TODAY: Putin protester to stay behind bars despite ailment; Kashin loses post; prison riot spurs calls for reform; Gazprom secures deal with Turkey; Russia seeking Internet control; Medvedev on bad driving, hooligans, Syria, and Pussy Riot; group refuses to cash in; Svetlana Kuritsyna.

A Moscow court has refused to free Vladimir Akimenkov, a political activist charged with attacking police officers at a protest, despite claims that he is ‘going blind’ in prison due to a congenital eye condition that requires urgent treatment.  Opposition-oriented journalist Oleg Kashin has been fired from his post at Kommersant, supposedly for not writing enough for his employer, although many suspect the dismissal is a result of Kremlin intervention.  A riot at a prison in Chelyabinsk has ended, successfully drawing attention to poor conditions for prisoners, with the region’s governer admitting that the system needs reform.  Gazprom has secured a 30-year supply deal with Turkey, ending a ‘one-year impasse in gas trade’.  Leaked drafts from an upcoming International Telecommunications Union conference in Dubai indicate that ‘Russia is seeking rules giving individual countries broad permission to shape the content and structure of the Internet within their borders’.  Google’s IP address was blacklisted in Russia over the weekend – for a second time – due to a ‘software failure’.  The European Union says that a new surge of protectionist measures by Russia ‘break global trade rules’.