It's actually quite lucky that the world has a sensible longitude upon which an International Date Line can be dropped. Imagine if there was an unbroken ring of industrialised nations going all the way around the Earth, I can see a situation where each nation wants to do business with the nation to its immediate west so badly that they just adjust their clocks forward and forward over the course of decades. Eventually, every nation on Earth has done it, and an entire day has essentially disappeared from the calendar - except that the UK is at UTC+24:00 now.
It's cases like this that show that you should use a proper timezone library in your code. Too often I see websites where the timezone field is given as "+/- X from GMT". Just store everything in UTC, and use tzdata fields (e.g. "Europe/London") to convert to something nice to show the user, and People Cleverer Than You™ will make sure everything works.
I love it when the news prompts flashbacks to Umberto Eco.<p><a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before</a>
I'm quite curious if local churches will follow along with the change.<p>I know Jews wouldn't, and I doubt Muslims would, but I don't think there are any Jews there anyway, not sure about Muslims.
Another version of the story for non-NYT subscribers:<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16351377" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16351377</a>
The change in timezone data exposed a bug in pytz: <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/pytz/+bug/885163" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.launchpad.net/pytz/+bug/885163</a>
Samoa will do anything to make it easier to trade with Australia, including switching what side of the road drivers should use. It's getting a little ridiculous.