Daylight saving time daylight savings time or daylight time and summer time, is the practice of advancing clocks during warmer months so that darkness falls each day according to the clock. A common implementation of DST is to set clocks forward by one hour in the spring and set clocks back by one hour in autumn to return to standard time. In other words, there is one 23-hour day in late winter or early spring and one 25-hour day in the fall. George Hudson proposed the idea of daylight saving in 1895; the German Empire and Austria-Hungary organized the first nationwide implementation starting on April 30, 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since particularly since the 1970s energy crisis. DST is not observed near the equator, where sunrise and sunset times do not vary enough to justify it; some countries observe it only in some regions. Only a minority of the world's population uses DST. DST clock shifts sometimes complicate timekeeping and can disrupt travel, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, sleep patterns.

Computer software adjusts clocks automatically, but policy changes by various jurisdictions of DST dates and timings may be confusing. Industrialized societies follow a clock-based schedule for daily activities that do not change throughout the course of the year; the time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, the coordination of mass transit, for example remain constant year-round. In contrast, an agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct are more governed by the length of daylight hours and by solar time, which change seasonally because of the Earth's axial tilt. North and south of the tropics daylight lasts longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the effect becoming greater the further one moves away from the tropics. By synchronously resetting all clocks in a region to one hour ahead of standard time, individuals who follow such a year-round schedule will wake an hour earlier than they would have otherwise. However, they will have one less hour of daylight at the start of each day, making the policy less practical during winter.

While the times of sunrise and sunset change at equal rates as the seasons change, proponents of daylight saving time argue that most people prefer a greater increase in daylight hours after the typical "nine to five" workday. Supporters have argued that DST decreases energy consumption by reducing the need for lighting and heating, but the actual effect on overall energy use is disputed; the manipulation of time at higher latitudes has little impact on daily life, because the length of day and night changes more throughout the seasons, thus sunrise and sunset times are out of phase with standard working hours regardless of manipulations of the clock. DST is of little use for locations near the equator, because these regions see only a small variation in daylight in the course of the year; the effect varies according to how far east or west the location is within its time zone, with locations farther east inside the time zone benefiting more from DST than locations farther west in the same time zone.

Ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than DST does dividing daylight into 12 hours regardless of daytime, so that each daylight hour became progressively longer during spring and shorter during autumn. For example, the Romans kept time with water clocks that had different scales for different months of the year. From the 14th century onwards, equal-length civil hours supplanted unequal ones, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some monasteries of Mount Athos and all Jewish ceremonies. Benjamin Franklin published the proverb "early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and wise", he published a letter in the Journal de Paris during his time as an American envoy to France suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight; this 1784 satire proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles, waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.

Despite common misconception, Franklin did not propose DST. However, this changed as rail transport and communication networks required a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day. In 1810, the Spanish National Assembly Cortes of Cádiz issued a regulation that moved certain meeting times forward by one hour from May 1 to September 30 in recognition of seasonal changes, but it did not change the clocks, it acknowledged that private businesses were in the practice of changing their opening hours to suit daylight conditions, but they did so of their own volition. New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern DST, his shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight. In 1895, he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, considerable in

Damascus Gate is one of the main entrances to the Old City of Jerusalem. It is located in the wall on the city's northwest side and connects to a highway leading out to Nablus, which in the Hebrew Bible was called Shechem or Sichem, from there, in times past, to the capital of Syria, Damascus. Of its Arabic names, Bab al-Nasr means "gate of victory," and Bab al-Amud means "gate of the column." The latter name, in use continuously since at least as early as the 10th century, preserves the memory of a Roman column towering over the square behind the gate and dating to the 2nd century AD. In its current form, the gate was built in 1537 under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Beneath the current gate, the remains of an earlier gate can be seen, dating back to the time of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who visited the region in 130–131 CE. In the square behind this gate stood a Roman victory column topped by a statue of Emperor Hadrian, as depicted on the 6th-century Madaba Map.

This historical detail is preserved in the current gate's Arabic name, Bab el-Amud, meaning "gate of the column". On the lintel of the 2nd-century gate, made visible by archaeologists beneath today's Ottoman gate, is inscribed the city's Roman name after 130 CE, Aelia Capitolina; until the latest excavations, some researchers believed that Hadrian's gate was preceded by one erected by Agrippa I as part of the so-called Third Wall. However, recent research seems to prove that the gate does not predate the Roman reconstruction of the city as Aelia Capitolina, during the first half of the second century. Hadrian's Roman gate was built as a free-standing triumphal gate, only sometime towards the end of the 3rd or the beginning of the 4th century were there protective walls built around Jerusalem, connecting to the existing gate; the Roman gate remained in use during the Early Muslim and Crusader period, but several storerooms were added by the Crusaders outside the gate, so that access to the city became possible only by passing through those rooms.

Several phases of construction work on the gate took place during the early 12th century, the early Ayyubid period, the 13th-century second phase of Crusader rule over Jerusalem. Damascus Gate is the only Jerusalem gate to have preserved the same name since at least the 10th century; the Crusaders called it St. Stephen's Gate, highlighting its proximity to the site of martyrdom of Saint Stephen, marked since the time of Empress Eudocia by a church and monastery. A 1523 account of a visit to Jerusalem by a Jewish traveller from Leghorn uses the name Bâb el'Amud and notes its proximity to the Cave of Zedekiah. Damascus Gate is flanked by two towers, each equipped with machicolations, it is located at the edge of the Arab marketplace in the Muslim Quarter. In contrast to the Jaffa Gate, where stairs rise towards the gate, in the Damascus Gate, the stairs descend towards the gate; until 1967, a crenellated turret loomed over the gate, but it was damaged in the fighting that took place in and around the Old City during the Six-Day War.

In August 2011, Israel restored the turret, including its arrowslit, with the help of pictures from the early twentieth century when the British Empire controlled Jerusalem. Eleven anchors fasten the restored turret to the wall, four stone slabs combine to form the crenellated top. Directly below the existing gate of Bab al-ʿAmud there is an older gate, believed to have been built in the early first or second centuries CE; such findings are in keeping with an account in the Midrash Rabba which states that Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, requested of Vespasian that he spare the western-most gates of the city that lead to Lydda. When the city was taken, the Arab auxiliaries who had fought alongside the Romans under their general, Fanjar spared the wall from destruction; the chronicler who brings down the historical record adds: "And it was decreed in heaven that it should never be destroyed, seeing that the Divine Presence dwells in the West." In 2013, an archaeological survey-excavation was conducted at the Damascus Gate by Zubair Adawi on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Excavations have revealed that construction within the Damascus Gate continued under the Byzantine emperor, Justinian I. Zedekiah's Cave Bezetha Herod's Gate HD Virtual Tour of the Damascus Gate - December 2007 Holy Land Photos:"Damascus Gate" Israel Antiquities Authority

Taghadoe in County Kildare is the site of an ancient monastic settlement and Round Tower, there is a graveyard and the ruins of a 19th-century church. It is situated 5 km off the Straffan Road; the name is derived from Teach Tua or House of Tua in Irish, Saint Tua the abbot of Clonmacnoise, was responsible for founding the monastic settlement here. The site dates back to the 6th Century; the Round Tower was left in ruins by the 17th Century. Most of the burials were in the 17th and 18th century and it was used by Roman Catholics. A John Dillon of Carton had bequeathed £1,000 for the building of a church on the site; the Church, constructed on the site in 1831 for the Church of Ireland by a donation from the Board of First Fruits of £830, this church was only active for 40 years and while derelict its walls are quite intact. The Tower was declared a National Monument in 1886, the site is in the care of the Office of Public Works