fix time regressions in Asia

This changes sets the time zone in doing an SQL Date conversion to GMT.
Without setting the timezone, the SQL Date object will use local
midnight to initialize the objects, which will cause regression
differences as Asia is ahead of GMT.
Fix Locale for Date Parsing

This changeset fixes the locale for date parsing to Locale.ROOT.
Without this change, the classes will fail when running on a
system in Asia in which the Locale has been set to Chinese.

These changes assume that internal representations will use
Locale.ROOT for date conversations.  Display dates should be
modified to use the local language.