It’s all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them.
This simply isn’t working during Trump’s second term in office. The rules and laws (and the oft-referenced “rule of law”) are still in place. But they don’t mean much when there are no meaningful methods of enforcement.
Trump continues to staff the DOJ with prosecutors who have never been subjected to the legally required confirmation process. To be fair, it’s always been a struggle to staff Trump’s DOJ. Those who haven’t quit because they refuse to engage in vindictive prosecutions are being fired because they either won’t engage in vindictive prosecutions or they’re simply not doing it as hard and as fast as Trump would like.
Plenty of people who used to serve Trump personally as his attorneys have been elevated into top-level prosecution roles, despite their complete lack of relevant experience. None of these people have been appointed legally.
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Judges have been pushing back, which has led to Trump’s former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan being unceremoniously ousted from her role as a US attorney. Alina Habba spent most of a year generating massive conflicts of interest after being quasi-appointed to the position of US Attorney. She did this while still employed by Trump as his personal lawyer. Last December, she resigned from the position she never held legally and is now just another Trump lawyer who gets to hang around in the West Wing.
John Sarcone — Trump’s former campaign lawyer — was disqualified by a judge in January because he, too, had not been legally appointed to his position because Trump (and AG Pam Bondi) decided anyone who Trump wanted to be a US attorney could be one, even if that meant skipping the confirmation process entirely.
That didn’t bode well for Trump’s revenge fantasies. Sarcone being benched by the bench meant that all of his subpoenas targeting NY state attorney general Letitia James were no longer valid.
If the president decides he doesn’t want to subject his prosecutorial appointees to the confirmation process, that’s fine. But they only get to serve for so long (120 days) before they have to be replaced with a confirmed nominee. If that doesn’t happen, the court system gets to appoint a prosecutor to the now-open position.
The White House on Wednesday evening fired a new interim U.S. attorney in New York’s Northern District less than five hours after a panel of federal judges had appointed Donald T. Kinsella to the position.
The swift termination of Kinsella, a former longtime federal prosecutor, underscored the ongoing tensions in federal districts where the administration of President Donald J. Trump has clashed with judges who have declined to appoint his interim appointments of U.S. attorneys who have not been confirmed by the Senate.
That’s insane. It probably took more time to discuss the appointment than it did for Trump to fire Kinsella. Kinsella was the court-appointed placeholder — one that could only be replaced by a nominee confirmed by the Senate.
But that’s not happening here. Not only did the administration fire Kinsella, but it immediately declared John Sarcone was still the acting US Attorney, no matter what the court had declared. And rather than caution the administration against ritually abusing the process to keep former Trump lawyers in positions of government power, Trump’s high-level officials got up on the socials to make sure everyone knew this president is actually a king.
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On Wednesday evening, after the Times Union first reported Kinsella’s appointment as well as his subsequent firing by the White House, the U.S. deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, posted on X: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella.”
Hopefully, the court will just appoint someone else and force the administration to keep showing its autocratic ass until one of the White House bumblefucks says or does something that can’t be walked back. Attrition is the name of the game here. And I think there are more than enough qualified prosecutors available to outlast Trump’s revolving door of personal lawyers willing to accept government positions in lieu of a personal check from Trump.
Sarcone ran for Westchester County district attorney as a Republican in 2024 but lost to eventual winner Susan Cacace, a Democrat. He was later nominated by the Trump Administration to be U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, which covers the Capital region, North Country, Central New York and parts of the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. But neither the U.S. Senate nor federal judges confirmed him, so the Trump Administration made him a special attorney for the region, devoid of term limits and traditional oversight.
Questions were eventually raised about his residence, since he had lived and campaigned in Westchester just a year before being named U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. The Times Union reported that Sarcone’s listed address was a boarded-up building. Following that report, Sarcone ordered his staff to remove Times Union journalists from the office’s press distribution list.
That’s who Sarcone is. And that’s who he is going to be. If the courts are serious about standing up to abuses of executive power, it might be time to engage in a war of attrition.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That’s the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“This is really getting real,” says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA’s exploration systems development mission directorate. “It’s time to get serious and start getting excited.” But she cautioned that there’s still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go. “We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th,” she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be “extensive and detailed.” […]
When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.
The tech giant’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services, issued an unusually pointed public rebuttal Friday afternoon to a widely cited Financial Times report asserting that Amazon’s own AI coding tools have caused at least two AWS outages in recent months.
