Kiribati is among the first countries to enter the New Year because parts of it use the UTC+14 time zone.
Kiribati is a Pacific island country spread across a vast area of ocean. In 1995, it moved the International Date Line around its eastern islands so that the entire country could share the same calendar date. The change placed the Line Islands, including Kiritimati, on the calendar's earliest time zone, UTC+14.
This does not mean every part of Kiribati experiences midnight at exactly the same moment: the country uses three time zones. The Line Islands are the part most often highlighted in New Year's coverage because they are among the first inhabited places to reach January 1.
The date-line change was intended to remove the practical inconvenience of having different parts of the country on different days. It also gave Kiribati a distinctive role in global New Year's reporting.