by Peter Mertz
LOS ANGELES, March 11 (Xinhua) -- Last November, 60 percent of Californian voters agreed to abolish the decades-old American practice of Daylight Savings Time (DST).
Now a total of 28 U.S. states are considering the abolition of moving clocks ahead one hour in the spring and back again in the fall. If all goes well as political experts predict, time will be uniform across the United States, for the first time in decades.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, first conceived of the idea in the 18th century, but the first country to implement DST was the German Empire and Austria-Hungary in 1916, and it was used by the Germans in World War II to increase worker production.
The 1966 Uniform Time Act officially started DST in the United States, and it was first practiced in 1973 after the oil embargo so as to offset early morning power use during the energy crises.
About 84 percent of 4.6 million Europeans polled last year said they wanted to scrap daylight savings time. Canadian leaders are also poised to follow the American lead.
Kansen Chu, a Chinese American who was re-elected as a member of the California State Assembly last November, first sponsored a bill to stop the time change.
"This is really a people's issue," said Chu, 67, noting that no special interest, private or government funding was used to promote the measure.
Chu represents California's 25th Assembly District, which covers heavily populated areas in the south and east of the San Francisco Bay. Almost 50 percent of its 460,000 inhabitants are of Asian descent.
