ebook-convert uses the exact same code as the calibre GUI. There is something on your system that is causing this. What that is is impossible to say offhand, you will need to run calibre from source and stick print statements in various places in feeds/__init__.py to see what is happening.
One basic check is:
calibre-debug -c "from calibre.utils.date import utcnow; print utcnow()"
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