The Executive Yuan is planning to incorporate the Consumer Protection Commission (CPC) into an Executive Yuan secretariat, Vice Premier Paul Chiu (邱正雄), who concurrently serves as CPC minister, said on Monday.
Chiu said Control Yuan members who visited the CPC for an inspection were satisfied with the performance and function of the CPC, which receives an annual budget of just NT$100 million (US$3.3 million), a fragment of the annual budget.
Chiu said he proposed subsuming the CPC to the level of a section under the Executive Yuan, but the Control Yuan members expressed a preference for the commission to remain independent of the Cabinet.
If the organization were to be simplified, Chiu said, the CPC would be directly under the Cabinet and able to work more efficiently. He added that he would consult further on the issue with the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, which performs policy planning, evaluation, coordination and integration functions.
Control Yuan members also expressed satisfaction with the way the CPC dealt with a recent incident involving Dell Inc, as well as a recent tainted cooking oil scandal.
The CPC pressured Dell’s Taiwan operation to come up with a satisfactory solution in response to a glitch that occurred when online shoppers took advantage of an error that saw the company offering laptops at a 75 percent discount. Dell canceled the offer as soon as the error was detected and provided coupons for those who had already placed orders, the value of which the company increased a few days later after an outcry by disappointed shoppers and intervention by the CPC.
In the other incident, cooking oil containing high amounts of arsenic was found at two McDonald’s outlets and one Domino’s Pizza store, all in Taipei County. The CPC warned fast food chains that they would face fines if subsequent tests showed no improvement. The case is currently in the courts.
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