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The EU Commission is proposing to end the practice of adjusting clocks by an hour in spring and autumn after a survey found most Europeans opposed it.

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said millions "believe that in future, summer time should be year-round, and that's what will happen".

The Commission's proposal requires support from the 28 national governments and MEPs to become law.

In the EU clocks switch between winter and summer under daylight saving time.

A European Parliament resolution says it is "crucial to maintain a unified EU time regime".

However, the Commission has not yet drafted details of the proposed change.

In a consultation paper it said one option would be to let each member state decide whether to go for permanent summer or winter time. That would be "a sovereign decision of each member state", Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein explained on Friday.

He stressed that the proposal was "to no longer constrain member states into changing clocks twice per year".

The UK is one of the 28 nations, but is due to leave the European Union in March 2019. Any change would be unlikely to happen before then.

Mr Winterstein rejected a suggestion the proposal could cause particular difficulties in Ireland: "I don't see the link between our quest which is undiminished, to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, and our proposal, which will come in due course, to no longer constrain member states into changing clocks twice per year.

"One pertains to the internal market once adopted, the other initiative is to ensure the Good Friday Agreement and other safeguards remain in place."

The Commission warns that unco-ordinated time changes between member states would cause economic harm.

In the public consultation, 84% of 4.6 million respondents called for ending the spring and autumn clock change.

By far the biggest response was in Germany and Austria (3.79% and 2.94% of the national population respectively). The UK's response was lowest - 0.02% - but few Italians took part, either (0.04%).

Read more on the world's time controversies:

Why do many dislike Europe's daylight saving time?

Some studies cited by the Commission point to adverse health impacts from the clock changes.

"Findings suggest that the effect on the human biorhythm may be more severe than previously thought," it says.

Clocks go forward by an hour on the last Sunday in March and switch back to winter time on the last Sunday in October.

Finland called for daylight saving to be abolished EU-wide, after a petition gathered more than 70,000 signatures from citizens calling for such a change.

The EU made the spring/autumn clock change the rule in all member states in 1996, based on the argument that it would reduce energy costs. But the Commission says the data on energy-saving is inconclusive.

There is also no reliable evidence that the clock changes reduce traffic accidents, the Commission says.

What are the EU's time zones?

There are three standard time zones when daylight saving time is not applied:

Three states apply GMT (the UK, Ireland and Portugal)

17 have Central European Time, which is GMT+1

Eight have Eastern European Time, which is GMT+2

The current seasonal clock changes are controversial partly because there is a big difference in daylight hours experienced by Scandinavia and by southern Europe.

Nordic countries have long, dark nights in winter and short nights in summer. The pattern in the south is more even across the seasons.

There are anomalies too. For example, neighbours Portugal and Spain are in different time zones, as are Sweden and Finland.

What is the situation in the UK?

The UK adopted Daylight Saving Time in 1916, along with many other nations involved in World War One, in order to conserve coal.

It followed years of pressure from William Willett, a great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin.

But the UK has had its own debate about time zones.

In 2011, the government proposed a three-year trial of moving to Central European Time, so the time would be GMT+1 in winter and GMT+2 in summer.

The change would have meant lighter evenings but darker mornings, and one of the arguments was that it would reduce accidents. But it was abandoned after opposition from Scotland and northern England, where some areas would not have seen daylight until 10am under the proposal.

Your views from across Europe

Emma in Finland

As a Finn who has lived across Scandinavia I wholeheartedly welcome this initiative.

There have been times that I have fallen asleep at 16:00 in the afternoon or have not seen sunlight for several days due to the times I started and finished work.

Lars in Sweden

It would be a much better idea to keep daylight saving but have the change take place on Good Friday each year because most people would then be off work for four days. This would almost certainly reduce the risks of cardiovascular incidents and tiredness.

For us in northern Europe scrapping daylight saving and using so called summertime all year round would mean the mornings in wintertime would be incredibly dark until 09:00.

Also, using so-called wintertime in summer would mean an end to much of the long, bright summer nights.

Andrew in Denmark

Whilst I can see the advantages in stopping the change from winter to summertime and vice versa, it may create problems.

If Denmark kept summertime in the winter, it would not be daylight in late November-February until 10:00 and beyond. If they keep wintertime in the summer, the sun will rise at about 02:00.

This is not an easy problem to resolve.

Up until 1996, Denmark went to summertime one month after the UK and returned to wintertime one month before, so that for two months of the year they were on the same time as the UK.

