World prepares to ring in 2024, bid farewell to a turbulent 12 months
- The world’s population will see out the old and usher in the new, with many hoping to shake the weight of high living costs and global tumult
- 2024 will bring elections concerning half the world’s population and a summer Olympiad celebrated in Paris
Jubilant crowds will bid farewell to the hottest year on record on Sunday, closing a turbulent 12 months marked by clever chatbots, climate crises and wrenching wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
The world’s population – now over 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 are expected to pack the city’s foreshore, despite uncharacteristically dank weather.
Eight tonnes of fireworks will light 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.