New Christian Year Begins on Ominous Note

NEW YORK (KI) -- Fireworks illuminated skies over Paris, Rio and Sydney to celebrate the entry to 2024, while rockets and strikes marked the year’s earliest hours in Gaza.

Much of the world’s population -- now more than eight billion -- is hoping to shake off high living costs and global tumult in 2024, which will bring elections concerning half the world’s population and the Paris Olympics.
But with the new year barely started there were already ominous signs: at the stroke of midnight in Gaza, Israeli bombing illuminated the sky.
The last 12 months brought “Barbenheimer” to 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 an unmanned craft on the Moon’s south pole.
It was also the hottest year since records began in 1880, with a spate of climate-fueled disasters striking across the world.
2023 will be remembered for war in the Middle East, after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 operation on southern Israeli occupied territories and Israel’s ferocious genocide in Gaza.
The United Nations estimates that almost two million Gazans have been displaced since Israel’s siege began, or about 85 percent of the peacetime population.
With once-bustling Gaza City neighborhoods reduced to rubble, there were few places left to mark the new year -- and fewer loved ones to celebrate with.
“It was a black year full of tragedies,” said 37-year-old Abed Akkawi, who fled the city with his wife and three children to a UN shelter in Rafah, southern Gaza.
“God willing this war will end, the new year will be a better one, and we will be able to return to our homes and rebuild them, or even live in a tent on the rubble,” he told AFP.
Several pivotal elections are scheduled in 2024, with the political fate of more than four billion people to be decided in contests that will shape Russia, Britain, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Venezuela and a host of other nations.
But one election in particular promises global consequences.
In the United States, Democrat Joe Biden, 81, and Republican Donald Trump, 77, appear set for a November rerun of their divisive 2020 presidential contest.
As the incumbent, Biden has at times appeared to show his age and even supporters worry about the toll of another bruising four years in office.
There are at least as many concerns about a Trump return.
He faces prosecution on several counts, and 2024 could determine whether the bombastic self-proclaimed billionaire goes to the Oval Office or jail.