THE world celebrated the New Year on Wednesday with fireworks displays from Sydney to London, although celebrations were clouded by deadly wildfires in Australia, protests in Hong Kong and India and nuclear tensions with North Korea.
Large crowds gathered in European capitals for spectacular firework displays that lit up the skies over landmarks like Big Ben in London, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Parthenon in Athens and the Kremlin in Moscow.
The traditional drop of a Waterford crystal ball on Times Square in New York capped a six-hour New Year’s Eve show. Intermittent rain did little to dampen the festivities as hundreds of thousands of people were treated to performances by pop star Post Malone, the Korea-pop band BTS, and singer song writer Alanis Morisette.
In Australia, a million revelers thronged Sydney harbor and nearby districts to watch more than 100,000 fireworks explode above the city, even as thousands of people along the country’s eastern seaboard sought refuge from the bushfires on beaches.
Thousands in Hong Kong welcomed 2020 on neon-lit promenades in the picturesque Victoria Harbour, breaking into pro-democracy chants shortly after the countdown to midnight.
Sydney decided to press ahead with its fireworks despite calls by some members of the public for the display to be canceled in solidarity with fire-hit areas in New South Wales, of which the city is the capital.
But amid the celebrations of a New Year and decade, old tensions threatened to flare up. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said on Wednesday his country would keep developing nuclear programs and introduce a “new strategic weapon” in the near future, after the United States ignored a year-end deadline to restart denuclearization talks.
Thousands of Indians ushered in the year by demonstrating against a citizenship law they say will discriminate against Muslims and chip away at India’s secular constitution.
The demonstrations came despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to dampen protests that have run for nearly three weeks. (Reuters)
