Two five-year-old Russian boys used spades to dig their way out of their kindergarten and set off on a mission to buy a Jaguar sports car, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily has reported.

The two boys disappeared as their group took part in a supervised walk in the grounds of the kindergarten in the city of Magnitogorsk in the Urals region, the tabloid said.

Chelyabinsk regional interior ministry confirmed the boys’ escape from the kindergarten. “We don’t have any details yet, we can only confirm the fact itself,” a spokesman said, adding that the incident took place several days ago.

After reaching freedom, the boys walked just over a mile to a car showroom selling luxury cars. A female driver noticed them and asked what they were doing. They told her they had come from their kindergarten to buy a Jaguar but did not have any money. She put them in her car and drove them to a police station.

The boys had prepared their escape for several days, digging a hole under a fence using spades from the sandpit, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported, citing kindergarten staff.

The kindergarten only noticed the boys’ absence after half an hour. Local educational authorities responded by firing the supervisor in charge at the time and giving a warning to the acting head.
 

“This is considered a very serious violation,” the head of the pre-school department of Magnitogorsk, Olga Denisenko, told Komsomolskaya Pravda. She could not be immediately reached for comment.

The children’s parents did not submit any complaint against the kindergarten.

source: The Guardian

Russian weather scientists in a remote Arctic area are surrounded by five hungry polar bears and essentially trapped inside their research station, according to the World Wildlife Fund. 

Two meteorologists and a mechanic have been unable to leave the Fyodorov weather station on Vaygach Island, and cannot take their twice-daily sea measurements, due to the polar bears lurking nearby.

“Yesterday we came out and a bear was near the house” one meteorologist said, according to Siberian Times. “Three times our engineer fired a small flare pistol and the bear was not even scared. We managed to scare it off with a flare, but not far.”

“They sleep near the houses. Two of them walk together,” the meteorologist said. “They are aggressive. Recently they fought together near our house.”

The team is armed only with flares and rubber bullets, according to WWF.

“This is an emergency”. District Governor Igor Koshin told RIA Novosti, the state-run news agency. He said he would be sending help, but added the bears would not be killed.

The scientists have been trapped since last week in the small research station, which has no fencing: 

Russian officials say the bears are drawn to residential places because, with no trash pickup in those remote areas, there’s usually a pile of garbage to ransack.

“This is especially true of garbage with food remains,” Koshin told RIA.

Last year, a bear was relocated nearly 25 miles from an oil operation, but still came back, he said.

Melting sea ice due to climate change has threatened the polar bears and their habitat, and their population is considered “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation’s Red List.

“Substantial sea ice loss and expected declines in the availability of marine prey that polar bears eat are the most important specific reasons for the increasingly worse outlook for polar bear populations,” Todd Atwood, USGS research biologist and lead author of a study on the bears, said in July, according to Reuters. 

Find the English equivalent of the following Hungarian expressions or sentence parts.

1.    lényegében csapdába estek a kutatóállomásukon

2.    egy medve közel volt a házhoz

3.    a medve meg sem ijedt

4.    nemrég verekedtek közel a házunkhoz

5.    a medvéket nem ölnék meg

6.    a tudósok csapdában vannak múlt hét óta

Key:

1.    essentially trapped inside their research station

2.    a bear was near the house

3.    the bear was not even scared

4.    Recently they fought together near our house

5.    the bears would not be killed

6.    The scientists have been trapped since last week

A night at the movies is a treat everyone should get to enjoy.

Friends on the Streets, a Moscow charity organization, has set up a cinema to screen movies for the city’s homeless, Al Jazeera reported. The group hopes in addition to providing relaxation and entertainment for attendees, the summer events will promote a larger awareness.

“More than anything we have a dream to change attitudes towards homeless people, because they are often abused and mistreated, and it is very hard for them to live,” said Natalia Markova, a volunteer with Friends on the Streets, according to Al Jazeera.

Films will be shown twice a month free of charge, with tea and snacks provided at each screening, BBC reported. The audience votes to decide which movie will play, with the cinema’s premiere last weekend being “something good, old-fashioned and Soviet,” Markova told BBC.

In addition to the monthly movies, Friends on the Streets has also developed sports events and a makeshift beauty salon for the city’s less fortunate.

Though these efforts have been met with some resistance as, according to a Moscow Times report, some argued that the focus should be on providing resources like food and shelter, smaller initiatives like this one also can positively impact people’s well-being.

“For most people there’s nothing special about going to a movie or a hairdresser,” Andrei Besshtanko, deputy head of City Hall’s department of social security, told the news outlet. “But for those who have spent a year on the streets it helps them to remember that they’re human.”

The cinema, which is set up in the center of Moscow, will show movies throughout the summer.

Russia: Rise of the high-speed train surfers

Train surfers are increasingly hitching rides atop Russia’s high-speed trains for kicks or to dodge fares, it appears. In the latest incident, two men from Moscow were detained in St Petersburg after travelling for four hours in freezing temperatures on the roof of the high-speed Sapsan that links the cities. The offenders, aged 18 and 23, suffered no frostbite . They told police they climbed on top of the train for "thrills", not to avoid the expensive ticket, which costs about $120.

Russian Rossiya 1 TV reports that in November four children aged nine to 13 were found surfing a train "under a toxic influence" in the city of Perm. And a news website describes how a 24-year old Moldovan man was detained in February. He was surfing the Sapsan only in "purple panties" in which he had stashed his passport. The website quotes transport police officials as saying fines for train surfing and hopping are ridiculously low. The Russian parliament is currently debating a bill to raise the fine from 100 roubles ($3) to 5,000 ($150).

source: www.bbc.co.uk

train surfing – a vonat külsején vagy tetején utazni
increasingly – egyre nagyobb mértékben
for kicks – az izgalom kedvéért
to dodge – kicselezni
fare – viteldíj
to detain – őrizetben tartani
offender – szabálysértő
frostbite – fagyás
thrills – izgalom, borzongás
under a toxic influence – alcohol vagy tudatmódosító anyag hatása alatt
panties – bugyi
to stash – elrejteni, biztos helyre eltenni
fine – pénzbírság
ridiculously – nevetségesen
to debate – megvitatni

Match the words with the definitions.

answers: 1-c 2-e 3-b 4-a 5-d

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-GB
X-NONE
X-NONE

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