The Grauniad cannot resist imparting its own spin to Australia's decision to switch from Greenwich Mean Time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC):
Australia is about to sever a yet
another historical link with Britain. It will abandon Greenwich Mean Time and
adopt a new national standard next week, based on the atomic clock.
Coordinated Universal Time is based upon the atomic clocks, measuring time intervals through the precision and predictability of radioactive decay. Read on in the article and you will get to see that it is a standard form of measurement adopted by everyone:
New Zealand, Singapore, the United States and most of the European Union have already adopted UTC. When European space scientists land a probe one of the moons of Saturn, when Australian surveyors rendezvous with relief aircraft in the Antarctic, when Egyptian jumbo jet pilots land at Heathrow, they all use UTC.
British space scientists and Antarctic explorers also use UTC, which is "maintained" by 40 time laboratories all over the world, using 260 atomic clocks. Some of these are at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, west London, and these keep British time accurate to about one second in three million years.
Why does the Grauniad feel the need to politicise a story about time? Is nothing sacred to these people?