Sometimes these systems just make baffling decisions. One time years ago, while waiting for my plane to begin deboarding at JFK Airport in NYC, I tried setting my MacBook's timezone to Eastern manually. I started typing "New Y" into the Closest City field. OS X helpfully auto-completed it as "New Yekeba, Liberia": https://evan.tumblr.com/image/65341168142
As best I can tell, New Yekeba is a tiny resettled former mining town with minimal population. There are very few English-language web pages about it. Somehow this ranked higher for Apple's auto-suggest than the most populous city in the US.