The government would factor in the public’s opinions when considering increases in the price of oil and the floating oil price mechanism that has been used to set the price on the first day of each month, a senior official with the Cabinet said yesterday.
“How people feel about rising oil prices is definitely a concern the agency in charge of [deciding the price] will take into account, as ‘listening to the voice of the public before finalizing policies’ is one of the administration’s guidelines,” said the official, who wished to remain anonymous.
The official was referring to an announcement made by Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) in which, while giving general comments on a two-day Cabinet workshop that ended on Friday, Liu said the government would take public opinion into consideration.
The official made the remarks in response to a report in yesterday’s United Daily Evening News that said Executive Yuan Secretary-General Hsueh Hsiang-chuan (薛香川) recently met a political commentator and frequent talk show guest Yang Hsien-hung (楊憲宏) to discuss the oil price issue.
The report said Hsueh agreed with Yang that oil prices should not only be set to reflect the cost of purchase, because the issue was also political.
Saying that Hsueh’s meeting with the talk show guest was not only about oil prices but also other topics, the official added that Cabinet officials often met media personnel and people from all walks of life.
The floating oil price mechanism, reinstated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration in late May after being frozen for six months by the former ruling Democratic Progressive Party, links domestic fuel prices to benchmark prices of West Texas Intermediate crude in New York.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching