People in Taiwan are bracing for higher fuel costs in the first week of this year after the nation’s two oil refiners announced yesterday they would raise domestic fuel prices to reflect a rise in international costs.
State-run CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) and privately owned Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said they would increase wholesale gasoline and diesel prices by NT$0.8 per liter, effective today.
“This week, global oil prices continued to climb higher as a result of declining US inventories of oil products, increasing fuel demand amid cold weather and rising tension in the Middle East,” Formosa said in a statement.
The two companies said they would also stop offering preferential rates for gasoline products for residents of areas affected by Typhoon Morakot.
CPC yesterday also announced price hikes in this month’s wholesale prices of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), effective today.
LPG products such as household LPG, propane and butane, as well as propane/butane mixes, will all go up by NT$2.5 per kilogram, while automotive LPG will increase by NT$1.4 per liter, CPC said in its statement.
CPC said household LPG should have increased by NT$6.2 per kilogram based on the company’s own calculation, but the company wanted to ease people’s financial burden.
Therefore, “the price of a 20kg household gas cylinder is expected to increase by NT$50,” CPC said in the statement.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained