Eighty-four Indonesians freed from scam centers in Myanmar were set to return home Friday as the repatriation of thousands of such workers after a crackdown strains regional resources.The Indonesians were among more than 7,000 people being held in the Myanmar border town Myawaddy following a crackdown on the scam centers by Thailand, Myanmar and China. Two buses carrying the Indonesians arrived Thursday in the Thai border city of Mae Sot, where the passengers had health checks and their identities were verified.Hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have been lured to work in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos to commit global scams through false romances, bogus investment pitches and illegal gambling schemes. Many of the workers were recruited under false pretenses, only to find themselves trapped in virtual slavery.The Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry said the 84 Indonesians, which included 69 men and 15 women, were healthy and will fly to Jakarta on three commercial flights Friday. The ministry had said last week as many as 270 Indonesians were stranded in Myanmar after leaving the scam centers, but it was not clear why only 84 were being repatriated.Judha Nugraha, director of Indonesian citizen protection at the ministry, has said that approximately 6,800 Indonesians have fallen victim to illegal job scams, ending up in online gambling operations or bogus investment schemes in Myanmar and several other countries over the past few years.The crackdown on the scam centers in Myanmar followed a meeting in Beijing in early February between Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Chinese leader Xi Jinping where she said Thailand would crack down on the scam networks.Thailand has cut off electricity, internet and gas supplies to several areas in Myanmar hosting scam centers along the border.More than 600 Chinese nationals were repatriated last week. Earlier, some 260 people from 20 countries, including Ethiopia, Brazil and the Philippines, crossed from Myanmar into Thai custody. Many have returned home but more than 100 remain in Thailand awaiting repatriation, Thai officials said.The size and scale of the repatriation effort is straining Thai government resources and leading to delays for those waiting to go home. Officials from Thailand, Myanmar and China were expected to meet Friday to address the logistics of the crackdown as concerns grow about a possible humanitarian crisis along the border.Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.Jintamas Saksornchai, Associated Press

At a press conference in the Oval Office earlier this month, Elon Muska billionaire who is not, at least formally, the President of the United Stateswas asked how the Department of Government Efficiency manages potential conflicts of interest to ensure accountability and transparency. In response, Musk suggested that simply opening a browser tab would assuage the reporters concerns. We post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website, he said. So all of our actions are maximally transparent.One problem with this assertion: At the time, the DOGE.gov domain was more or less empty, an oversight that someone in Musks orbit had to hastily rectify. Now, nested beneath tabs on a white-on-black homepage is a wall of receipts tallying DOGEs alleged cost savings as it attempts to hollow out the federal government. (These receipts reportedly included 10 figures worth of math errors shortly after the wall debuted.) Other tabs provide information about the salaries of the approximately 2.3 million federal employees Musk is trying to fire (data borrowed from the Office of Personnel Management) and agency-by-agency information about federal spending (figures taken from publicly available Treasury Department reports). There is no better distillation of Musks brand of efficiency than tasking underlings with building sloppy, dark-mode versions of free government resources that already exist.The Regulations tab, however, reveals the true nature of Musks project, which is not to deliver tax relief to working people, but to free wealthy corporations from pesky regulatory oversight. The page abandons dollars-and-cents metrics for something different: an Unconstitutionality Index that divides the number of regulations enacted by federal agencies by the number of statutes passed by Congress each year. Users can scroll down to see how many regulations these agenciesunelected bureaucrats, as DOGE calls themhave published, and even how many hundreds of thousands of words those regulations run.The clear implication is that the Code of Federal Regulations has become far too complicatedperhaps too complicated to be constitutionaland that only the fully optimized business brains at DOGE have the vision, courage, and managerial savvy necessary to wrangle this unruly mess.DOGEs war on the very concept of regulation demonstrates just how little innovation Musk and his henchteenagers are bringing to the putative task of streamlining the federal governments workflow. Corporate interests, eager to shed even modest limitations on their ability to pay out executive bonuses and shareholder dividends, have spent decades arguing that regulations are unauthorized exercises of legislative power. At DOGE, Musk is simply repackaging these bog-standard, free-enterprise talking points with the trappings of Silicon Valley technobabble. In his position as this countrys de facto copresident, the more regulations he manages to scuttle, the more he and his cronies companies stand to profit.To be clear, the regulations that Musk is demonizing here are simply the rules by which the executive branch, at Congresss direction, implements and enforces the laws that Congress passes. For example, when lawmakers passed the Consumer Product Safety Act, a 1972 law that aims to protect consumers against unreasonable risk of injury from hazardous products, they tasked a federal agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, with spelling out the nitty-gritty rules for making different kinds of products safe. The logic here is pretty intuitive: Setting standards for, say, the maximum amount of force necessary to open a refrigerator door from the inside is technical, complex work best left to mechanical engineers and child safety researchers, not, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene.In a sprawling country that is home to 340 million people, this system of delegation from professional politicians to subject-matter experts is what keeps air breathable, water potable, and kitchen appliances from becoming death traps for small children playing hide-and-seek. But it necessarily imposes costs on industry: Compliance with rules entails spending at least some money and forgoing at least some potential profit. As a result, the notion that regulation is evil and foolish has become an article of faith among pro-business groups and the Republican politicians they support, who argue that the proliferation of unnecessary, duplicative, burdensome rules stifles innovation and stunts economic growth.Opponents often cite the increase in volume of rules over time as proof of their inherent illegitimacy, a sentiment the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once summarized using a memorably unsettling metaphor. I dont want to abolish government, he said. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.The Unconstitutionality Index on DOGEs website is a fixture of the anti-regulation movement, created by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that recently celebrated 40 years of eliminating excessive regulation and unleashing human potential. (Several CEI staffers are listed as contributors to Project 2025, the policy blueprint drafted by conservative groups in anticipation of President Donald Trumps reelection.) Organizations like CEI exist to raise the alarm about the dangers of bureaucracy; in congressional testimony last year, a CEI fellow told lawmakers that despite its best efforts, unchecked regulation is still impeding economic efficiency and undermining progress.The Trump-Musk administration wasted little time delivering relief on this front: In an executive order last week, the White House announced plans to facilitate the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state. The order instructs agency heads, in coordination with DOGE, to identify regulations to put on the chopping block, including those that significantly and unjustifiably imped[e] technological innovation or impose undue burdens on small business and impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship. Suddenly, people who have spent decades framing regulations as an existential threat to their beloved free market have a White House willing to listen and eager to act.Regulation has traditionally lagged behind the pace of the tech industry in particular, which is part of the reason Big Tech has remained so profitable despite doing all kinds of harm that rarely results in meaningful consequences. Maintaining this status quo is worth billions to the leaders of these companies, especially as they search out new sectors of the economy to upend in move-fast-break-things fashion. By gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk has deftly greased the skids for X Money, a peer-to-peer payments service that Musk plans to roll out on his social media platform this year. As DOGE fires hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX engineers are quietly taking their places, and Musk is pushing for the agency to cancel a multibillion-dollar contract with Verizon and award it to his company instead. As sales stagnate, Tesla has taken to hyping its long-awaited driverless taxi business as the future of the company, a bet that becomes a little less risky with every regulatory hurdle that Musk manages to knock over between now and launch.By enlisting Musk to go full Founder Mode on a dated federal bureaucracy, DOGE was pitched as the means of fulfilling every politicians favorite promise: to run government more like a business. Were going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook, Musk told rallygoers in October to rapturous applause. But there is nothing new about the DOGE playbook, other than the involvement of a celebrity tech executive who is amused by memecoin backronyms. It is a decades-long ideological project to empower people like Musk to make themselves even wealthier at the expense of everyone else.

