Indie rock fans and music lovers are getting ready to party non-stop for four days at the country’s biggest and longest running annual rock festival, Spring Scream, which will begin in southern Taiwan in less than two months.
Starting on April 1, Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁) will come alive with the sounds of original music as more than 200 bands and artists from all over the world take to the stage at seven different locations.
The annual event has grown from a gathering of 30 bands to a rock music mecca that attracts tens of thousands of fans in Taiwan and from nearby countries each year.
The shows in the past have featured homegrown artists such as Tizzy Bac, Chairman, China Blue and Taiwan Soul, as well as foreign performers, including Canada’s Girl, Mimie Chan from Japan, and the Machine and Romona Cordova from France.
Besides partying at the four-day music festival, Spring Scream audiences will also have the opportunity to enjoy a feast of films at the Urban Nomad Film Fest that will be held at the location.
Urban Nomad was founded in 2002 by two expatriate journalists in Taiwan, David Frazier and Sean Scanlan, to create a -community-oriented film environment by screening experimental works and video art, in genres ranging from surf video to award-winning documentaries. It is the only fully independent film festival in the country, as it has no government funding.
More information about Spring Scream is available on the festival’s official Web site at www.springscream.com.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods