They misspoke and bizarrely doubled down when corrected, but they are touching upon an interesting fun fact. That it's always daytime somewhere in France.
I didn't realize French territory is so widespread.
So if the U.K. ever complies with the UN and the ICJ and relinquishes control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, the sun will set on the British empire, but not on France.
That'll be funny as fuck and I hope France never misses an opportunity to point it out.
There's pretty much nothing right along the international date line, regardless of country. If you're trying to collect them all you better not care about +12 vs -12. As you can see your options are also limited for -1 and -2.
Unrelatedly, I'm curious what the story is with Central vs. Mountain time in Nunavut. That's quite the wasp-waist for such a vast, mostly empty area.
Instead of grabbing the Azores for UTC -1, France figured it would be easier to just annex all of Portugal. Brazil was reportedly grateful to no longer have a whole extra timezone for that one -2 island, and also glad to hear that they annexed Portugal.
But what does that mean?
Does Australia span all timezones? Take its zone of UTC+9:30 and then go all the way around the globe to the east until you hit UTC+8 which is also Australia. Congrats you passed through all timezones and are in Australia again.