New Taipei City’s (新北市) Christmas celebrations will include a two-day star-studded concert and a procession featuring circus performers and Hawaiian dancers this year.
The event is scheduled for Dec. 22 and Dec. 23, the city government announced.
The lineup for the two-day concert will include popular girl group S.H.E. and singers Rainie Yang (楊丞琳), Cyndi Wang (王心凌) and Wilber Pan (潘瑋柏), as well as Aaron Yan (炎亞綸) from the boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海).
The city government also confirmed that singer-songwriters Crowd Lu (盧廣仲) and Lala Hsu (徐佳瑩), who rose to fame after winning the popular TV singing competition One Million Star (超級星光大道) in 2008, will also be performing.
A procession is planned for Dec. 23, setting off from Zhongshan Road to Citizen Square, where the nation’s tallest Christmas tree can be found.
A total of 30 groups are expected to participate in the procession, each with their own distinct entertainment skills, including a group of young people performing fire-eating, sword swallowing and other circus stunts.
The Hawaiian dance group Mele Hula, a group of samba dancers aged 70 years upwards, will participate, along with kindergarten children playing music.
The concerts and procession are part of a one-month Christmas celebration held by the city, which began with an LED light show on the Citizen Square Christmas tree and has, so far, also included orchestral performances and children’s shows.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the