The story was picked up by numerous media outlets, and the widely followed tech news aggregator, as an example of the risks of deploying agentic AI tools, and the underlying question of who — or what — is responsible when something goes wrong.
In a blog post titled “Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI,” Amazon acknowledged a limited disruption to a single service in one region last December but attributed it to a user error in configuring access controls, not a flaw in the AI tool itself.
“The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role—the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action,” Amazon said, noting that it received no customer inquiries about the disruption.
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In addition, the company wrote, “The Financial Times’ claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.”
This is where it gets into semantics, the key phrase being “impacted AWS.” In fact, the FT reported that Amazon itself acknowledged a second incident but said it did not affect a “customer-facing AWS service.”
In other words, if an incident doesn’t impact a service used by customers, does it count as an outage? The FT called it one. Amazon clearly thinks not. And this is ultimately the crux of the dispute.
As for the undisputed outage impacting AWS, the FT’s report cited four people familiar with the matter in describing a 13-hour interruption to an AWS system in mid-December.
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The sources said engineers had allowed Amazon’s Kiro AI coding tool — an agentic assistant capable of taking autonomous actions — to make changes, and that the tool determined the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment.”
Multiple Amazon employees told the publication that it was the second time in recent months that AI tools had been involved in a service disruption. According to the FT report, a senior AWS employee said the outages were “small but entirely foreseeable,” adding that engineers had let the AI agent resolve issues without human intervention.
AWS is Amazon’s most profitable division. It generated $35.6 billion in revenue last quarter, up 24%, and $12.5 billion in operating income. The cloud unit is a significant focus of the company’s planned $200-billion capital spending spree this year, much of it directed toward AI infrastructure.
In addition to using agentic tools in its own operations, Amazon is selling them to AWS customers, making any narrative about AI-caused outages particularly unwelcome.
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Amazon’s core defense — that the December incident was “user error, not AI error” — was already included in the FT’s original story. The blog post largely restates that position in a more prominent and pointed way.
“We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption,” Amazon wrote in its response. “We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again—not because the event had a big impact (it didn’t), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience.”
Amazon said the disruption was limited to AWS Cost Explorer, a tool that lets customers track their cloud spending, in one of its 39 geographic regions. Reuters and The Verge reported that the affected region was in mainland China, citing an Amazon spokesperson. It did not affect core services such as compute, storage, or databases, the company said.
The company added that it has since implemented new safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access.
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Posting on X, New York Times reporter Mike Isaac called the Amazon response “the most prickly” he’d seen from Amazon in years, comparing it to the past era when former White House press secretary Jay Carney, who led public policy for the company, spoke out strongly in its defense.
Using data transmitted wirelessly from roughly one million PHEVs produced between 2021 and 2023, the researchers measured actual fuel consumption across diverse driving conditions and found an average of six liters per 100 kilometers – roughly three times the officially certified figures. Read Entire Article Source link
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author. All data sourced from the Labour Force in Singapore 2025 report, released by Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower last month.
We’re often told that the age of stable jobs where people would spend many years is long behind us and that the future will require flexibility and adaptability—including frequent changes of employment. Frankly speaking, I’ve been hearing this for the past 20 years myself.
And yet, the statistics released by the Ministry of Manpower show that this is hardly the case in Singapore. The city-state is often presented as one of the most modern, dynamic and advanced economies, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that local workers are leading the trends in job hopping.
As it turns out, the opposite is true.
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Over the past decade, the share of local, resident workers who have stayed with the same company for 10 years or more has gone up from a little over a quarter to a full one-third.
Source: Labour Force in Singapore 2025/ Singapore Ministry of Manpower
At the same time, the share of those who have either just entered the job market or changed their job in the past 12 months has shrunk from nearly 20% to just 12%, with the biggest drop recorded in the post-pandemic years.
Looking at the entire workforce, back in 2015, more than half of Singapore’s workers had stayed under five years in the same place. Today, the proportions have flipped, with the majority reporting 5 years or more with their employers.
Source: Labour Force in Singapore 2025/ Singapore Ministry of Manpower
Stability or stagnation?
The crucial question is whether these trends are a sign of unusual stability, whereby local workers enjoy secure jobs for many years, or if they simply lack better options and choose to stay put where they are.
While they aren’t mutually exclusive—after all, much depends on the company you work for—data suggests that the job market in Singapore is good for its workers. And getting better.
