Former US president Bill Clinton, who was scheduled to visit the Taipei International Flora Expo, canceled the visit yesterday because of time constraints, expo organizers said.
Executive director of the expo, Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), said the committee had planned a visit to the Xinsheng Park venue and US Garden located in the Fine Arts Park area, but the former US president canceled at the last minute.
Security concerns were said to have been behind the cancellation, though organizers offered no details.
The expo yesterday attracted more than 72,000 visitors, the most in one day since the grand opening on Nov. 6.
The number of daily visitors to has been between 30,000 and 40,000, and advance tickets for the Pavilion of Dreams, the most popular expo venue, have been selling out within one hour of the ticket office opening at 9am.
Chen said visitors who want to visit popular pavilions should buy an advance ticket as soon as they arrive at the expo and tour the outdoor areas first.
The EcoARK, a building made of 1.5 million plastic bottles, has became another star attraction since opening to the public on Friday.
The pavilion, located in the expo’s Yuanshan Park area, was not finished for the grand opening, as additional preparations were necessary for exhibition-fashion shows and photo exhibits organized by fashion magazine Vogue.
The unique structure and -fashion-motif of the pavilion has attracted large crowds of visitors, who have had to stand in line for at least 30 minutes to get it.
“I drove by the Yuanshan venue many times and the building always attracted my attention. It’s amazing how they turned plastic bottles into a building. The pavilion is beautiful and I also love the environment protection message the building conveys,” said 32-year-old Alice Wang (王思瑜), who came yesterday morning to visit the pavilion.
The 130m high building, commissioned by the Far Eastern Group, was constructed from polli bricks made out of recycled bottles, according to pavilion director C. S. Yeh (葉清水). At night, the LED lights inside the outer wall make the building light up in the dark.
The expo is open daily from 9am to 10pm, and will run until April 25.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching