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Moscow’s mayor issues warning to weathermen

Moscow’s irascible mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, has pledged to cut funding to the city’s weather forecasting service after a series of failures by the weathermen to predict snowstorms and cold snaps with any accuracy.

Addressing officials at a meeting of the Moscow government this week, he said that funding would only be resumed if the forecasters agreed to pay penalties when they got it wrong.

The mayor was quoted by the radio station Ekho Moskvy as saying: “We are paying and we would like to receive a quality product. Instead of that you are giving us bull****.”

Last year Sergei Shoigu, the Russian emergency situations minister, also called for weather forecasters to be fined after they failed to predict flooding in Siberia.

Weather in Moscow has become increasingly unpredictable with severe cold snaps alternating with long periods of unseasonably warm weather during this winter.

January 28 saw the largest snowfall in the capital since records began more than 100 years ago. Julius Strauss in Moscow

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