Dazzling fireworks lit up Australia’s Sydney Harbour, communist Vietnam held a rare, Western-style countdown to the new year, and Japanese revellers released balloons carrying notes with people’s hopes and dreams as the world ushered in 2011.

A MAN armed with a box cutter barricaded himself inside a day-care centre in southern Italy yesterday with 11 children and a teacher, but police captured him hours later and all the hostages were released unhurt.