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news Expo 2020: the countdown gets going again 11 October 2020

There is now less than a year to go until Expo 2020 Dubai. Once again the countdown has started for the “universal exposition” that, following the postponement due to Covid-19, is now scheduled to open its doors to the public October 1, 2021.

The organizers have decided to keep the same branding – Expo 2020 – to commemorate the dramatic experience that the world is going through, working together, from 2021 onwards, on “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future”, as the slogan for the first expo to be held in an Arab country puts it.

As Reem Al Hashimy, Minister of State for International Cooperation and Director General of the Expo 2020 Bureau, underlined: “The aim of our universal Expo is to inspire hope.” She also commented that over coming weeks more details on the event will be made public.

 

In the meantime, new images have been released showing the progress of works: the construction of the national pavilions should be completed by the end of the year, whereas over recent months efforts have been focused on the landscaping and on the permanent buildings owned by the Expo organization.

The first official pre-expo event has just been held. The space-themed event marked the half-way point in the journey of the Emirati probe named “Hope”, which is heading for Mars, having taken off from its Japanese launch site on July 19. Alongside a round-table discussion involving astronauts and space experts, the event also saw the unveiling of the world’s largest 360˚ projection screen at Al Wasl Plaza – which will be the heart of the Expo site – with the preview screening of a “space spectacular” that will be broadcast in its entirety over the first of the ten themed weeks scheduled for the course of the Expo.

And while the UAE has this week become the first nation in the world in which the number of Covid-19 swab tests, at more than 10 million, has exceeded the total number of people in the country, the hope is that Expo 2020 may constitute a new beginning after the pandemic and that the upturn in the non-oil sectors recorded in September, thanks to the loosening of restrictions, may be consolidated over the coming six months.

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