New Year's Eve celebrations around the world
Sydney gets the year wrong while 500 couples tie the knot in Jakarta
SYDNEY : The fireworks show at Sydney's harbour that rang in 2019 and dazzled spectators around the world was picture perfect, except for one element - it got the year wrong.
More than 1.5 million people packed the harbour front of Australia's largest city to watch the extravaganza and noticed a signage beamed onto one of Sydney Harbour Bridge's pylons had the words "Happy New Year 2018!"
Photos of the typo were shared on social media sites.
"According to Sydney, it's still 2018, so I'm going back to bed," one Twitter user quipped.
Another wrote: "Oh will this horrible year never end."
Organisers of the City of Sydney, who invested huge resources and time into planning one of the world's first New Year's parties, saw the funny side of the mistake.
"We just laughed about it, you know these things happen as we said, it takes 15 months to organise an event of this size and scale," the fireworks' executive producer Anna McInerney told reporters yesterday.
"Obviously we weren't pleased, but you move on, you get back to doing the show."
In Rio de Janeiro, the hilltop Christ the Redeemer statue briefly came to colourful 3D life through light projections as it peered over Copacabana Beach, where pyrotechnics lit up more than two million Brazilians dancing to free concerts.
The beach was lit up with hundreds of thousands of mobile phone screens as the massive crowd recorded the fireworks spectacle.
New York was to follow with its iconic Times Square Ball drop.
In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands of people packed the streets along Victoria Harbour for a spectacular 10-minute show that illuminated the night.
In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, more than 500 couples tied the knot in a free mass wedding organised by the government to mark the arrival of a new year.
Fireworks shows were cancelled out of respect for victims of a recent tsunami that killed more than 400 people.
BOXING
In Japan, locals flocked to temples to ring in the new year, as US boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather came out of retirement to beat Japanese kickboxer Tenshin Nasukawa in a multi-million-dollar "exhibition" bout outside Tokyo.
In Dubai, fireworks lit up the sky over the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, to the delight of onlookers, while nearby Ras al-Khaimah sought to enter the Guinness Book of Records with the world's longest fireworks show.- AFP
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