Who celebrates New Year first and last? Time zones explained

While you are just firing up the BBQ on New Year's Eve in Dhaka, some islanders in the Pacific are already asleep after their fireworks faded hours ago. That's the strange magic of time zones. The New Year does not arrive everywhere at once, but sweeps across the planet like a slow, glittering wave.

The New Year we celebrate on 1 January follows the centuries-old Gregorian calendar, kept in sync by Greenwich Mean Time. The world is neatly divided into 24 time zones. But do not picture it as perfectly straight lines, as time zones bend and twist around borders, islands, and political quirks.