Richard in Switzerland

This is a great shame.

Summertime was introduced in mainland Europe because it gave more daylight in the evenings. I was living in France at the time and it was very popular.

Some countries did not follow suit immediately - for example, Italy and Switzerland. This led to a chaotic situation for those close to the borders.

Jessica in Spain

It's about time this was brought up.

I suffer from a vitamin D deficiency and the winter months in particular, are awful.

When I lived in Kent and commuted an hour into London for work, I only saw maybe a half-hour of daylight at lunchtime a day, and that's if I managed to get away from my desk.

I know some people who only see sunlight at the weekends.

If this could be changed so we at least get a bit of sunlight en route to or from work, this would make the tiniest difference but could affect everyone's health in a big way.

Also, everyone knows that people are happier and friendlier in the sunshine.

Graeme in Scotland

I lived through the UK's experiment of having no time change while at school in Scotland. It was almost dark until 10:00 in the winter and that was horrible.

I have since worked in south-west Norway, which has a very similar sunshine period.

The winter in Scotland and Norway is dark and cold. Do not mess with the status quo. </s> The European Commission will recommend EU member states abolish daylight saving, where clocks are advanced by one hour in summer, its president Jean-Claude Juncker said on German television Friday.

"We carried out a survey, millions responded and believe that in future, summer time should be year-round, and that's what will happen," he told public broadcaster ZDF, adding that the European Commission planned to decide on the matter later Friday.

"I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say," said Juncker, speaking in German.

"We will decide on this today, and then it will be the turn of the member states and the European Parliament."

An online poll suggested that more than 80 percent of Europeans were against the annual ritual of adjusting clocks forward by one hour in the spring and then back an hour in the autumn, a practice used across most of Europe and North America.

Proponents of daylight saving say the longer evening daylight hours in the summer help save energy and bolster productivity.

Opponents argue that some people cannot easily adapt to the change and feel it has a short-term negative impact on their health. </s> People hoping for a speedy end to 2016 are going to have to wait a second – literally.

Clocks worldwide will pause for a "leap second" on Saturday. At 11:59 p.m. and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (6:59 p.m. EST), international timekeepers will insert an additional second, marking the time as 11:59 p.m. and 60 seconds before midnight on New Year's Day.

Here are some things to know about the time change:

1. The time will automatically update on devices that adjust time automatically, such as cell phones and other electronics. The federal government also accounts for leap seconds in its GPS navigation messages, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

There's no need to worry about clocks that get manually adjusted either -- the time change is so small, it's likely to go unnoticed.

2. The extra second is necessary to keep time in sync with the Earth's rotation. Official international time, UTC, is based on both precise atomic clocks, which provide timekeepers with the "ticking rate," and astronomical time, based on the position of the sun and stars, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"Atomic clocks are more than a million times better at keeping time than the rotation of the Earth, which fluctuates unpredictably," said Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at the UK's National Physical Laboratory. "Leap seconds are needed to prevent civil time drifting away from Earth time. Although the drift is small – taking around a thousand years to accumulate a one-hour difference – if not corrected, it would eventually result in clocks showing midday before sunrise."

3. Leap seconds are not uncommon. Saturday's extra second will be the 27th leap second added to the clock since timekeepers introduced the measure in 1972, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The last leap second occurred on June 30, 2015.

4. The need for leap seconds is unpredictable. The organization tasked with maintaining global time, the Paris-based International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, announced this year's leap second over the summer in one of its bi-annual bulletins.

Timekeepers are only able to tell with a few months notice whether a leap second will be necessary because of the unpredictable nature of the Earth's rotation speeds.

"The only thing we do know is that the rotation rate will slow down over the long term because of gravitational forced from the moon and sun," the NIST said in a news release.

5. The time addition is not without its critics owing to the fact that leap seconds can cause major problems. A leap second added to the end of the year in 2012 caused a software glitch that interrupted internet services for a few hours, according to NIST.

Other critics believe people would be better served by sticking to the regularity of atomic time, according to NPR.

Last year, the United Nations announced it would delay its decision on whether to do away with the leap second until 2023, NPR reported. The organization said that "further studies are required on the impact and application of a future reference time-scale," before the decision can be made. </s> Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Rebecca Morelle reports: "It's all because of a very slight wobble in the Earth's rotation"

A "leap second" will be added to this year's New Year's countdown to compensate for a slowdown in the Earth's rotation.

The extra second will occur as clocks strike midnight and a time of 23:59:60 will be recorded, delaying 2017 momentarily.

It will only affect countdowns in countries using Greenwich Mean Time, which includes Britain.

The change is required because standard time lags behind atomic clocks.

A leap second last occurred in June 2015 and this will be the 27th time it has occurred.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) - responsible for the UK's national time scale - uses the atomic clock to provide a stable and continuous timescale.

Along with other clocks across the globe, it provides the world with its coordinated universal time.

NPL senior research scientist Peter Whibberley said: "Atomic clocks are more than a million times better at keeping time than the rotation of the Earth, which fluctuates unpredictably.

"Leap seconds are needed to prevent civil time drifting away from Earth time.

"Although the drift is small - taking around 1,000 years to accumulate a one-hour difference - if not corrected it would eventually result in clocks showing midday before sunrise."

Atomic clocks use the change of electron energy levels to tell the time.

The time created by the clocks is used in GPS location devices and is used to control the wave frequency of television broadcasts.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in France tracks the Earth's rotation and announces the need for a leap second. </s> New Delhi (ABC Live): Indian Standard Time : Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) -National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL) is the custodian of Indian Standard Time (IST) and has the responsibility for realization, establishment, maintenance and dissemination of IST through an act of Parliament.

A “Leap Second” is added every now and then to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to synchronize clocks worldwide with the Earth’s ever slowing rotation. UTC consists of a time scale that combines the output of more than 300 highly precise Atomic clocks worldwide, including the one at CSIR-NPL. Atomic clocks are very accurate and are stable within 1 second over a period of millions of years. On the other hand, the Astronomical Time known as Universal Time (UT1) refers to the Earth’s rotation around its own axis and determines the length of a day. However, the Earth’s rotation around its own axis is not regular, as sometimes it speeds up and sometimes it slows down, due to various factors including the moon’s gravitational Earth-braking forces that often results in ocean tides. As a result, Astronomical Time (UT1) gradually falls out of synch with Atomic time (UTC), and as and when the difference between UTC and UT1 approaches 0.9 seconds, a “Leap Second” is added to UTC through Atomic clocks worldwide.

Since 1972, 36 “Leap Seconds” have been added at intervals varying from six months to seven years. 37th “Leap Second” will be added to UTC at the midnight of December 31, 2016 in the countries within this time zone. However, countries in other time zones will have “Leap Second” inserted according to their longitude. As the “Leap Second” is added simultaneously all over the world at UTC 23:59:59 on December 31, 2016, implying that in India the “Leap Second” will be inserted at IST 05:29:59 on January 1, 2017 (IST being five hours and thirty minutes ahead of UTC). In order to follow IST, the clocks need to be adjusted after the insertion of “Leap Second”. Those utilizing CSIR-NPL time dissemination services (NTP, Teleclock etc.) need not worry as they will receive the corrected time post the insertion of “Leap Second”. The “Leap Second” adjustment is not so relevant for normal everyday life; however this shift is critical for applications requiring of time accuracies in the nanosecond e.g. astronomy, satellite navigation, communication networks etc.

A “Leap Second” explanatory meeting will be held on December 31, 2016 at 23:30 Hours at the Main Building Reception area of the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory.

The detailed information about the IST is available on NPL website http://www.nplindia.org/time-frequency-and-electrical-electronics-metrology-division </s> The U.S. Naval Observatory announced last July that a leap second will be added to official timekeeping on December 31, 2016. That means your day and year – and everyone’s day and year – will officially be one second longer.

Leap seconds have been added 26 times since 1972. They’re inserted at the end of the last day of either June or December. The leap second will be added to the world’s clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on December 31. This corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, when the extra second will be inserted at the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Master Clock Facility in Washington, DC.

The extra second is added to our official timekeeping mainly to keep our increasingly electronic world in sync. The most recent such leap second was added on June 30, 2015, and the one before that was June 30, 2012.

Why do we need a leap second? Isn’t the length of our day set by the rotation of the Earth? Like the ancients who insisted that all motion in the heavens must be perfect, uniform and unvarying, many of us today assume that the Earth’s rotation – its spin on its axis – is perfectly steady. We learned, correctly, that the sun, moon, stars and planets parade across our sky because the Earth turns. So it is easy to understand why we assume that the Earth’s rotation is precise and unwavering. Yet Earth’s rotation does not stay perfectly steady.

