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A beer and rock music festival that kicks off at the city’s Treugolnik center on Friday looks set to become Russia’s answer to beer-drinking culture from Belgium, the U.K., the Czech Republic and other countries, while helping the local homeless. All profits made at the Magerfest festival, which runs through this coming weekend, will be donated to programs targeting the city’s homeless people. St. Petersburg is home to nearly 30 independent breweries, though only the biggest players are well known among the general public. The new festival is designed to serve as a springboard for smaller breweries, a full range of which will be presented at the event. The rock music element of the event is by no means small, with top Russian and Western bands including the U. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
In the absence of buckwheat, two pensioners stock up on oatmeal porridge in a central St. Petersburg store Thursday. |
 A police officer who was especially brutal during a police clampdown on the July 31 demo in defense of the right of assembly may face a prison term, after a criminal case regarding the police exceeding their authority was opened this week. The rally’s organizers are also calling for the senior officers who gave the orders to break up the event to be punished.
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 Buckwheat disappeared from some St. Petersburg stores this week as prices for a number of basic food items in the city grew by an average of 12 percent in August. The reasons behind the shortage are not only the drought, which has damaged many crops in Russia this summer, but also the buying fever sparked by rumors, officials say. |
All photos from issue.
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Local soccer squad Zenit F.C. fell short of qualifying for the UEFA Champions League on Wednesday with a 0:2 second-leg playoff loss to French side AJ Auxerre. A 1:0 victory in the first leg, played in St. Petersburg on Aug. 17, was not enough to ward off elimination after Zenit’s 1:2 aggregate loss. “The match was a tough one because Auxerre were playing at a high tempo,” head coach Luciano Spalletti told L’Equipe after a fiercely fought game that featured some contested refereeing decisions. Auxerre got off to a perfect start as defender Cedric Hengbart easily scored a header after a corner kick. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Drivers sit in a traffic jam before the Alexander Nevsky bridge on Tuesday. Jams formed all over the city this week as city residents returned from holiday and yet more roadworks were begun. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev’s bill to reform the country’s notoriously corrupt police force points in the right direction but faces major changes as it undergoes unprecedented public debate, lawmakers said Wednesday. “There are some weak spots and contradictions in the bill, and I think the text that will be forwarded to the State Duma will differ from the text we are debating today,” Federation Council Senator Viktor Ozerov told reporters after a round-table discussion in the upper house of parliament.
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The Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-led United Russia Party issued a request to President Dmitry Medvedev to suspend work on the planning and construction of a highway through the Khimki forest, Fontanka.ru reported Thursday, citing Lenta.ru, which quoted the party’s press service. |
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MOSCOW — It’s been more than seven years since the border guards, a unit of the Federal Security Service, returned Alma Bukharbayeva’s teenage son in a sealed casket. |
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MOSCOW — The leader of the United Russia party’s youth wing is quitting amid criticism that his organization not only failed to shine during this summer’s devastating wildfires but found themselves mired in scandal for making a fake video of members fighting blazes. Ruslan Gattarov, 33, confirmed on Wednesday that he would resign as the leader of Young Guard in October, but he denied that his departure was linked to the group’s poor performance during the fires. |
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Odnoklassniki founder Albert Popkov plans to sell his stake, allowing Digital Sky Technologies to raise its share in the social network to 100 percent. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has approved a request from DST, owned by Yury Milner, Grigory Finger and Alisher Usmanov, to purchase rights allowing it “to establish the terms of the entrepreneurial activity” of Odnoklassniki, according to a statement on the service’s web site. |
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Pessimism Grows MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian confidence in the health of the economy plunged in August, with more people predicting “hard times ahead,” according to a poll by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or VTsIOM. |
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 Russia has heaved a sigh of relief that Russian businessman Viktor Bout (not “suspected arms dealer,” since everyone is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court) was not extradited from Thailand to the United States on Wednesday as earlier planned. |
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Once again, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has expressed support for a Russian citizen wanted by the United States. This time, the person in question is Viktor Bout, the suspected arms dealer whom a Thai court ruled last Friday should be extradited to the United States to face trial. |
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When applied to a restaurant, the epithet “simple” can carry various connotations. It could suggest that the interior is minimalist and scant. It could mean that the atmosphere is rustic or crude. “Simple” could imply that the food is uninspired and bland. All these inferences of the word do not apply to Delfim’s Bar and Restaurant. In this case, “simple” means a straightforward upscale restaurant. Case in point: The restaurant derives its name from its founder, Delfim Martins, who recently immigrated to St. Petersburg from his native Portugal to open a Portuguese/European restaurant. The interior has a classic design. Dark chestnut, cream and gold predominate, while white-clothed tables for a total of 80 diners raise the wine aficionado’s expectations with tall, curved glasses. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
Yury Norshtein, the creator of legendary animated works such as ‘Yozhik v Tumane,’ or Hedgehog in the Fog (above), will give an open lecture at the Mikhailovsky Theater on Tuesday. Entrance is by prior registration at http://yeslectures.ru/action/event_register/. |
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Bono, U2’s outspoken frontman, was strangely closemouthed after the Russian police arrested five Amnesty International volunteers and shut down the stands of Amnesty International, Greenpeace and U2’s own anti-AIDS organization, ONE, before the band’s high-profile concert in Moscow on Wednesday. The police and plainclothes agents qualified stands, posters and leaflets as an “unsanctioned” rally and ordered them to stop their “illegal” activities.
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 The First World Festival of Puppet Schools opened Thursday in St. Petersburg to show all the diversity of puppet theaters from around the globe. The festival runs through Sept. 4 with a program featuring professional and graduation performances by leading theater schools from 16 countries including Russia, Germany, the U. |
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SAN FERNANDO, Mexico — Authorities on Thursday began the difficult task of identifying 72 suspected migrants believed murdered for refusing to become hitmen for a drug cartel. Mexican officials hoped to send consular agents from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras to the ranch where Mexican marines found the bodies of 58 men and 14 women after a clash with a suspected drug cartel near the border with the U. |
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HONG KONG — Teeming Hong Kong observed a mournful silence Thursday for eight tourists killed in a Manila bloodbath, after their bodies were returned home amid mounting outrage against Philippine authorities. |
 BAGHDAD — More than a dozen apparently coordinated car bombs targeting Iraqi police and other attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda killed 53 people on Wednesday, just days before the U.S. military ends its combat mission. The trail of bloodshed started in the capital Baghdad before stretching to the north and south of the country, hitting 10 cities and towns in quick succession in tactics that bore the hallmark of the jihadist network. |
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SEOUL — North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is believed to be visiting China, possibly accompanied by his youngest son and heir apparent, ahead of a looming power shift in the communist state, officials said Thursday. |
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