Lebanon

Lebanon Lebanon ... announced today delay of Spring forward from March 25 to April 20. This announcement was by the Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati. A video was later leaked to the media of parliament speaker Nabih Berri asking Mikati to postpone DST to aid observance of Ramadan, Mikati objecting that this would cause problems such as scheduling airline flights, to which Berri interjected, "What flights?" The change was controversial and led to a partly-sectarian divide. Many Lebanese institutions, including the education ministry, the Maronite church, and two news channels LCBI and MTV, ignored the announcement and went ahead with the long-scheduled spring-forward on March 25/26, some arguing that the prime minister had not followed the law because the change had not been approved by the cabinet. Google went with the announcement; Apple ignored it. At least one bank followed the announcement for its doors, but ignored the announcement in internal computer systems. Beirut international airport listed two times for each departure. Dan Azzi wrote "My view is that this whole thing is a Dumb and Dumber movie." Eventually the prime minister backed down, said the cabinet had decided to stick with its 1998 decision, and that DST would begin midnight March 29/30. Although we could model the chaos with two Zones, that would likely cause more trouble than it would cure. Since so many manual clocks and computer-based timestamps ignored the announcement, stick with official cabinet resolutions in the data while recording the prime minister's announcement as a comment. This is how we treated a similar situation in Rio de Janeiro in spring 1993.