Just to note my continued unhappiness with the conversions of zones to aliases. The recent change to map Harare to Maputo broke a test in Joda-Time (the most widely used 3rd party library in Java for date/time, probably used by millions of developers). This means that the many users of Joda-Time will get errors when they try to recompile the latest jar file, a process that has worked fine for years. In order to make the test pass I now have to special case to say that either Harare or Maputo is a valid value. This issue occurs because Joda-Time normalises all aliases to the actual zone as per TZDB data. Thus a request for DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID("Africa/Harare"); which use to return a zone with the ID "Africa/Harare" now returns "Africa/Maputo". This means that users can no longer get a zone that represents their country for half of Africa and the Carribean. I cannot stress enough that these utterly unecessary changes have and will continue to cause observable differences in end-user applications. I remain firmly of the opinion that there should be at least one actual Zone entry for each ISO defined territory/country, and that these recent changes should not be described as minor tidying. Stephen