World rings in 2024 amid global tumult

(UPDATE) SYDNEY, Australia: Jubilant crowds bid 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. However, wars in Ukraine and Gaza cast a pall over celebrations.

The world's population — now over 8 billion — saw out the old and ushered 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 city's foreshore.

Even before nightfall, tens of thousands of people gathered at vantage points around the city's iconic Harbor Bridge, defying uncharacteristically dank weather.

At midnight, 8 tons of fireworks light the fuse on 2024, a year that will bring elections concerning half the world's population and a summer Olympiad celebrated in Paris.

In New York's Times Square, crowds of revelers filled the heart of midtown Manhattan.

The celebrity-filled event included live performances from Flo Rida, Megan Thee Stallion and LL Cool J, as well as televised appearances from Cardi B and others.

However in Muslim-majority Pakistan, the government has banned all New Year's Eve celebrations as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians.

In an overnight televised message, caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar urged Pakistanis to «show solidarity with the oppressed people of Gaza» by beginning the new year with simplicity.

Kakar said Muslims across the world were saddened over Israel's attacks on Gaza that resulted in the killings of thousands of innocent people.

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-fueled 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