Since 2015, the median income from work has increased from S$3,949 to S$5,775 in 2025. That is 46.2% in nominal terms and 23.2% when accounting for inflation. This means local salaries can buy 1/4 more compared to a decade ago.
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Meanwhile, the average number of weekly working hours for full-time employees has dropped from 47 to 43.8. That’s a cumulative decrease of over 166 hours per year, equivalent to 20 eight-hour workdays.
Singaporeans work less and earn more than ever, despite the fact that a growing number choose to stay with the same employer—or, perhaps, because of that.
Let’s not forget that, like much of the world, Singapore continues to face a persistent talent shortage, with 83% of local businesses reporting a deficit of capable employees.
Image Credit: ManpowerGroup Singapore
Retaining good workers is a far better option than hiring new ones. Recruitment is expensive and unpredictable because it takes time to train a new hire, and there’s no guarantee they will turn out to be good team members.
Similarly, while job hoppers may hope to get a 10 to 20% raise each time they switch workplaces, the disruption it causes and the uncertainty about working conditions (expectations, flexibility, getting along with coworkers) add risks of their own.
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Mutual understanding, that the company needs the people it already has and can rely on, and that those people are willing to stay if they are appreciated, could explain why Singapore seems to defy the predictions about an ever more dynamic job market of the future.
As it turns out, stability is highly valuable even to modern companies—and modern workers.
Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.
President Trump is adding a new 10 percent tariff on nearly all imports to the United States, following a Supreme Court ruling that overturned most of the levies imposed by the US government last year.
In an executive order signed Friday evening, Trump outlined a few exceptions, including imports of critical minerals, beef and fruits, cars, pharmaceuticals, and products from Canada or Mexico. The new tariffs will take effect on February 24, 2026.
In a press conference Friday afternoon, Trump was fired up about the Supreme Court decision and resorted to personal attacks, calling the six justices who ruled against his trade policies “a disgrace to our nation.” Answering a reporter’s question about how two of the justices he nominated, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, voted for the overturn, Trump called them “an embarrassment to their families.”
The new trade policy is based on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to single-handedly and immediately charge tariffs of up to 15 percent if there are “large and serious” trade deficits. These tariffs only last 150 days unless Congress authorizes an extension. Like the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the statute has never before been used by a US president in this way.
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Once the 150-day deadline arrives, it’s possible for Trump to keep re-issuing Section 122 tariffs. But the administration could also use this time to prepare other forms of tariffs, essentially switching legal justifications to get the same regulatory effects, says Gregory Husisian, a partner and litigation attorney at Foley & Lardner LLP, which has helped over one hundred companies file requests for tariff refunds. “[Section 122 tariff] is for a limited time period, so it’s going to be a bridge authority,” Husisian says.
In the meantime, the Trump administration could rush through the process of conducting trade investigations based on concerns of national security or unfair trade practices abroad, which are a requirement for launching Section 301 and Section 232 tariffs. “We are also initiating several Section 301 and other investigations to protect our country from unfair trade practices of other countries and companies,” Trump said at the press conference, referring to these other tariff options that take longer to launch.
At the press conference, Trump didn’t specify what exactly would happen to companies seeking refunds on their tariff payments. The Supreme Court decision did not specify whether and how the tariffs should be refunded. Answering a reporter’s question on the topic, Trump said he expected the issue to be litigated in court.
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Experts tell WIRED that they expect the refund process to be messy and long, since it might require companies to file complaints and calculate the amount of money they believe they are entitled to receive. The government could also then push back on the calculated amount. The process could last anywhere from a few months to more than two years.
The Supreme Court decision specified that the IEEPA gives the president significant power during emergencies, but noted this power doesn’t extend to taxation. Trump, at the press conference, repeatedly distorted the ruling: “But now the court has given me the unquestioned right to ban all sorts of things from coming into our country, to destroy foreign countries … but not the right to charge a fee,” he said. “How crazy is that?”
At times, the press conference turned into a rant about issues unrelated to tariffs, like how the president thinks Europe is too woke or how much he hates the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Speaking about how the court interprets the literal meaning of the IEEPA, Trump suddenly started bragging about his reading comprehension skills. “I read the paragraphs. I read very well. Great comprehension,” he said.
