Russia Feature: Putin Wins Election, But Will There Be Protests? (Heritage)

Vladimir Putin cries with joy at his post-election rally

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Vladimir Putin faces new protests on Monday to challenge his victory in a presidential election he said had prevented Russia from falling into the hands of enemies trying to usurp power.

Putin's opponents, complaining of widespread fraud in Sunday's election, said they did not recognize the results and would rally near the Kremlin at 7 p.m. (1500 GMT).

But the former KGB spy, who after four years as prime minister will be returning to the post he held from 2000 until 2008, said with tears rolling down his cheeks that he had won a "clean" victory.

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Syria Feature: Homs --- Dying Without Food, Medicine, or Supplies (Damon and Korouny and Lee)

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Last week "Sammy", an activist in Homs, concluded an interview with EA's James Miller, "I do not know what the world is waiting for. Is it a terrorist group, or a revolution?....At least they need to send relief, to help the humanitarian situation. We need humanitarian aid."

This morning we post two videos and an article about the situation inside Syria's besieged city. At the top of the entry, CNN's Arwa Damon reports from Baba Amr in Homs on the lack of food and other essentials and the efforts to get supplies to the population.

Below, Mariam Korouny writes for Reuters about the crisis, and Al Jazeera English posts a video report by Laurence Lee about the deaths and shortages.

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Iran Snapshot: The Economy --- "How Am I Going to Live Like This?" (Mostafavi)

Marjan Hamidi turned away from the butcher's shop in a crowded area of Tehran's sprawling bazaar. Her quest to buy reasonably priced groceries was not going well.

"Everything's become so expensive in the past few weeks, she said with disappointment. "But my husband's income stays the same. How am I going to live like this?"

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Iran Feature: How Tehran Evades Sanctions on Its Ships (Armstrong/Grey/Ojha)

Just before noon on a sticky, overcast Saturday morning earlier this month a truck carrying two white containers waited at an electronic checkpoint to leave Singapore's main port. The containers bore the bright red letters IRISL, the initials of Iran's cargo line, which has been blacklisted by the United Nations, United States and European Union. 

Anchored just off Singapore's playground island of Sentosa that same day, the container ship Valili was also stacked high with IRISL boxes. A couple of miles to the east the Parmis, another container ship, also carried IRISL crates. Shipping movements data tracked by Reuters shows the Parmis had pulled into Singapore waters from the northern Chinese port of Tianjin early that morning.

The ships and containers are key parts in an international cat-and-mouse game, as Iran attempts to evade the trade sanctions tightening around it.

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Bahrain Feature: Problems for the Financial Sector? (French)

Bahraini financial firms face a tough task raising funding in 2012, as political tensions from last year's Arab Spring unrest fester and real estate investments show no sign of paying off.

Analysts say one option for banks in the tiny island kingdom is to look to neighbour Saudi Arabia, but getting a hearing is often a challenge because lenders there have enough local business on their hands.

The violent protests against Bahrain's rulers rattled Western banks operating there and equally importantly dealt a body blow to real estate prices, leading to impairments at Islamic banks in particular.

"Bahrain is a ghost town right now," said one Dubai-based banker who makes frequent trips to the island, speaking on condition on anonymity.

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Russia Feature: Renewed Protests Against Putin (De Carbonnel/Grove)

The protest in Moscow demanding fair elections

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Tens of thousands of Russians defied bitter cold in Moscow on Saturday to demand fair elections in a march against Vladimir Putin's 12-year rule, and thousands of others staged a rally supporting the prime minister.

Opposition protesters also organized smaller protests in other cities across the vast country, one month before the March 4 presidential election which Putin is expected to win.

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Syria (and Beyond) LiveBlog: What Will Happen With Today's Protests?

2123 GMT: According to the LCCS, 22 people have been killed today in Syria, including 4 children, 7 civilians in Daraa, 6 in Homs, 5 in Hama, 4 in people in the Damascus Suburbs (2 in Irbee, and 1 in Yabroud and Daraya.)

2110 GMT: According to Now Lebanon,

A YouTube video purportedly filmed on Friday in Homs shows protestors during an evening march with one demonstrator carrying a paper saying: “The people want support [to be offered to] the Free Syrian Army and Arab protection.”

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Iran Feature: Has the Regime Decapitated the Green Movement? (Hafezi)

Attempts to revive street protests have fizzled. The opposition, which says its fight for a freer Iran will continue, is following the Arab uprisings with a mixture of envy and regret for its own failure, analysts and moderate former officials say.

"The opposition is leaderless and lacks any strategy. The opposition leaders are under house arrest. Dozens of prominent reformists are jailed. Their supporters have no choice but to wait and see," said a close ally of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who asked not to be named.

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Libya Feature: The Caterer, The Memory Stick, and the Fall of Qaddafi's Tripoli (Nakhoul)

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime was delivered by a caterer, on a memory stick.

Abdel Majid Mlegta ran the companies that supplied meals to Libyan government departments including the interior ministry. The job was "easy," he told Reuters last week. "I built good relations with officers. I wanted to serve my country."

But in the first few weeks of the uprising, he secretly began to work for the rebels. He recruited sympathizers at the nerve center of the Gaddafi government, pinpointed its weak links and its command-and-control strength in Tripoli, and passed that information onto the rebel leadership on a series of flash memory cards.

The first was handed to him, he says, by Gaddafi military intelligence and security officers. It contained information about seven key operations rooms in the capital, including internal security, the Gaddafi revolutionary committees, the popular guards --- as Gaddafi's voluntary armed militia was known -- and military intelligence.

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Sudan Feature: 500,000 Displaced as North Sudanese Forces Gather on Border (Flint)

Fierce new fighting along Sudan's volatile north-south divide is raising deep concern for the safety of the Nuba people, the forgotten victims of the country's long-running civil war who are once again under attack by government forces and militias.

The fighting has significantly increased the chances that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the civil war six years ago will collapse, reigniting a north-south war and ending all hopes of peaceful partition when oil-rich South Sudan formally declares itself independent on 9 July.

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