The Consumers’ Foundation has decided to deliver a formal petition next week to ask the government to screen commodity prices to see if recent increases are justified, the foundation’s head said yesterday.
Foundation chairwoman Joann Su (蘇錦霞) said that at the outset of the global financial crisis in 2008, commodity and retail prices in the country rose as the prices of international raw materials surged to historical highs.
However, when raw material prices on world markets fell because of the weakening global economy, retail prices in Taiwan did not follow suit.
Now, as international prices have not returned to their 2008 highs, wholesale and resale prices in Taiwan have already started to creep higher, Su said, urging the Fair Trade Commission to see if basic commodity vendors were engaging in monopolistic practices.
Should the government fail to investigate the issue or not publicize the results of its probe by the end of this month, the foundation said it would file a complaint with the Control Yuan, the branch of government that monitors public sector practices.
According to the foundation, a recent survey of bakery chains showed that bread prices have been moving higher.
The price of taro bread has increased from NT$28 to NT$30 per roll, while the price for a package of five small bread rolls has risen by NT$5 to NT$65.
Meanwhile, the Taiwan Flour Mills Association said this year’s first shipments of wheat, which arrived in Taiwan on Thursday, were priced in a range between US$348 to US$494 per tonne, much higher than July’s US$247 per tonne, but still off the high of US$700 per tonne recorded during the financial storm in 2008.
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