True or false? Your green laser pointer is more powerful than your red one. The answer is almost certainly false. They are, most likely, the same power, but your eye is far more sensitive to green, so it seems stronger. [Brandon Li] was thinking about how to best represent colors on computer screens and fell down the rabbit hole of what colors look like when arranged in a spectrum. Spoiler alert: almost all the images you see of the spectrum are incorrect in some way. The problem isn’t in our understanding of the physics, but more in the understanding of how humans perceive color.
Perception may start with physics, but it also extends to the biology of your eye and the psychology of your brain. What follows is a lot of math that finally winds up with the CIE 1931 color space diagram and the CIE 2012 system.
Some people obsess about fonts, and some about colors. If you are in the latter camp, this is probably old hat for you. However, if you want a glimpse into just how complicated it is to accurately represent colors, this is a fascinating read. You can learn about the Bezold-Brücke shift, the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect, and the Abney effect. Maybe that’ll help you win a bar bet one day.
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The post winds up in the strangest place: spectroscopy. So if you want to see how color representation applies to analyzing blue sky, neon tubes, and a MacBook display, you’ll want to skip to the end.
Spending a Friday evening doing your taxes probably isn’t the most appealing way to kick off your weekend…but what if you added drinks, delicious takeout, and a couple of buddies who were also tending to all the annoying little tasks they’ve been avoiding?
That’s the idea behind “admin nights,” a new trend that is proliferating on TikTok. The conceit is simple: Friends get together, pull out their laptops, and start hacking away at their to-do lists. Think of a girls’ night out, but…in, and centered on tedious tasks instead of cocktails and clubbing.
“It’s the perfect blend of both,” Brie Ever, a Birmingham, Alabama-based content creator who hosts weekly “admin nights,” told Vox. “There are moments when I know I need to lock in, and I’ll just put in my headphones. But for the most part, everyone’s talking, working, and having a glass of wine all at the same time.”
While it might seem strange that people are opting for errands or chores over happy hour, task-themed meetups have become a popular form of hanging out. Other examples you’ll see online include “freezer meal parties,” where friends prepare ready-to-microwave dinners and “vision board nights,” where groups make collages of their life goals.
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These gatherings represent the experimental and less obvious ways people are prioritizing friendship while tackling the struggles of modern living. Everything has the potential to be a party now.
Hanging out has become more complicated
Spending time with friends can naturally become more difficult as you get older. Work, romantic relationships, kids, and other caregiving responsibilities can completely drain your social battery and cut into the time that was once reserved for your pals. But even younger adults who theoretically have less on their plates aren’t free of the exhaustion that accompanies modern living.
Anna Goldfarb, author of Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections, told Vox that a lot of friend groups have become decentralized, as people relocate and change jobs more frequently. “Our grandparents might’ve stayed in the same town for most of their lives,” Goldfarb said. “They might have stayed at the same job. They didn’t have to work so hard to keep these connections afloat.”
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Life has also become more expensive for a lot of people due to inflation and tariffs. Going to the movies, restaurants, or out for drinks regularly can feel like a luxury for many consumers, and just might not feel worth it. (YouGov’s 2025 Dining Out Report found that 37 percent of US diners say they’re dining out less frequently than they were a year ago, with 69 percent citing “a perceived rise in expensiveness.” And a 2025 CivicScience poll found that 27 percent of respondents are ditching the multiplex and staying home due to movie ticket prices.)
With all these hurdles in mind, it’s not surprising that social gatherings are beginning to look a lot different.
Gathering is all about intention now
In the past few years, social activities have started to look a lot more productive and intentional. Running clubs, for example, became a more visible trend during the first two years of the pandemic, and book club events have been increasing, according to data from Eventbrite. There’s also the phenomenon of “soft clubbing,” first reported last summer, which sees typical nightlife activities replaced with sober, wellness-focused gatherings. (Think: cold-plunge parties and saunas featuring DJ sessions.) Admin nights are a natural evolution of this optimization of social activities, or at least just a collective desire to avoid hangovers.
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Vision board nights and meal prep parties are a welcome hangout for organized, goal-oriented pals. In other instances, friends are getting together to clean each other’s homes, bake, and even provide life updates. Many of these gatherings lean into a psychological concept called “body doubling,” which is often used by people with ADHD. (Ever, the content creator, used the term when discussing the appeal of admin nights.) It simply means having other people present while you complete tasks to help you stay focused.
Irene S. Levine, a psychologist and author of the book Best Friends Forever: Surviving A Breakup With Your Best Friend, sees a lot of value in tackling errands with your pals, although it doesn’t have to be as structured as a planned party. “That could extend to going to the gym together or doing your food shopping together,” she told Vox. “When you’re stretched for time, doing things simultaneously with your friends kills two birds with one stone. You’re taking care of business, so there’s less guilt associated with it.”
