Pop, Ring and Bang Start New Year

Fireworks blazed over Sydney Harbor, Europeans uncorked champagne for a new currency, and a monk in Tokyo rang out the past year’s woes as party-goers the world over celebrated the start of the New Year.

About 100 singers and dancers rocked Berlin with an open-air party and a midnight fireworks show illuminating its famed Brandenburg Gate. This New Year is especially historic for Germans because later this year Berlin once again becomes the capital of a united Germany.

Europe embraced 1999 with its own form of unity: Champagne bottles popped and scores of balloons soared into the air to mark the launching of the new euro currency in 11 European countries.

More than 6,000 American cheerleaders and band musicians flew to London to march in its New Year’s Day parade today.

Leaders around the world urged their people to end sectarian strife and have hope in the future.

In his last New Year’s message before leaving office, President Nelson Mandela called on South Africans to work together to solve poverty and corruption--the legacies of decades of apartheid rule.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin hoped that 1999 will be an improvement over the past year, when his country was hit by economic disaster and he was plagued by bad health.

A continent away and hours earlier, Asians welcomed the Year of the Rabbit with displays of fireworks, speeches and late-night pilgrimages to sacred shrines and temples.

Millions of Australians bade farewell to 1998 by watching a $1.2-million fireworks extravaganza that bathed the harbor’s Sydney Opera House in pulses of green, red and blue light.

In central Tokyo, crowds thronged Zojoji temple just before midnight, waiting for a Buddhist monk to strike the temple bell 108 times to dispel the evils of the past year and usher in good luck.

In New York, revelers gathered in Times Square, where much of the festivity was a dress rehearsal for next year’s millennium spectacle.

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the city’s famous, and now refurbished, intersection to greet 1999 and watch the lighted ball drop at the stroke of midnight.