Taiwan’s domestic gasoline and diesel prices are this week to fall by NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively, after trade friction between China and the US hurt the global oil market, Taiwan’s two major suppliers said yesterday.
Under its floating pricing mechanism, the average crude oil price per barrel slid US$0.84 this past week to US$71.97, data provided by state-owned oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) showed.
CPC vice president Huang Jen-hung (黃仁弘) said the price drop was due to Russia’s growing oil output and the trade dispute between Beijing and Washington.
However, compared with the China-US trade dispute, CPC is more concerned with the unstable political situation in the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway to the Persian Gulf through which about 30 percent of the world’s oil supply passes, Huang said.
If tensions in the region result in the waterway being closed, oil prices could soar, he said.
Iran has threatened to take military action to shut down the strait in response to Washington’s economic sanctions, which could possibly be expanded to Iranian oil exports in November, foreign media reports have said.
Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) yesterday announced similar price cuts that are also to take effect today.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last