The Week’s big New Year’s Day quiz 2024

Three four-sided building blocks with the numbers 2, 0, 2, and one being turned showing the numbers 3 and 4 simultaneously — (Image credit: Nora Carol Photography/Getty)

A week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson may have once said – but a week of news is far longer.

After 52 weeks of endlessly enormous news, this year has felt like an epoch. Global temperatures reached record highs, causing more extreme weather events and posing the gravest threat to humanity. Deadly war has broken out in the Middle East, with allies drawn in but divided and rogue states threatening to take advantage. The meteoric growth of artificial intelligence has already led to scientific and technological breakthroughs, but raises fears of a dangerously uncertain future.

In the UK, we marked 100 days under leader Rishi Sunak. His tenure will likely be remembered for a struggling economy, stubbornly high inflation, two dramatic reshuffles and the loss of four key by-elections. Over in the US, former president Donald Trump has continued his race towards the Republican nomination, seemingly undeterred by four criminal indictments and a civil fraud trial. The world was buffeted by multiple shock election results, with knife-edge victories across the political spectrum. And every Friday, we have tested your memory for headlines and details with our Quiz of the Week.

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Harriet Marsden is a senior staff writer and podcast panellist for The Week, covering world news and writing the weekly Global Digest newsletter. Before joining the site in 2023, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, working for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent among others, and regularly appearing on radio shows. In 2021, she was awarded the “journalist-at-large” fellowship by the Local Trust charity, and spent a year travelling independently to some of England’s most deprived areas to write about community activism. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, and has also worked in Bolivia, Colombia and Spain.