RECENT LEGISLATION:

President Yeltsin vetoed a bill to raise the pay of members of the Duma. The bill would have given Duma deputies, who receive the equivalent of a minister’s salary, an unaccounted expense allowance; pension benefits equal to 75 percent of salary and indexed to inflation; and three months’ severance pay for members not re-elected…. Yeltsin’s spokesman says he will veto a bill, passed last week, to create a council with the power to punish print and broadcast media which fail to protect morality and “strengthen love and respect for the fatherland and belief in goodwill and justice”…. The president has not taken a position on a third bill which passed last week, to restore the anthem of the Soviet Union as Russia’s national anthem.