By JAMIE STENGLE, Associated Press

DALLAS (AP) — Once again, most Americans will set their clocks forward by one hour this weekend, losing perhaps a bit of sleep but gaining more glorious sunlight in the evenings as the days warm into summer.

Where did this all come from, though?

How we came to move the clock forward in the spring, and then push it back in the fall, is a tale that spans over more than a century — one that’s driven by two world wars, mass confusion at times and a human desire to bask in the sun for a long as possible.

There’s been plenty of debate over the practice, but about 70 countries — about 40% of those across the globe — currently use what Americans call daylight saving time.

While springing the clocks forward “kind of jolts our system,” the extra daylight gets people outdoors, exercising and having fun, says Anne Buckle, web editor at timeanddate.com, which features information on time, time zones and astronomy.

“The really, really awesome advantage is the bright evenings, right?” she says. “It is actually having hours of daylight after you come home from work to spend time with your family or activities. And that is wonderful.”

Here are some things to know so you’ll be conversant about the practice of humans changing time:

How did this all get started?

In the 1890s, George Vernon Hudson, an astronomer and entomologist in New Zealand, proposed a time shift in the spring and fall to increase the daylight. And in the early 1900s, British homebuilder William Willett, troubled that people weren’t up enjoying the morning sunlight, made a similar push. But neither proposal gained enough traction to be implemented.

Germany began using daylight saving time during World War I with the thought that it would save energy. Other countries, including the United States, soon followed suit. During World War II, the U.S. once again instituted what was dubbed “war time” nationwide, this time year-round.

In the United States today, every state except Hawaii and Arizona observes daylight saving time. Around the world, Europe, much of Canada and part of Australia also implement it, while Russia and Asia don’t currently.

Inconsistency and mass confusion

After World War II, a patchwork of timekeeping emerged across the United States, with some areas keeping daylight saving time and others ditching it.

“You might have one town has daylight saving time, the neighboring town might have daylight saving time but start it and end it on different dates and the third neighboring town might not have it at all,” says David Prerau, author of the book “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time.”

At one point, if riders on a 35-mile (56-kilometer) bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, wanted their watches to be accurate, they’d need to change them seven times as they dipped in and out of daylight saving time, Prerau says.

So in 1966, the U.S. Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which say states can either implement daylight saving time or not, but it has to be statewide. The act also mandates the day that daylight saving time starts and ends across the country.

Confusion over the time change isn’t just something from the past. In the nation of Lebanon last spring, chaos ensued when the government announced a last-minute decision to delay the start of daylight saving time by a month — until the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Some institutions made the change and others refused as citizens tried to piece together their schedules. Within days, the decision was reversed.

“It really turned into a huge mess where nobody knew what time it was,” Buckle says.

What would it be like if we didn’t change the clocks?

Changing the clocks twice a year leads to a lot of grumbling, and pushes to either use standard time all year, or stick to daylight saving time all year often crop up.

During the 1970s energy crisis, the U.S. started doing daylight saving time all year long, and Americans didn’t like it. With the sun not rising in the winter in some areas till around 9 a.m. or even later, people were waking up in the dark, going to work in the dark and sending their children to school in the dark, Prerau says.

”It became very unpopular very quickly,” Prerau says.

And, he notes, using standard time all year would mean losing that extra hour of daylight for eight months in the evenings in the United States.

A nod to the early adopters

In 1908, the Canadian city of Thunder Bay — then the two cities of Fort William and Port Arthur — changed from the central time zone to the eastern time zone for the summer and fall after a citizen named John Hewitson argued that would afford an extra hour of daylight to enjoy the outdoors, says Michael deJong, curator/archivist at the Thunder Bay Museum.

The next year, though, Port Arthur stayed on eastern time, while Fort William changed back to central time in the fall, which, predictably, “led to all sorts of confusion,” deJong says.

Today, the city of Thunder Bay is on eastern time, and observes daylight saving time, giving the area, “just delightfully warm, long days to enjoy” in the summer, says Paul Pepe, tourism manager for Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission.

The city, located on Lake Superior, is far enough north that the sun sets at around 10 p.m. in the summer, Pepe says, and that helps make up for their cold dark winters. Residents, he says, tend to go on vacations in the winter and stay home in the summer: “I think for a lot of folks here, the long days, the warm summer temperatures, it’s a vacation in your backyard.”

By MATT SEDENSKY, Associated Press National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Scrambling to replace their health insurance and to find new work, some laid-off federal workers are running into another unexpected unpleasantry: Relatives cheering their firing.

The country’s bitterly tribal politics are spilling into text chains, social media posts and heated conversations as Americans absorb the reality of the government’s cost-cutting measures. Expecting sympathy, some axed workers are finding family and friends who instead are steadfast in their support of what they see as a bloated government’s waste.

“I’ve been treated as a public enemy by the government and now it’s bleeding into my own family,” says 24-year-old Luke Tobin, who was fired last month from his job as a technician with the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest.

Tobin’s job loss sent him scurrying to fill prescriptions before he lost his health insurance and filling out dozens of applications to find whatever work he can, even if it’s at a fast-food restaurant. But some relatives reacting to his firing as “what has to happen to make the government great again” has been one of the worst parts of the entire ordeal.

