Well, THE official world standard is GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich, (pronounced 'grenitch' just to complicate things), is a little village in the south of England where a 19th century amateur scientist (can't remember his name), set up an observatory and eventually gave us the standard by which all clocks are measured. Since Greenwich is on the somethingth median, GMT is zero hours and the rest of the world takes it's time zones from that, adding +whatever or -whatever to GMT. Hmmm... that was a really precise, scientific explanation I gave. LOL. Well, I'm sure someone will fill me in on the correct details of the story, but it's not far off what I said. Anyway, there's also an official GMT site, which, I guess, would be the one to trust. mac PS There's also some loony (I believe, the owner of Swatch watches), who wants us all to go by some Swiss/Internet standard that he invented. But, of course, if the world was sensible, we'd all be speaking that ghastly Esperanto, wouldn't we? Viva la difference!