A former employee of a 50 Lan (50嵐) tea shop in Taichung is to receive a total of NT$340,000 in compensation after receiving first to third-degree burns after she dropped a kettle of boiling water due to being frightened by a cockroach.
According to a ruling yesterday, the employee, surnamed Lin (林), began working at the store in April 2013, about two months prior to the incident.
On June 1, Lin was taking a kettle of boiling water from the kitchen to the working area when she was spooked by a cockroach, adding that Lin let dropped the kettle and the boiling water spilled onto her lower limbs.
Lin was hospitalized at Taichung Veterans’ General Hospital for 30 days before returning home, the ruling said, adding that Lin sustained first and second-degree burns to her lower legs and third-degree burns to her feet.
While the store initially paid NT$46,000 in damages, Lin sued the store for compensation due to vocational hazards as well as violations of her rights, according to the notice.
The store, previously given a clean bill of health by sanitation inspectors and sterilized in May, was unable to prevent the presence of cockroaches, the ruling read, adding that despite written warnings, the store had not provided adequate safety measures nor actively taught or required its employees to follow safety instructions.
Compensation for the vocational hazards was set at NT$180,000, while violation of Lin’s rights amounted to NT$160,000, the ruling said, adding that the owner still owed Lin NT$290,000 after the initial payment of NT$46,000.
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