The Taipei Children’s Recreational Center in the Yuanshan (圓山) area celebrated its 75th anniversary yesterday and invited children under the age of 12 to visit the center for free through April 5 before it closes for more than one year starting next month.
The center, which was built on the site of the former Yuanshan Zoo and Children’s Amusement Park, is an important childhood memory for many Taipei residents and has remained a popular attraction for families.
After celebrating its 75th anniversary, the center will close its doors to visitors until September next year to allow for the construction of exhibition areas for the 2010 Taipei International Gardening & Horticulture Exposition.
The Taipei City Government will set up three exhibition areas for the expo and build a new amusement park in the Mei-lun Park area of Shilin District (士林).
Center director Chien Chian-chuan (簡健全) said the news about the center’s closure had attracted more visitors. About 15,000 people visited the center on weekends on average and the number of visitors could reach a new high this week, he said.
Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Chien Yu-yen (簡余晏) challenged the city government’s decision to close the center for the expo, saying it had sacrificed the children’s “happy land” to promote the expo.
She said the city government had focused its efforts on building the three exhibition areas and ignored the maintenance work needed for the center’s facilities, including the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel. The center might be abandoned after the expo, she said.
Chien Chian-chuan said some staff would stay in the center to maintain the facilities.
‘HONEYMOON’ IS OVER: A political science professor said that the Tsai administration’s popularity peaked after it successfully contained COVID-19, but is waning President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) and Premier Su Tseng-chang’s (蘇貞昌) approval ratings fell significantly this month in the wake of the government’s handling of the distribution of relief funds and stimulus coupons to people and businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, a poll released yesterday by the New Power Party (NPP) showed. The poll showed that 68 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with Tsai’s performance, down 8.9 percentage points from last month, while 21 percent said they disapproved of her performance. Her approval among respondents aged 20 to 29 fell 14.7 percentage points, the largest decrease when compared with other age
Food delivery provider Foodpanda had 564 consumer disputes from January to last month and failed to attend many mediation sessions with local governments nationwide, the Executive Yuan’s Consumer Protection Committee said. In a news release earlier this month, the committee said that it investigated consumer complaints and mediations for Foodpanda and rival Uber Eats during the period, when the number of delivery orders jumped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Uber Eats had 80 consumer disputes, the committee said. Of Foodpanda’s consumer disputes, 368 resulted from delivery drivers canceling orders after customers could not be reached, 108 were related to the quality or quantity
Peggy Chen (陳佩琪), wife of Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), yesterday said that the Central Epidemic Command Center’s (CECC) claim that Taiwan had warned the WHO about possible human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 was “far-fetched.” The US on April 9 said that the WHO had put politics first and ignored Taiwan’s early warning in December last year, which the WHO denied the following day. The WHO said that it received an e-mail from Taiwanese authorities on Dec. 31 last year, but that “there was no mention in the message of human-to-human transmission.” Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC,
The Taipei City Government yesterday promised to improve its Taipei Card 3.0 application process after a city councilor said that it required applicants to provide irrelevant personal information. Taipei City Councilor Miao Po-ya (苗博雅) said that to activate the card — which can function as an EasyCard, Senior EasyCard, student card and library card, as well as provide discounts for restaurants, arts and entertainment in the city — people must provide personal information such as their passport number, occupation, education level, their spouse’s name, personal income, credit rating and health information. The city government said the system would help it digitalize and
RSS