Here's what we looked at this week:Fellow Products channels Dieter Rams' design approach. 1X shows off NEO Gamma, their domestic servant robot. This is surely the beginning of the end. Phaidon's forthcoming "Mid-Century Modern Designers" book covers 300 designers and goes way beyond furniture.The Cuboid: A compact, designey power strip by new Swedish design brand Kord.Helix: One AI brain controlling multiple robots.Believe it or not, with Eskimo Design's Modernist towel heater, form follows function.A brilliant design for a trailer that unloads the material for you.This IQ Vise can hold anything in any position.Sigma's minimalist, ultra lightweight BF camera is unibody, being milled out of a single block of aluminum.Tech furniture: A stool that provides haptic feedback for musicians. Useful, or gimmick?An unusual barbecue object from Japan: This mesh frying pan lets you cook rice and noodles over an open flame.ColorPipes: Lightweight inflatable lighting, now with programmable colors.A brief history of the briefcase, and a comeback version by Toyo Steel.Industrial Design student work: Turning discarded carpet into comfortable furniture.Choppy, by Latvian design brand Stum, is a bent plywood children's bicycle.Why van racking company Sortimo made an automatic door.Studio Ololoo's surprising Bubble Stool.Humanscale's Float Micro is a minimalist, height-adjustable offset-leg cantilevered side table.Industrial design firm Spitfire explains: "How to Develop a Product."

