Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan time zone

[Uncle Mxy]

Venezuela is currently in two time zones, one hour apart. Hugo Chavez wants to merge the country into one brand-new country-wide TZ, 30 minutes in the middle of the two original time zones. They can't decide on an actual -date- to implement this, though, but they're on a mad dash to implement it soon. A few months ago, the date was September 17th, then it was September 24, then it was set back to December 31st, and NOW it's December 9th.

An entire country not knowing what time it is by legislative decree -- fun.

[Big Swami]

That's the nice thing about being an autocrat - you get to force everyone to be on the same schedule. China is a huge country, for instance, but it only has one time zone.