JakartaPost/AFP-Jan 1, 2024
Jubilant crowds bid farewell on Sunday to the hottest year on record, closing a turbulent 12 months marked by clever chatbots, climate crises and devastating wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Much of the world’s population — now more than eight 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. In Sydney, the self-proclaimed “New Year’s capital of the world”, more than a million partygoers packed around the harbor, with city officials and police warning that all vantage points were full. Pyrotechnics also illuminated the skies in Auckland, Hong Kong, Manila and Jakarta. Perhaps more than anything, 2023 will be remembered for war in the Middle East, after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 raids on southern Israel and Israel’s ferocious reprisals on Gaza. The United Nations estimates that almost two million Gazans have been displaced since Israel’s siege began, or about 85 percent of the peacetime population. Several pivotal elections are scheduled in 2024, with the political fate of more than four billion people to be decided in contests that will shape Britain, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Venezuela and a host of other nations. 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. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/world/2024/01/01/world-rings-in-2024-after-war-bots-and-barbie.html.
