A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor yesterday accused the city government of forcing other cities and counties to draft budgets and participate in the Taipei International Flora Expo.
Participation in the expo, DPP Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chia-ching (徐佳青) said, had attracted increasing complaints from cities and counties about being required to budget several million dollars and mobilized staff and students for the event.
Taichung City, for example, budgeted NT$2 million (US$63,000) to send local school students to visit the expo as an extracurricular activity. Changhua County Government will also use part of its annual budget to send schoolchildren to the event and establish an exhibition at the expo.
“The Taipei City Government is using other cities’ and counties’ resources to artificially exaggerate the number of visitors and the economic returns from the expo,” Hsu said at Taipei City Council.
The expo, which officially opens on Nov. 6 and runs through April 30, is expected to attract participation from 62 cities from 33 counties. A total of 12 cities and counties around the nation will have their own exhibitions during the event.
According to the organizers, 8 million visitors, including as many as 800,000 from abroad, are expected to converge on the city for the flower extravaganza.
Taipei City Government paid a NT$3 million subsidy to 12 cities and counties to display local flowers and plants at the expo. However, participants still have to pay millions of dollars to mobilize local residents to visit the expo.
Expo organizing committee spokesperson Ma Chien-hui (馬千惠) said the expo was an international event and that local governments had been invited to display flowers and plants indigenous to their areas at the expo.
She said the subsidy would be used to maintain exhibitions during the event, adding that the organizing committee was not forcing any other local city governments to participate in the flora expo.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a