TODAY: Prison whistle-blower punished; Left Front member jailed; France castigates the Kremlin for Magnitsky case; ailing entrepreneur escapes pre-trial detention thanks to European Rights Court; policing Russia’s army.  Putin put off public speaking by Sunday’s catcalls?  Gorbachev attacks ‘imitation’ democracy; Medvedev’s Georgia admission; Tajikistan agrees to free alleged Russian smuggler; broadcaster’s live insult to Obama; Khordokovksy film hits stumbling block 

RFE/RL reports on how, following an interview in which he revealed human rights abuses in Butyrka remand prison, Senior Lieutenant Aleksei Kozlov was subsequently demoted to a lower-paid post and made the subject of hostile scrutiny from his colleagues. Left Front activist Oleg Prudnikov has been sentenced in Moscow to seven days in jail for refusing to follow police instructions.   The Interior Ministry has hit back at protestors detained at Moscow State University, arguing that they were warned several times that their actions would be followed by arrests.  France has become the latest Western country to chastise Russia openly for its lackluster investigation into the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in pretrial detention in 2009.  Only recourse to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights has meant that a seriously ill inmate, entrepreneur Natalia Gulevich, could be transferred from pretrial detention center to a hospital after her kidneys and bladder recently failed.  Defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov has said that a police force will be introduced into Russia’s army next year in an attempt to root out ‘dedovshchina’, an extreme form of military hazing.