Caroline Island
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and Southern Line Islands. In January 1972, the Central and Southern Line Islands, including Caroline, were joined with the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which had become autonomous in 1971 as part of British decolonization efforts. In 1979, the Gilbert Islands became the independent nation of Kiribati; Caroline Island was then and continues to be Kiribati's easternmost point. The entire island is presently owned by the government of the Republic of Kiribati, overseen by the Ministry of Line and Phoenix Groups, which is headquartered on Kiritimati. Competing claims to sovereignty over the island by the United States (under the Guano Islands Act) were relinquished in the 1979 Treaty of Tarawa, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1983. The island was briefly inhabited again from 1987 to 1991 by Ron Falconer, his wife Anne, and their two children, who developed a largely self-sufficient settlement on the atoll. Following a transfer of ownership, Falconer was evicted from the island by the Kiribati
government. A book, Together Alone (ISBN 1-86325-428-5), written by Falconer, documents the story of their residence on Caroline Island. In the 1990s, the island was leased to Urima Felix, a French Polynesian entrepreneur; he established a small homestead on one of the islets and reportedly had plans for development of the atoll. The island is also occasionally visited by Polynesian copra gatherers under agreements with the Kiribati government in Tarawa. On December 23, 1994, the Republic of Kiribati announced a change of time zone for the Line Islands, to take effect January 1, 1995. This adjustment effectively moved the International Date Line over 1000 kilometers (600 mi) to the east within Kiribati, placing all of Kiribati on the Asian or western side of the date line, despite the fact that Caroline's longitude of 150 degrees west corresponds to UTC−10 rather than its official time zone of UTC+14. Caroline Island now is at the same time as the Hawaiian Islands (Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time Zone), but one day later. This move made Caroline Island both the easternmost land in the earliest time zone (by some definitions, the easternmost point on Earth), and one of the first points of land which would see sunrise on January 1, 2000 — at 5:43 a.m., as measured by local time. The stated reason for the move was a campaign promise of Kiribati President Teburoro Tito to eliminate the confusion of Kiribati straddling the Date Line and therefore being constantly in two
Time zone realignment