discover the images of the transition to 2025 around the world

From Sydney to Rio de Janeiro via Damascus and Paris, the world celebrated the start of 2025 on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday with fireworks, at the end of a year marked by Olympic gold, the thunderous return of Donald Trump but also new upheavals in the Middle East and Ukraine.

After Asia-Pacific which opened the ball on the 31st, the festivities continued in the Middle East, Europe and America. As midnight struck in Brazil, hundreds of thousands of people screamed with joy on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach for a mega fireworks display and a nearly two-hour concert extravaganza, performed by legendary brother and sister Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethania, among other artists.

In New York, tens of thousands of revelers are gathered in the emblematic Times Square, waiting for the descent of the famous five-ton illuminated ball to mark the transition to the new year. Five months after the euphoria of the Olympic Games, Paris has once again donned bright clothes for the transition to the new year. More than a million people gathered on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, closed to vehicles and lined with dozens of glittering trees.

In Britain, thousands of people gathered on the banks of the River Thames in London to watch the fireworks, but bad weather forced the cancellation of events in other cities, including Edinburgh.

In a New Year's speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine should fight in 2025 on the “battlefield” but also to the “negotiation table” to end nearly three years of Russian invasion.

After the end of more than fifty years of the undivided rule of the Assad clan over Syria, hundreds of people gathered in the center of Damascus brandishing their flags in the colors of the “revolution”telling them “hope” for the new year, after thirteen years of civil war in the battered country.