EU expands at midnight, but when is that?

What time is midnight? European Union lawyers have been puzzling over the seemingly self-explanatory question to determine exactly when the 15-nation bloc officially expands to take in 10 new members.

The enlarged EU will spread over three time zones, so the lawyers had to determine when May 1 begins for the purposes of the Union's biggest ever enlargement.

Typically for the EU, two different legal services came up with different answers - or rather with the same answer for different reasons.

The EU Council's legal service, serving the member states, said it was midnight in Rome, because Rome is the home of the EU's founding treaty and where legal instruments of ratification are officially deposited.

The executive European Commission's legal services said it was midnight in Luxembourg (the same time as in Rome), because that is where the EU's Official Journal is published.

In reality, enlargement celebrations will begin an hour earlier at the stroke of midnight in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

Ironically, the last to celebrate will be the Irish, who hold the EU's rotating presidency, since Ireland, Britain and Portugal are an hour behind central European time.