The deadly bombings in Boston earlier this week have not significantly affected travel from Taiwan to the US, tourism industry representatives said yesterday.
Some Taiwanese tour groups that had booked trips to Boston have changed their itineraries and plan to travel to other cities in the US, the Taipei Association of Travel Agents said.
An increasing number of people have been calling travel agencies to obtain information about travel to the US, but no significant drop in the number of visitors to the US is expected, association official Liu Yi-liang (劉奕樑), said.
Travel agencies will continue to arrange alternative itineraries, he said, adding that only a few people have canceled their US travel plans.
Two bombs exploded on Monday near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, leaving three people dead and about 180 injured.
US authorities are still investigating the incident.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday issued a “gray” travel alert for Boston, advising Taiwanese to be cautious if they plan to travel to the northeastern city.
Gray is the lowest-level warning in the ministry’s travel advisory system, which has four levels — gray, yellow, orange and red — depending on perceived risk severity.
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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