But, Levine clarified, there’s nothing self-indulgent about spending quality time with your friends. “It’s actually so important to our health and emotional well-being,” she said.
There have been plenty of reports and casual handwringing over the idea that people are partying less nowadays, and that Gen Z isn’t having as much fun as their peers were at the same age. At first glance, these new modes of hanging out may not look like the stereotypical young person’s idea of a good time. There’s presumably no hard drugs, no sex, no stumbling home at 4 am involved in admin nights. But it makes sense that gatherings would look a bit different when the world looks dramatically different. As life becomes more difficult to manage and relationships get harder to maintain, the hottest club in town might be your friend’s couch, laptop open, finally setting up automated bill pay.
Even though digital cameras have lowered the barrier of entry to photography dramatically, as well as made it much easier for professionals and amateurs alike to capture stunning images without the burden of developing film, the technology behind them is considerably more complex than their analog counterparts. In fact, an analog film camera (not counting the lens) can be as simple as a lightproof box and a way to activate a shutter. Knowing that, any kind of film camera could be built for any number of applications, like this 3D-printed panoramic camera from [Denis Aminev].
The custom-built camera works by taking a standard roll of 35mm film, which is standardized to take 36 pictures, and exposing a wider section of the film to create a panorama. This reduces the number of pictures on the roll to 19. This is the fifth version of this camera, called the Infidex 176 V, and has everything a standard film camera would have, from an exposure counter, pressure plate for the film, a winder, interchangable lenses, a viewfinder, and a tripod mounting point. It does take a bit of work to assemble, as shown in the video linked below, but the final result is impressive and delivers a custom finished product not easily found or reproducible in off-the-shelf cameras.
The path to creating this camera was interesting as well, as [Denis]’s first custom film camera was a pinhole camera. From there he moved on to disassembling an SLR camera and attempting to reproduce all of its parts with 3D printed ones. With that in hand, he was able to modify this design into this panoramic camera which he likes because it reproduces the feel of widescreen movies. Although this camera reproduces all of the bells and whistles of a high quality analog camera, not all of these features are strictly necessary for taking pictures on film. Have a look at this minimum viable camera as well.
LG is returning to the UK microwave market after a 10-year break, unveiling a new eight-model lineup set to roll out through 2026.
The move marks a renewed push into small kitchen appliances, as the company looks to expand its smart home portfolio beyond its traditional stronghold in TVs and large white goods.
The refreshed range covers everything from entry-level 20L models to a premium 39L convection microwave, with prices starting at £84 and rising to £299 (MSRP).
At the top of the lineup is the MJ3965BPS, a 39L NeoChef Convection model priced at £299 and arriving in June 2026.
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It combines microwave, grill, convection and steam cooking in one unit, powered by LG’s Smart Inverter technology for more consistent heating. Features like the Infrared Convection System, Charcoal & Quartz Heater, and Healthy Fry mode position it as an all-in-one solution for more ambitious home cooks.
Below that sits the MH6565CPS, a £179 25L model that LG describes as its flagship standard microwave. It delivers 1,000W Smart Inverter power and a 900W grill, wrapped in a minimalist One Body Design with both touch controls and a physical dial.
Mid-range options include the MH6535GIS (£159) and MH6336GIB (£149), both offering 1,000W inverter cooking and 6-point turntables designed for better weight distribution and more even heating. LG says the continuous power delivery of Smart Inverter helps eliminate cold spots and overcooked edges compared to traditional pulsed microwaves.
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At the more affordable end, the lineup includes several 20L, 700W models such as the MS2042D (£89) and MS2082F (£84). These focus on everyday heating and defrosting, with panel touch or dial controls, auto-cook presets and LG’s Anti-Bacterial EasyClean coating.
Across the range, LG is emphasising usability and durability, with LED interiors, child lock features, and a two-year warranty included as standard. Some models are already available via LG’s UK store and selected retailers, with wider availability expected from June 2026.
While these models focus on practical cooking performance today, LG also hinted at a longer-term smart vision. This includes potential AI-powered dish recognition and ThinQ app integration down the line.
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For now, though, this is a straightforward re-entry into a competitive category, and a clear signal that LG wants a bigger slice of the modern UK kitchen.