Instead, compared to modern timekeeping methods such as atomic clocks, the Earth is a notoriously poor timepiece. Not only is Earth’s spin slowing down, but it also is subject to effects that cannot even be predicted well.

If you have ever been to the beach, you will be familiar with the main reason our planet is slowing down. That reason is ocean tides. As our planet rotates, it plows past the great watery bulges (raised mostly by the gravitational interaction of the Earth and moon), which serves to slow it down much like a brake on a rotating wheel. This effect is small, actually very small. According to calculations based on the timing of ancient astronomical events (eclipses), the Earth’s rotation has slowed down by about .0015 to .002 seconds per day per century.

That in itself is not much, and is not enough to justify adding a “leap second” every few years, as has been done since 1972. The length of a day today is almost imperceptibly longer than the length as the same day last year. In the 1800s, a day was defined as 86,400 seconds. Today it is 86,400.002 seconds, roughly.

The discrepancy comes by comparing the Earth’s daily rotation relative to astronomical objects (which shows the planet slowing down), to a extremely high precision atomic clock (which is accurate to about a billionth of a second per day).

The Earth is slowing down, very slowly. It takes about 100 years for Earth’s rotation to add just 0.002 seconds to the time it takes Earth to spin once on its axis. What happens, though, is that the daily 0.002-second difference between the original definition of a day as being 86,400 seconds builds up.

After one day is it 0.002 seconds. After two days it is 0.004 seconds. After three days it is 0.006 seconds and so on. After about a year and a half, the difference mounts to about 1 second. It is this difference that requires the addition of a leap second.

The situation is not quite that clear cut, however. The figure of 0.002 seconds per day per century is an average and it can, and does, change. For example, you might recall that the Fukushima earthquake in 2011 resulted from displacements of portions of the Earth’s crust that actually speeded up the Earth’s rotation, shortening the day by 1.6 millionth of a second! While that is not much, keep in mind that such changes are cumulative, too.

Other short term and unpredictable changes can be caused by a variety of events, ranging from slight changes in the distribution of mass in the Earth’s molten outer core, to movement of large masses of ice near the poles, and even density and angular momentum variations in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The bottom line is that the actual variation day to day is not always plus 2 milliseconds. According to a U.S. Naval Observatory document, between 1973 to 2008, it has ranged from a plus 4 milliseconds to a minus 1 millisecond. Over time, that could necessitate a negative leap second, signifying an increase in the Earth’s rotation speed, but since the concept was introduced in 1973, this has never been done.

This all may seem pretty esoteric and unimportant, but not to the telecommunications industry.

We’ll say here that everyone thinks a leap second is a good idea. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations body that governs some global issues related to time, has been contemplating leap seconds for some time. They considered abolishing the practice, but in November, 2015 – with delegates from more than 150 nations meeting in Geneva – the ITU announced it had decided not to dump the leap second, at least not right now. The ITU said:

So they’re still thinking about it!

Consider the ITU’s situation. Telecommunications relies on precise timing, and the addition of a leap second forces many systems to be turned off for a second every year of two. To get all such systems in a global industry cycled on and off in sync can be a major headache. Consider also that the global positioning system (GPS) does not use the leap second system, which causes further confusion. Many in the industry feel that the periodic addition of a “leap second” to keep the to measurements in step is cumbersome and wasteful.

Although dropping the idea of a leap second would be a convenience for telecommunication and other industries, in the long (very long) run, it would cause clocks to get out of synch with the sun, eventually causing 12 p.m. (noon) to occur in the middle of the night, for example. At the current rate of change in Earth’s rotation rate, it would take about 5,000 years to amass just a one-hour difference between the Earth’s actual rotation rate and the atomic clock.

How, you may ask, do we even measure such small changes in the Earth’s rotation? Historically, astronomers (such as those at Britain’s famed Royal Greenwich Observatory near London) have used a telescope to watch a star pass through their eyepiece, crossing an imaginary line called the meridian. Then they time how long it takes for the Earth to bring that around star back around to cross the meridian again. This is highly accurate for everyday purposes, but for scientific use it is limited in accuracy because of the wavelengths used and the murkiness of the atmosphere.

A much more accurate method is to use two or more radio telescopes separated by thousands of miles, in a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. By carefully combining the data from each of the telescopes, astronomers effectively have a telescope thousands of miles in size, which provides much greater resolution (detecting fine detail) and measurement of position. This allows them to determine the planet’s rotation rate to an accuracy of less than a thousandth of a second. They do not observe stars, however, but very distant objects called quasars. The NASA video below will tell you more …

Bottom line: A leap second will be added to the clock on December 31, 2016. Leap seconds have been added every so often since 1972. The last one was June 30, 2015. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a U.N. body that governs some global issues related to time, has considered abolishing the practice of inserting a leap second into official time-keeping. But the ITU decided in 2015 to defer a proposal to dump the leap second until 2023. Stay tuned, timekeepers! </s> (NBC News) Leap seconds happen occasionally to keep clocks in sync with the slowing of the earth’s rotation and to make sure they are as accurate as possible. This year’s leap second was announced by the international earth rotation and reference systems service, that’s the group responsible for adding leap seconds to international time. The time keepers said, “We can expect the clocks to read 11:59:60 instead of 11:59:59.”

The leap second has the potential to cause chaos for computers that can’t deal with a 61-second minute. The most recent leap second happened just last year, on June 30th. </s> The European Commission has blocked the (£24.6bn) merger of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Deutsche Börse on competition grounds hours before the UK serves its European divorce papers.

EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager scotched the third attempt in 17 years to merge the Anglo and German stock exchanges after they refused to meet her requests to sell off the LSE's Italian bond trading platform called MTS.

Vestager said: "The merger would have led to a de facto monopoly in clearing of fixed income instruments.

"As the parties failed to offer the remedies required to address our competition concerns, the Commission has decided to prohibit the merger."

The moves brings to a halt 15 months of plans to combine exchanges in Germany, the UK and Italy, as well as several of the large clearing houses to create the biggest European exchange operator.

The LSE and Deutsche Börse signalled last month that they were not prepared to sell MTS, making the failure of the merger likely.

British Prime Minister Theresa May is set to trigger Article 50 today (29 March), signalling the end of more than 40 years inside the EU, and kicking off two years of withdrawal negotiations.

The LSE had been prepared to sell its smaller French clearing arm LCH to its smaller French rival Euronext for €510m.

However, the European Commission ruled that this remedy did not go far enough.

Vestager added: "The European economy depends on well-functioning financial markets.

"That is not just important for banks and other financial institutions. The whole economy benefits when businesses can raise money on competitive financial markets." </s> Britain’s Big Ben to fall silent for four years

Tourists walk past Big Ben in Westminster, London June 10, 2017. The Elizabeth Tower, which is 96 metres (315 feet) high, is the most photographed building in Britain. ― Reuters picLONDON, Aug 14 — Britain's much-loved Big Ben will fall silent for four years from next week as conservation work is carried out on the famous 19th century bell in a clock tower next to the Houses of Parliament.

“Big Ben falling silent is a significant milestone in this crucial conservation project,” Steve Jaggs, whose official title is “Keeper of the Great Clock”, said in a parliament statement yesterday.

“This essential programme of works will safeguard the clock on a long term basis, as well as protecting and preserving its home — the Elizabeth Tower,” he said.

It will be the longest period that Big Ben, whose bongs are familiar to many people around the world because of their use in BBC radio and television broadcasts, has been silent in its 157-year history.

The Great Bell, popularly called Big Ben, weighs 13.7 tonnes and strikes every hour to the note of E. Four smaller bells also chime every 15 minutes.

The last bong before the refurbishment will be at 12pm (1900 in Malaysia) on August 21, the statement said.

The clock will still tell the time silently until 2021 and the chimes will continue to be rung on important occasions such as New Year's Eve.

The Elizabeth Tower, which is 96 metres (315 feet) high, is the most photographed building in Britain.

The tower itself is commonly referred to as Big Ben even though the name applies only to the bell.

The clock's cogs and hands as well as the four dials will be removed, cleaned up and repaired as part of the work.

The project's cost was estimated last year at £29 million (RM161.5 million).

Because the clock mechanism will be temporarily out of action, a modern electric motor will drive the clock hands until the clock is reinstated.

Parliament also said that the clock's faces would have to be covered up while they are being repaired.

“However, to ensure that the public are still able to set their watches by this most important of time pieces, one working clock face will remain visible at all times throughout the works,” it said. — AFP
The European Commission is proposing to end the practice of adjusting clocks by an hour in spring and autumn after a survey found most Europeans opposed it. The Commission proposal requires support from the 28 national governments and MEPs to become law.