MOSCOW’S MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT HELPING GROZNY BACK ON ITS FEET.

The indefatigable mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has tasked his city planners with helping restore communal services to the quarter million inhabitants of Chechnya’s war-devastated capital. Electricity supplies are being restored and street lighting turned back on. Luzhkov has promised flour, sugar, and oil from Moscow’s reserves. As winter approaches, heating has become an urgent problem in Grozny, and Moscow plans to supply 30,000 paraffin heaters. Ensuring supplies of fresh water is harder; sewage-disposal is the most difficult problem of all and is provoking fears of epidemics. Other urgent needs are burial services and refuse-collection. (Interfax, November 9)

Radioactive Material Missing from Chechnya?