Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) was in Barcelona, Spain, on Friday to learn about how the city handles large-scale events as he made his latest stop on a 10-day fact-finding European voyage.
Hau met with Barcelona Mayor Xavier Trias and said he hoped the two cities could strengthen their cooperation since they share a similar vision — building a clean, efficient city with citywide Wi-Fi access.
Barcelona went through a transformation after hosting the 1992 Olympics, Trias told Hau. While many European cities are seeing their economies falter under the weight of the eurozone debt crisis, Barcelona has barely been affected by the financial turmoil, Trias said.
Trias added that the Mobile World Congress, which just finished, drew 67,000 visitors to Barcelona, which he said was an indication the city was attractive to investors.
Hau, who has said he wants Taipei to host high-profile events, said he was particularly impressed with the way Barcelona prepared for the 1992 Olympics, and specifically how it considered in advance how Olympic venues would be used after the Games.
The Taipei mayor said the experiences he gained in Barcelona would be particularly helpful for Taipei’s preparations for the 2017 Universiade.
Hau has already visited London and Girona, Spain, a city northeast of Barcelona near the French border. He will next travel to Hamburg, Germany.
Hau’s visit will conclude today and he is expected to return to Taiwan on Thursday.
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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