Joy, sorrow as world ushers in 2024
NEW YORK — Fireworks illuminated skies over Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney to celebrate the entry into 2024, while rockets and strikes marked the year’s earliest hours in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine.
Much of the world’s population — now more than 8 billion — is hoping to shake off high living costs and global tumult in 2024, which will bring elections concerning half the world’s population and the Paris Olympics.
But with the new year barely having started, there were already ominous signs: At the stroke of midnight in Gaza, a barrage of rockets was fired toward Israel in a twisted reflection of the fireworks lighting up night skies elsewhere around the world.
In New York City, thousands of visitors lined up to watch the annual dropping of a giant illuminated ball in Times Square as crooner Paul Anka saw out the final minutes of the year.
The march of midnight from time zone to time zone brought 2024 first to places such as Australia, where more than 1 million people watched a pyrotechnic display centered around Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge. It would be another 16 hours before New York finished 2023.
Pyrotechnics also illuminated the skies in Auckland, Hong Kong, Manila and Jakarta, while revelers danced in the streets in Greece and bathed in the nude in southern France.
The past 12 months brought “Barbenheimer” to the box office, a proliferation of human-seeming artificial intelligence tools and the world’s first whole-eye transplant.
India outgrew China as the world’s most populous country and then became the first nation to land an unmanned craft on the moon’s south pole.
It was also the hottest year since records began in 1880, with a spate of climate-fueled disasters striking across the world.
Fans bade adieu to “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll” Tina Turner, Friends actor Matthew Perry, hell-raising AngloIrish songsmith Shane MacGowan and master dystopian novelist Cormac McCarthy.
Several pivotal elections are scheduled in 2024, with the political fate of more than 4 billion people to be decided in contests that will shape the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Venezuela and a host of other nations.
But one election in particular promises global consequences.
In the United States, Democrat Joe Biden, 81, and Republican Donald Trump, 77, appear set for a November rerun of their divisive 2020 presidential contest.