“They can’t separate their ideology and their politics from supporting their own family and their own loved ones,” says Tobin.

Kristin Jenn got a similar response from members of her family after she learned the National Park Service ranger job she was due to start had been put on hold by the billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency hiring freeze. She thinks it’s likely the job will be eliminated altogether.

As she has expressed her disappointment over potentially losing her dream job, some members of her mostly conservative family have unfriended her on social media. Others are giving her the silent treatment. Nearly all favor such cuts even if she’s a victim of them.

“My life is disintegrating because I can’t work in my chosen field,” says Jenn, 47, from Austin, Texas. “Lump on top of that no support from family – it hits you very hard.”

The strife has extended to Jenn’s mother, a former federal employee herself. When she has criticized the administration’s actions, her mother simply says she supports the president.

“She has somehow been convinced that public servants are a parasite and unproductive even though she was a public servant,” says Jenn.

The federal job cuts are the work of DOGE, which has been tearing through agencies looking for suspected waste. No official tally of firings has been released, but the list stretches into the thousands and to nearly every part of the country.

More layoffs are expected as DOGE continues its work.

Eric Anderson, 48, of Chicago, was still absorbing the shock of being fired from his National Parks Service job as a biological science technician when he came across his aunt’s social media post celebrating the DOGE cuts. The gist, Anderson said, was, “Man, it sure is great seeing all this waste being knocked off.”

He grows angry thinking about it.

“Do you think I’m a waste?” he says, his voice rising as he recalls the post. “There are a lot of people out there that are hurting right now that are not a waste.”

Erica Stubbs, who was working as a forestry technician with the U.S. Forest Service in Boulder, Colorado, is avoiding social media after seeing hate for federal workers.

Though most people in her life have been supportive since she was fired, some have made passing comments about the necessity of eliminating jobs like hers.

“What they tell me is it’s just cutting out the waste, the excess spending — that your job’s not that important,” says 27-year-old Stubbs. “I’m not saying it’s the most important job in the world but it’s my job. It’s important to me.”

Social media is teeming with posts reveling the layoffs and urging DOGE: “Fire more!” In a fiercely divided country, many saw the cutbacks through their own political lens.

One man’s devastation, it turns out, can be another man’s delight.

Riley Rackliffe, who was working as an aquatic ecologist at Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada, was buoyed that his firing led so many friends and relatives to reach out, offering to pass his resume along, call their congressman or even help with his mortgage.

Mixed with that, though, has been the vitriol.

When his firing made the local news, a Facebook posting of the story led to a storm of comments deriding him and championing the layoffs. One person called Riley, who is 36 and holds a Ph.D., a “glorified pool boy” whose job nearly anyone could do.

Even some of Rackliffe’s friends paired their expressions of consolation for Rackliffe with support for cutting jobs they contended were unnecessary government bloat.

“Hey, I’m sorry you lost your job but I think we really need to cut out some of this waste in the government,” Rackliffe said one friend texted him, saying he supported DOGE’s aims. “He basically said, ’We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to rip off the Band-Aid.”

What stings most, Rackliffe says, is the contention that people like him were lazy and worthless, collecting big paychecks for meaningless work.

“It’s really hurtful for the president to insinuate that you don’t exist or that your job consisted of sitting at home doing nothing and cashing the paycheck,” he says. “I’d like to see him sifting through spiny naiad in 120-degree weather looking for parasitic snails. He’s the one that goes golfing on the government dime. I don’t even know how to golf.”

Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky.

By CHARLOTTE KRAMON, Associated Press/Report for America

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Senate passed a bill that would allow President Donald Trump and more than a dozen people to seek compensation for legal bills stemming from an attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

The bill passed unanimously by state legislators Thursday would enable compensation from counties for attorneys’ fees and other legal costs in criminal cases in which a prosecutor has been disqualified.

Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in Fulton County in August 2023. The accusations included asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes for Trump to win the battleground state, harassing an election worker and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified from the election interference case by a state appeals court based on a romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom Willis hired to lead the case.

Georgia Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II, an Augusta Democrat, posed a different hypothetical.

“If you have that young person, possession of marijuana, whatever it may be, and the prosecutor has done something wrong and that case is dismissed because the prosecutor did something wrong, they’re entitled to have their attorney’s fees back,” Jones said. “That’s actually something that we probably would have pushed many years ago.”

Another bill passed the Senate Thursday that would give subpoena powers to State and House committees.

Both bills come a year after the state Senate passed a bill creating a special committee to investigate “various forms of misconduct” by Willis, including her relationship with Wade. The committee tried to subpoena Willis for a hearing last year but she did not appear. A judge later ruled the committee was allowed to subpoena her.

Nothing has come of the committee’s investigation, but Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and other Republicans said last week they want to investigate Stacey Abrams.

They want to look deeper into recent ethics findings that voter participation group New Georgia Project improperly coordinated with Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign. She would have been the first Black woman to serve as a U.S. governor but lost to Republican Brian Kemp, who defeated her again in a 2022 rematch.

They also want to investigate unsubstantiated claims by new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin that Abrams benefitted from $2 billion that a coalition of groups trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases received from President Joe Biden’s administration. Abrams says she received none of the money.

Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.