- On January 1, 2000 Tony Blair fervently
hopes the eyes of the world will turn towards Greenwich.
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- Adrian Rodenburg, meanwhile, is hoping
equally fervently that they will turn towards a grassy spot on a promontory
of a tiny island off Fiji.
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- Meanwhile, Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, King
of Tonga, wants everyone watching his homeland.
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- But because of the peculiarities of the
International Dateline he'll have to fight it out with both Teburoru Tito,
president of Kiribati, and Ken and Eva Lanauze. They are determined their
homestead on Pitt Island, 600 miles off New Zealand, will be the first
spot to welcome the new Millennium.
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- Exactly where the year 2000 will first
dawn has pitted one side of the globe against the other - and one tiny
Pacific island against the next.
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- It's all about money, of course.
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- The vast £758 million Millennium
Dome on the Meridian Line running through South East London is supposed
to attract 30,000 paying visitors a day.
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- Meanwhile South Pacific leaders reckon
revenue from Millennium-mad tourists could bring them £2.2 billion.
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- Which is why Adrian Rodenburg plans to
build a Time Museum on the tip of a tiny Fijian island where you will be
able to buy time capsules for $5 each.
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- Adrian says the position is exact, having
been plotted with the help of seven satellites.
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- The snag is that neighbouring Tonga has
sneakily set its clocks an hour ahead and is planning the mother of all
parties.
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- "The Millennium starts here,"
says the King.
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- The first rays of the Millennium sun,
he says, should strike Tonga on the crest of a volcano on the island of
Tofua.
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- For around £500 pilot Larry Simon
will fly you to watch the dawn from the lip of this active volcano to sip
champagne. But there is a snag for Tonga too. The neighbouring archipelago
of Kiribati has set its clocks 14 HOURS ahead of GMT - a full hour ahead
of Tonga. And shifted the International Dateline into the bargain.
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- Formerly the British colony of the Gilbert
Islands, Kiribati used to straddle the dateline - until its president
decided to wrap the dateline around all the islands and put the whole
lot ahead of GMT.
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- Sitiveni Rabuka, the Prime Minister of
Fiji, is fuming. "You can't be 181 degrees east of Greenwich and you
can't be 14 hours ahead of GMT," he says.
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- In fact, none of the islands will see
the first rays of the new Millennium sun.
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- Because of the way the earth travels
round the sun, the first people to witness the dawn of 2000 will be the
50 inhabitants of Pitt Island, one of an island group belonging to New
Zealand.
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- But even that's become fraught.
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- The first rays should strike Mount Hakepa,
most of which is owned by farmers Ken and Eve Lanauze.
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- However, the northern slope is owned
by another farmer, James Moffat - and for the first time in their history,
the neighbours have fallen out.
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- Now, as the clock ticks away, they've
called surveyors in to prove which patch of the tiny island will first
see in the Millennium.
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- IT'S A RIGHT CLOCK UP...
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- Squabbles over time arise because there
is no authority governing the international dateline.
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- When it is midnight on January 31, 1999,
in Greenwich, it has already been January 1, 2000, in every time zone eastwards,
up to the 180 degree line of longitude.
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- Until Kiribati cheekily decided it was
an impossible 181 degrees longitude.
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- In fact, astronomers say the first rays
would fall on the Dibble glacier in the Antarctic - with Pitt Island being
the first inhabited place to see the dawn.
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