two separate violent attacks on journalists in Novosibirsk that took place earlier this month – one of them, on Andrei Chelnokov, the head of the Union of Novosibirsk Journalists, and the other on Boris Komarov, whose company Uniton-Media owns several news media outlets.