Kiribati moved its standard time zone across the International Date Line in 1995, changing when it celebrated New Year's Eve.
Kiribati is an island country spread across a vast area of the central Pacific. Before the change, the International Date Line separated parts of the country, making the eastern Phoenix and Line Islands a different calendar day from the Gilbert Islands. In 1995, the government shifted the date-line boundary used by its clocks so the country's islands could share the same calendar date.
The change placed the Line Islands, including Kiritimati, on the world's earliest civil time zone, UTC+14. As a result, Kiritimati is among the first inhabited places to enter a new calendar year. This is why news reports often describe Kiribati as one of the first countries to celebrate New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.
The International Date Line is not a perfectly straight natural boundary; it is an agreed convention that bends around political territories. Kiribati's adjustment changed local calendar coordination, not the planet's rotation or the astronomical instant of midnight.