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Russia’s Duma may pass bill on return to permanent ‘winter time' this week

If adopted, the law on 'winter time' will take effect at 2am October 26, 2014

© ITAR-TASS/Igor Zotin

MOSCOW, June 30. /ITAR-TASS/. State Duma may pass a law before the end of the week on Russia’s return to the permanent ‘winter time', Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the lower house said Monday after a regular meeting of the Duma Council.

“No doubt, everyone is impatiently looking forward to the second and then the third reading of a bill on reverting to the ‘winter time',” he said. “This (the hearing of the bill) will be done before the end of this week.”

Lawmaker Sergei Kalashnikov, the chief of the parliamentary Committee on Healthcare, said earlier that the bill might be endorsed Tuesday or Friday, in the second and the third readings at a time.

At the Tuesday session, the deputies will examine the version of the bill wherein the time zones are established by law, not by governmental resolutions. An amendment on this was filed by Sergei Kalashnikov personally.

He explained his move by saying the cabinet of ministers was still undecided on a return to the permanent standard time.

Duma’s Committee for Healthcare issued a recommendation to the lower house on June 26 to endorse the bill on the ‘winter time'.

It says that the territory of Russia will have no less than ten time zones, the boundaries of which will be drawn with account of the boundaries of this country’s constituent regions. They will be named and indexed in line with the existing system of global time zones consistent with the Universal Time Corrected (UTC, fully coinciding with the GMT)

“Moscow Standard Time will be used as a benchmark for the computation of zonal times and will be equal URC + 3 hours,” Kalashnikov said.

The Duma passed the bill on reverting to the permanent ‘winter time' in the first reading June 10. If adopted, the law will take effect at 2am October 26, 2014.

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State Duma Social Russia's domestic policy

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