Daylight saving: here are the countries trying to ditch it
- Today, 70 countries change their clocks midyear for daylight saving time
- Russian scientists claim the risk of heart attack jumped 50 per centwhen the clocks changed
Anyone trying to make an international call this weekend would be forgiven for getting a little mixed up.
Daylight saving time ends in the United States on Sunday, bumping the clocks back an hour. The change happened in Europe a week earlier, meaning the time difference between the continents was momentarily smaller.
It’s another confusing wrinkle in a confusing temporal process that confounds the world.
Today, 70 countries change their clocks midyear for daylight saving time, including most of North America, Europe and parts of South America and New Zealand.
China, Japan, India and most countries near the equator don’t fall back or jump ahead. In much of Asia and South America, the daylight saving time shift was adopted, but then abandoned. It has never been observed in most of Africa.
While the United States extended its daylight saving time in 2005 and Florida wants to make it its standard time, other countries are moving to ditch the practise.