news from Estonia

Peter Ilieve peter at aldie.co.uk
Wed Nov 4 21:14:11 UTC 1998


My relative in Estonia reports a rather confused picture. The law
is clear enough: this year they changed to the EU rule time of 01:00 UTC
from their previous midnight UTC. This is a change from 04:00 -> 03:00
local time. The newspapers didn't catch up though. They were still saying
it was a change from 03:00 -> 02:00 local time. They can perhaps be
forgiven for this as the new law was only dated 22 September. This spring
in the UK the Times (a supposed `newspaper of record') printed a picture of
a clock showing it going from 02:00 to 03:00. We haven't done that since 1980.

The Estonian law can be found at:
http://trip.rk.ee/cgi-bin/thw?${BASE}=akt&${OOHTML}=rtd&TA=1998&TO=1&AN=1390

Knowing my poor grasp of Estonian he offers the following free translation:

  According to the association agreement between the EU 
  and the Republic of Estonia ratified by the Estonian law 
  (RT II 1995, 22--27, 120) and in accordance with the 8th 
  directive of EU 22. July 1997, 97/44/EU (EUT L 206, 
  1.08.1997, pp 62--63) the Government of Estonia 
  decides to change to Summer Time as follows

  1) start 3.00 by the zone time (1.00 GMT) on last 
  sunday of March changing to 4.00;

  2) end 4.00 by the zone time (1.00 GMT) on last sunday 
  of October changing to 3.00)

I also asked him whether they use any standard abbreviation for their
standard and summer times. He says no, they use "suveaeg" (summer time)
and "talveaeg" (winter time).

He says there is still some discussion about whether they should continue
fiddling with the clocks but didn't provide any specifics. Most Estonian
newspapers have web pages linked from
http://www.ee/www/Media/Journalism/Newspapers/welcome.html.
The papers' pages are nearly all in Estonian only so I can't offer any
more clues.

Finally, this just confirms the existing data. No change is needed
to the europe file.


		Peter Ilieve		peter at aldie.co.uk




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