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Empire State Building lights go out as New York joins Earth Hour

Dozens of American cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Portland and Minneapolis, joined the event

© EPA/ALBA VIGARAY

NEW YORK, March 25. /TASS/. Residents of New York took part in Earth Hour, the WWF’s international environmental campaign, on Saturday.

At 20:30 local time (03:30 Moscow time on Sunday), lights went out for an hour almost completely at the 102-story Empire State Building and the UN Headquarters in New York. Some of the huge screens on which various announcements are broadcast around the clock were de-energized on Times Square.

Dozens of American cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco (both in California), Las Vegas (Nevada), Portland (Oregon) and Minneapolis (Minnesota), joined the event.

Meanwhile, Canada took part in Earth Hour for the eleventh time, with lights in the government buildings in Ottawa’s Parliament Hill going out. The lights of skyscrapers, stadiums and even some residential areas in other cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax, were also extinguished. They were later be joined by Calgary and Vancouver.

Earth Hour is an international event sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which calls on organizations and individuals to turn off non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol to their commitment to the planet. In 2017, more than 2 billion people in 187 countries, including 150 Russian cities, joined the global awareness campaign.

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