New beginnings

It was the most monitored midnight in history. People around the globe passed over the threshold into a new age - from those on tiny Millennium Island in the Pacific, who were the first to see the dawn of a new millennium, to the millions who took to the streets of the world's great cities.

But the extraordinary technology that allowed us to witness pictures from around the globe also held the threat of disaster in the form of the Y2K bug. Nothing symbolises how much technological progress has been made during the past 100 years; and also how vulnerable it has made us.

But it seems that people are only too ready to grasp new hope and the promise of new beginnings that it brings.

That hope was perfectly captured by the scenes in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. There, 160 hostages from a hijacked airliner walked across the tarmac to freedom. For their relatives there will be special reason to celebrate a new century.

Once again, the scenes represented the state of the world at the end of the 20th century: a world plagued by the ever-present threat of terrorism, from which no country is immune; and, at the same time, a world full of the hope that such events, however intractable they may seem, can end peacefully.

Almost everywhere else there is to be found the prospect of a similar combination of hope and danger.