World Rings In 2024 After War, Bots And Barbie

Sydney, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 1st Jan, 2024) Jubilant crowds began bidding farewell to the hottest year on record Sunday, closing a turbulent 12 months marked by clever chatbots, climate crises and wrenching wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

The world's population -- now more than eight billion -- will see out the old and usher in the new, with many hoping to shake the weight of high living costs and global tumult.

In Sydney, the self-proclaimed "New Year's capital of the world", more than a million partygoers packed the harbour foreshore, with city officials and police warning that all vantage points were full.

Sydneysiders gathered through the day at prominent sites, defying uncharacteristically dank weather, and they were not disappointed when the Harbour Bridge and other landmarks were garlanded in light and colour by eight tonnes of fireworks.

Sydney's spectacular show lit the fuse on 2024, a year that will bring elections concerning half the world's population and a summer Olympiad celebrated in Paris.

The last 12 months brought "Barbiegeddon" at the box office, a proliferation of human-seeming artificial intelligence tools, and a world-first whole-eye transplant.

India outgrew China as the world's most populous country, and then became the first nation to land a rocket on the dark side of the moon.

It was also the hottest year since records began in 1880, with a spate of climate-fuelled disasters striking from Australia to the Horn of Africa and the Amazon basin.

Fans bade adieu to "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll" Tina Turner, "Friends" actor Matthew Perry, hell-raising Anglo-Irish songsmith Shane MacGowan and master dystopian novelist Cormac McCarthy.