The New Coffee Room

Taiwan officials announced a huge win in the battle against invasive green iguanas in the country, removing thousands of the animals in just four months.

Taiwan's Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency (FNCA) reported that it had removed 36,543 green iguanas in 2025 up until April, triple the number in the same period in 2024, according to Taiwan News.

The FNCA utilized an app originally designed for reporting natural disasters threatening crops, which was updated with a function to report green iguana sightings. The organization also worked with four teams of indigenous hunters for more difficult-to-reach areas, as well as nine removal squads, totaling 1,635 people on the lookout for the lizards.

Link to video

taiwan_girl

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/coca-cola-unveils-game-changing-reverse-vending-machines-that-could-transform-how-we-think-about-trash/articleshow/121444710.cms

Coca-Cola India started a cool new project with "reverse vending machines" that collect empty plastic bottles. These machines are being used in East India, especially in Puri city. All you need to do is put in an empty Coca-Cola bottle and the machine crushes and stores it, according to the MediaBrief report.

There’s also a mobile app that gives you reward points every time you deposit a bottle. These points can be utilized to get rebates on items of Coca-Cola. Each RVM can hold up to 800 bottles before it gets emptied.

Not a bad idea and better than nothing, but I think, that at right now, it is cheaper to make new fresh plastic bottles rather than to recycle them and remake them.

taiwan_girl

The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a middle-school student’s claim he had a free-speech right to wear a T-shirt stating there are “only two genders.”

Over two dissents, the justices let stand a ruling that said a school may enforce a dress code to protect students from “hate speech” or bullying.

After three months of internal debate, the justices decided they would not take up another conservative culture-war challenge to progressive policies that protect LGBTQ+ youth.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed a 14-page dissent joined only by Justice Clarence Thomas. He said the case “presented an issue of great importance for our nation’s youth: whether public schools may suppress student speech because it expresses a viewpoint the schools disfavor.”

Liam Morrison, a seventh-grader from Massachusetts, said he was responding to his school’s promotion of Pride Month when students were encouraged to wear rainbow colors and posters urged them to “rise up to protect trans and gender-nonconforming students.”

Two years ago, he went to school wearing a black T-shirt that said “There are only two genders.”

A teacher reported him to the principal, who sent him home to change his shirt. A few weeks later, he returned with the word “censored” taped over the words “two genders” and was sent home again.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-05-27/supreme-court-denies-students-right-to-wear-an-only-two-genders-t-shirt

taiwan_girl

@taiwan_girl said in The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Their War Plans:

A former longtime chief of staff to indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter, Kasper was a leading figure in the firings of senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg. The trio were ousted last week in a leak investigation.

Follow up

The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.

The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/27/hegseth-pentagon-leak-investigation-wiretap

taiwan_girl

@jon-nyc said in And now, the corruption.:

My god. Guy gets convicted of using his employees payroll tax money for personal use. Gets 18mo sentence plus he has to pay restitution of 4.4MM.

His mother went to one of those ‘meet the president for $1M’ dinners and three weeks later he gets pardoned.

And another pardon - this time a couple:

In June 2022, they were accused of falsifying documents to defraud Atlanta banks out of more than $30 million through fraudulent loans. They also hid millions of dollars from the IRS that they earned from their show “Chrisley Knows Best,” a federal jury found. Back in February, their attorney told NBC that Trump was “seriously” considering pardoning the Chrisleys.

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/trump-pardons-todd-julie-tax-evasion-bank-fraud-1236411269/

taiwan_girl

@jon-nyc Dont have Twitter. Can you summarize what the Twitter was saying?

taiwan_girl

@Tom-K 555

We (at least I) never thought that!!!

taiwan_girl

I have a friend who has a catering business in Champaign/Urbana, and it is one of her favorite restaurants. She recommend to me, but it was too crowded the night I went by there.

taiwan_girl

@xenon said in Social Media vetting for student visas:

Stuff like this has such a chilling effect on tourism. I know a bunch of Canadians who just don't want to bother with the border any more

https://fortune.com/2025/05/23/us-could-lose-23-billion-gdp-230000-jobs-foreign-tourists-trump-tariffs/

Tariff bluster, canceled visas, and enhanced screening at border crossings and other checkpoints may be pushing foreigners to put a pin in their plans to visit the U.S. this year. The impacts could ripple through America’s economy.

A 10% drop in international tourism this year—based on the decline in foreign visitors to the U.S. by air in March—could cost America $23 billion in gross domestic product and the equivalent of roughly 230,000 jobs, according to estimates from Implan chief economist Jennifer Thorvaldson.