Skip to main content

HOW DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ENTERED THE NEW YEAR.







Countries around the world are marking the New Year, with festivities currently under way in Europe.

Germany, France and Italy are among the latest to usher in 2016, along with parts of the Middle East and Africa.

Earlier in Japan, people released balloons by Tokyo Tower, while South Koreans celebrated with traditional bell-ringing.

Revellers in Australia and New Zealand were some of the first to welcome the New Year.

Crowds counted down at Auckland's Sky Tower in New Zealand, with a laser show and fireworks display. Fireworks also lit up Sydney harbour in Australia.



In Berlin, fireworks were held at the Brandenburg Gate, with one million people estimated to be attending the countdown. The celebrations took place as police in Munich warned of a planned terror attack and asked people to avoid crowds.

In Paris, the traditional fireworks display was cancelled to be replaced by a five-minute video performance at the Arc de Triomphe just before midnight. The screening was relayed on screens along the Champs-Elysee.

The city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said the video was intended to send "the world the message that Paris is standing, proud of its lifestyle and living together''.

Earlier, President Hollande in a New Year's Eve address to the nation said that his country "has not finished with terrorism yet", six weeks after gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in Paris.

Underwater 'concert'

In one of the more innovative celebrations, four divers equipped with musical instruments and breathing apparatus performed an underwater "concert" in a fish tank in Yantai, east China.

Festivities went ahead in Dubai despite a fire at the city's Address Hotel. A fireworks display was held near the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.

Egypt celebrated with fireworks staged in front of the pyramids near Cairo, as the government works to revive its tourist industry.



Russia - the first major European city to welcome 2016 - held a fireworks display over Red Square in Moscow.

Despite security fears across the continent, many major public events are going ahead, though with heightened security restrictions.

Only 25,000 people in Madrid were allowed into the Puerta del Sol square. More than 100,000 people are expected to watch the Mayor of London's fireworks show, a ticketed event.



Over in Sierra Leone, the declared end of Ebola will mark a return to festivities, after Freetown, the capital, was left deserted a year ago due to the disease's outbreak.

As 2016 finally reaches the Americas, up to a million people are expected to converge on Times Square in New York, amid tight security, to watch the famous ball descend.

On Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach, crowds will not only mark the New Year - they will also fete the 100th anniversary of Samba music, and the upcoming summer Olympics.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...

Re-Covered: Living Through History

  A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940 Since the beginning of lockdown, I’ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it’s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It’s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we’re living through right now. Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939–1945 —a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown—has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthr...