Taiwanese baseball star Chen Chin-feng (陳金鋒) has been invited to sing the national anthem at next month’s Double Ten National Day celebrations, as the event would focus on the theme of “local heroes” and cut back on the extravagant style of previous celebrations, government officials said.
Chen has accepted the invitation, said Deputy Minister of the Interior Hua Ching-chun (花敬群), who heads the event’s organizing committee.
“The Double Ten event marks our National Day, so it is an honor to be invited, and I am happy to accept it,” Chen said.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
This year’s organizing efforts are aimed at putting on a markedly different celebration from previous ones by cutting back on the ostentatious display of pomp and pageantry, and doing away with the nighttime fireworks show, which has been seen as wasting taxpayers’ money, Hua said.
This is to be the first National Day celebrations that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) would preside over in her capacity as the head of state.
This year’s themes are “We stand together with the public” and “It is good to be with you,” which would honor outstanding performers in their respective endeavors, as well as individuals who made a difference in other people’s lives through their work, Hua said.
The ceremony is to include firefighters and civilian groups tasked with rescue and emergency response operations take part in a parade as “local heroes,” joining marching bands from various schools and military units.
Another focus is to be on the nation’s athletes, as the ceremony is to have the Taiwanese team who competed at the Rio Olympic Games last month, along with Chen, lead a procession of athletes.
Hua said that they invited Chen because he has announced his plan to retire after this season, and sports fans and officials would like to pay tribute to Chen, who came up with game-deciding hits for Team Taiwan and made history as the first Taiwanese player in US Major League Baseball when he debuted for the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sept. 14, 2002.
“People are proud of Chen’s accomplishment and he is recognized as the ‘pride of Taiwan,’ so this is a fitting way to honor him before he retires,” Hua said.
One other main theme for this year’s celebrations is “green” energy, which is to have people, including borough and village wardens from across the nation, parade on electrical motorcycles provided by a Taiwanese company.
Hua said this is the government’s way of showing the public and the international community its resolve to “go green” and “go electrical” by using Taiwan’s “most popular mode of transportation.”
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,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan