Right. The case of Kiribati is instructive. At one time, half of that country, which covers a huge area of the tropic Pacific Ocean, was 22 hours time behind the other half. Some 8 years ago, they decided to end this foolishness (which caused a variety of headaches) by moving the eastern half forward by 24 hours. They thus “moved the IDL” from cutting through the middle of the country to looping around it to the east.
When the millennium approached, people in other Pacific countries accused them of cheating to get the earliest place where the millennium started. I saw one newspaper article which claimed that time experts were reluctantly accepting this change in the Date Line. Assuming the newspapers reported accurately, both of these reflect a basic misunderstanding about legal time. A country can set it’s legal time to whatever it wants to. What their neighbors have as legal time or what the experts think is right have no bearing on it.
Yes indeed…there’s a number of countries that have decided to deviate from the international standard and set their clocks a half-hour different, mostly in Asia. (e.g. Iran is +3:30 UTC, India is +5:30, Myanmar is +6:30, etc.)
Then there’s some true oddballs out there: Nepal, for some reason, is +5:45(!) UTC, and the Kermadec Islands are at the unusual time of +13:00 UTC. The latter are a possession of New Zealand in the central Pacfic; presumably the local time was changed to avoid being stuck on the other side of the dateline from the motherland.
For a good map of Pacfiic Ocean time zone weirdness, check out this site: http://www.worldtimezone.com/time-oceania.htm - the aformentioned shift in time for parts of Kiribati juts out like axe across the IDL.