Americans were the first to switch to daylight saving time
Unlike Russia, in the federal states of North America the clocks are not turned everywhere. According to ITAR-TASS, the eastern part of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, where farmers oppose the switch to daylight saving time, areas of Quebec east of the 63rd meridian, and individual localities in British Columbia and northwestern Ontario live on their own standard time year-round.
In the US, the time change is not mandatory for all states, possessions and territories. Therefore, in Arizona, Hawaii, the freely associated state of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, standard time is observed.
Since the US joined the 'daylight saving time' system in 1918, it has repeatedly revised it. And in 2007, Congress passed a decision according to which the clocks must be turned on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. A similar law was adopted in neighboring Canada.
Today, the system of dividing into summer and winter time has become the norm in more than 110 countries located in all latitudes from Canada to Australia. In Russia and Europe, clocks are turned forward one hour on the night of the last Sunday of March, and this applies to all time zones - they turn clocks in St. Petersburg, Khabarovsk and Nakhodka. In its current form, this system has existed since 1997, but debates about whether to keep it or abandon the change are not subsiding.
A new wave of discussions around the clock face began at the initiative of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. In his address to the Federal Assembly on November 12, 2009, the head of state called for considering the advisability of switching to summer and winter time, adding that in the latter case one should also compare the benefits of savings and the obvious inconveniences. Deputies reacted instantly to the head of state's words. A bill was introduced into the State Duma dedicated to the abolition of the transition to daylight saving time and the abolition of the so-called 'decree time', which is ahead of standard time and which the country has been living by since 1930.
The scientific elite for the most part greeted the president's statement with disapproving murmurs. Some scientists proposed not to abandon summer time, but to abandon winter time. Associate Professor of the Geography Faculty of Moscow State University Andrei Panin argued that decree time should not be abolished but preserved, adding an hour after the clocks are turned to summer time, and abolish the winter shift. According to his reasoning, in winter the day in central Russia is so short that we will anyway both get up and go to bed in the dark. Therefore, turning the clocks back at the end of October makes no sense.
In the end, neither the abolition of summer time nor winter time was legislated, and the February bill may suffer the fate of previous initiatives. Recall that in 2008, deputies of both 'A Just Russia' and the LDPR came up with similar proposals. Deputies of 'A Just Russia' proposed to set standard time plus one hour throughout the calendar year without an additional annual clock change.
As 'Vremya Novostei' notes, the authors of the sensational but already forgotten bill cited the opinion of experts, claiming that the annual clock change forward 'causes a significant deterioration in the health of citizens during the adaptation period'.