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Lights go out in Russia’s Far East for Earth Hour

Households and businesses saved energy by turning off home appliances and lights in homes, shops, cafes and restaurants

VLADIVOSTOK, March 25. /TASS/. Russia’s Far East has joined the worldwide event Earth Hour, turning out the lighting of office blocks and landmarks, staging flash mobs and organizing environmental events. The current year is Year of the Environment in Russia.

"In Vladivostok, around one hundred people have come to see a fire show" in the city center, Yulia Fomenko, a spokeswoman for the WWF Russia Amur branch, told TASS. "Primorye’s (Russian Far East) capital went dark for 60 minutes when lights on the bridge across Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn) bay, campuses of Far Eastern Federal University, administrative buildings, television towers and train stations were switched off."

Authorities in the cities of Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Magadan and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk teamed up to switch off lights of office blocks and administrative buildings as well. Households and businesses saved energy by turning off home appliances and lights in homes, shops, cafes and restaurants.

Earth Hour is an international event during which the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) calls on organizations and individuals to turn off non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol to their commitment to the planet. Illumination of well-known buildings and memorials worldwide is turned off during that period.

The event kicked off in Sydney, Australia in 2007 for the first time.

Last year, 2 billion people from 178 countries took part in the event, among them were 22 million Russians.

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