by Anne and Ron Falconer and their children, who developed a largely self-sufficient settlement. Following a transfer of ownership, the Falconers left the island. In the 1990s, the island was occasionally visited by Polynesian copra gatherers under agreements with the Kiribati government in Tarawa. On 23 December 1994, the Republic of Kiribati announced a change of time zone for the Line Islands would take effect on 31 December 1994. This adjustment placed all of Kiribati on the Asian or western side of the International Date Line. Although Caroline Island's longitudinal position of 150 degrees west corresponded to a UTC offset of −10 hours, the island's new time zone became UTC+14. This move made Caroline Island both the easternmost land in the earliest time zone (by some definitions, the easternmost point on Earth), and the first point of land which would see sunrise on 1 January 2000—at 5:43 a.m. local time. Other Pacific nations, including Tonga, New Zealand and Fiji, protested the move, objecting that it infringed on their claims to be the first land to see dawn in the year 2000. According to the United States Naval Observatory, the first point of land to see sunrise on 1 January 2000 (local time) was between the Dibble Glacier and Victor Bay in East Antarctica, at 66 degrees south, where the sun rose at 12:08 a.m. In August 1997, to promote events to mark the arrival of the year 2000, the Kiribati government officially renamed Caroline Island as Millennium Island. In December 1999, over 70 Kiribati singers and dancers travelled to Caroline from South Tarawa, accompanied by approximately 25 journalists, as part of the celebrations to mark the arrival of the new millennium. The broadcast had an estimated audience of up to one billion viewers worldwide. In 2017 a Russian businessman proposed a deal to invest $350 million to build a resort in Kiribati in exchange for sovereign rights over three islands. The deal was rejected by the Kiribati government based on a report from the Kiribati Foreign Investment Commission. Geography and climate Caroline Island lies near the southeastern end of the Line Islands, a string of atolls extending across the equator, south of the Hawaiian Islands in the central Pacific Ocean. The slightly crescent-shaped atoll has a land area of . It consists of approximately 39 separate islets, surrounding a narrow lagoon; the smallest islet, Motu Atibu, may have disappeared. The