One of the (many) things that I hoard are pens. Friends joke that I have a mini office supplies shop in my house when they see my pen collection. I rarely just use a black pen for my note-taking, journaling, and other writing things. Sometimes though, it can be a hassle to bring more than one pen when I go outside. I like those multi-colored clicky pens but theyre not always the most reliable as they run out of ink fast and the quality isnt always the best. Designer: MakeDuoThe A/B Pen, soon to launch in a couple of months, is one kind of pen that can appeal to people like me who like multiple pens. It is a rectangular shaped item that actually has two pens nesting together with magnets. You can easily remove each of the two pens when you want to use one of them and then re-attach them when youre done. It can also serve as a fidget tool as you get a satisfying snap when attaching and releasing them. Hopefully it wont easily break if you keep doing that though.The idea for having two pens handy is that you can mix and match different colors and styles. There are more than 15 different colors and pen styles that you can use as refills or just to change whenever you feel like it. You have options for different line weights, styles of pens, and of course, my favorite, different colors. This saves space in your bag for when you need different kinds of pens so you can just carry the A/B Pen and some of the refills when needed. When youre not using it, you can place the pen in its magnetic cradle which also comes with a bent steel clamp so you can attach it to your favorite planner or notebook. The housings are made from a robust T6 6106 aluminum profile that are then sandblasted and go through a hard anodizing process. This way they get both color and surface protection. Theyre also small enough that you can just put it into your pocket in case youre not carrying a bag. So, for those of us who yearn for the vibrant flexibility of a multi-pen setup without the inherent drawbacks of traditional clicky models, the A/B Pen presents a compelling solution. Its more than just a writing instrument; its a customizable, tactile experience. By seamlessly blending form and function, MakeDuo has crafted a pen that caters to the modern creative, the meticulous note-taker, and anyone who simply appreciates the joy of a well-designed tool. The post Magnetic 2-in-1 pen has different colors and styles as refills first appeared on Yanko Design.

The convenience of our modern lives comes at the price of our mental and spiritual health. Too often do we find ourselves going from one point to another in an almost endless cycle of work, eating, and a few hours of sleep. Its no wonder that, in recent years, there has been a greater desire to escape the hustle and bustle of city life, seeking refuge in the stillness and gentle flow of nature. At the same time, however, not everyone can easily give up basic comforts and utilities, but one doesnt have to completely give up those amenities for a few days retreat.Nestled among the leafy alpine landscape of Sawmill Settlement at the base of Mt Buller, Victoria, the Sawmill Treehouse stands as a testament to thoughtful design that harmonizes with nature rather than imposing upon it. This architectural gem offers more than just accommodation it provides a genuine retreat where visitors can disconnect from digital distractions and reconnect with the natural world.Designer: Robbie J WalkerThe journey to this elevated sanctuary begins with rusted steel steps that carry you upward, creating immediate separation from everyday concerns. As you ascend, the sensation of entering a different realm becomes palpable. The treehouse, elevated on slender posts, gives occupants the magical feeling of dwelling among the branches, where the boundaries between indoor comfort and outdoor splendor blur beautifully.What makes this structure particularly remarkable is its Japandi-style designa fusion of Japanese minimalism and Scandinavian functionality. This aesthetic approach emphasizes simplicity, natural materials, and a deep respect for surroundings. The exterior features weathered COR-TEN steel that not only provides essential fire protection in this alpine setting but also develops a rich patina that complements the surrounding eucalyptus trees.The designers commitment to environmental harmony is evident in every aspect of the treehouse. The steel posts align perfectly with existing gum tree trunks, and the entire structure was positioned to ensure no trees were sacrificed during construction. This thoughtful placement allows nature to flow freely beneath the dwelling, maintaining the forests ecological continuity while providing guests with an elevated perspective.Inside, Tasmanian oak timber lines the walls, creating a warm contrast to the rusted steel exterior. The open-plan living area features full-span glazing that frames the forest views like a living artwork. This transparency invites natural light to dance across the interior spaces throughout the day, creating ever-changing patterns as sunlight filters through the surrounding foliage.The kitchen space merges practicality with aesthetic restraint, featuring bespoke cabinetry that maximizes functionality without visual clutter. High-quality appliances ensure guests can prepare meals with ease while enjoying the tranquil forest views. The bedroom functions as a cozy retreat within a retreat, with a comfortable Queen Koala bed positioned to maximize both comfort and connection to the surrounding landscape.Perhaps the most profound aspect of the Sawmill Treehouse experience is its ability to foster sensory reconnection. Here, the sounds of birdsong replace digital notifications. The gentle rustle of leaves in the breeze becomes a natural soundtrack. Clean, earthy scents of eucalyptus and moss offer aromatherapy thats more authentic than any manufactured fragrance.This treehouse represents a growing movement in architecture that prioritizes experiential quality over excessive space or amenities. It demonstrates how thoughtful design can create profound experiences within modest dimensions. At approximately 12 meters long and 4 meters wide, the structure proves that meaningful architecture isnt measured in square footage but in how effectively it connects occupants with the place.For those seeking to escape the constant stimulation of modern life, the Sawmill Treehouse offers a rare opportunity to step back, breathe deeply, and rediscover the simple pleasure of being present in a beautiful natural setting. It stands as an inspiring example of how architecture can facilitate healing, rest, and genuine rejuvenation when designed with intention and respect for the natural world.The post Japandi-style Sawmill Treehouse is an Enchanting Haven Embraced by Nature first appeared on Yanko Design.

Want a terrific workhorse Mac? Look no further than Apples smallest computer.

What could possibly go wrong?

Theres little reason to pay top dollar for a smartphone. These iPhones and Android devicesranging from $150 to $600stood up to WIREDs testing.

Apples new event planning app lets you gather friends and family in one placeeven if theyre on Android.

The company plans to move users of the pioneering service, which it bought in 2011, to Microsoft Teams.