Friday, March 29, 2024

Countries celebrating 2013

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LONDON (AP) — Lavish fireworks displays ushered in 2013 across the Asia-Pacific region for the New Year, and Europe was holding scaled-back festivities and street parties in the hope of beginning a new year that will be kinder to its battered economies.
Asian cities kicked off New Year’s celebrations in style and an atmosphere of renewed optimism, despite the “fiscal cliff” impasse of spending cuts and tax increases threatening to reverberate globally from the United States.
Huge fireworks lit up skylines in Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and even the once-isolated country of Myanmar joined the countdown party for the first time in decades.
Celebrations were planned around the world, including the traditional crystal ball drop in New York City’s Times Square, where 1 million people were expected to cram into the surrounding streets.
In Russia, Moscow’s iconic Red Square was filled with spectators as fireworks exploded near the Kremlin to welcome in the new year. Earlier in the day, about 25 people were reportedly arrested in Moscow for trying to hold an unsanctioned demonstration. But President Vladimir Putin gave an optimistic New Year’s Eve address, making no reference to the anti-government protests that have occurred in his country in the past year.
“We believe that we can change the life around us and become better ourselves, that we can become more heedful, compassionate, gracious,” Putin said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
In Australia, a balmy summer night was split by 7 tons of fireworks fired from rooftops and barges in Sydney, many cascading from the city’s Harbor Bridge, in a $6.9 million pyrotechnic extravaganza billed by organizers as the world’s largest.
In Myanmar, after nearly five decades under military regimes that discouraged or banned big public gatherings, about 90,000 people experienced the country’s first New Year’s Eve countdown in a field in the largest city of Yangon.
“We feel like we are in a different world,” said Yu Thawda, a university student who came with three of her friends.
Tens of thousands of people lined Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor to view a $1.6 million fireworks display, said to be the biggest ever in the southern Chinese city.
In North Korea, cannons boomed at midnight in Pyongyang as people crowded the streets of the capital to watch a fireworks show over the Taedong River. After being in mourning a year ago regarding leader Kim Jong Il’s death, North Koreans celebrated the end of a big year that included the rise of new leader Kim Jong Un and the recent launch of a satellite into space.

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