7.8% slam dunk! The 'dead' economy is alive & kicking

CPI(M) Faces Internal Strain in Kannur as Vijayan Addresses Defections

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan is facing pressure as the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front grapples with signs of discord in its traditional stronghold of Kannur. A number of supporters are reported to have distanced themselves from the LDF in recent times. Vijayan attributed these defections to what he called a wave of false propaganda that misled party supporters. He expressed confidence that those who had drifted away were beginning to recognise the reality of the situation. The development signals growing challenges for the ruling front in a district long considered its political base.

TrackMCP

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Bitcoin ETFs Return to Inflows With $217M; Ether Funds Hit 11-Day Streak

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $217 million in inflows on Monday, resuming a positive run after a single session of outflows had broken their nine-day streak. The one-day interruption proved brief, with buyers returning swiftly to the bitcoin funds. Meanwhile, ether ETFs continued their own impressive run, extending their streak of positive inflow days to 11 consecutive sessions. The ether funds have not recorded a single day of net outflows since mid-August. Together, the two trends signal sustained institutional and retail appetite for crypto ETF products.

Railway Board approves Surat-Udaipur Vande Bharat train, discontinues one existing service

Real estate emerges as fastest-growing services sub-sector, up 24.7 per cent in June

Mumbai's cost of living goes up a notch in Sept

Do NRIs pay tax on money they gift to HUFs?

Assam STF Arrests 5th Suspect Tied to Pakistan-Linked Handler

Assam's Special Task Force has arrested a fifth suspect connected to a Pakistan-backed handler as part of an ongoing crackdown. The operation targets extremist and anti-national networks operating in the region. Authorities described the arrest as part of a sustained investigation into such networks and their operatives. The STF has been systematically pursuing individuals linked to these groups across multiple operations.

Why Silent AI Agent Failures Are More Dangerous Than Loud Crashes

A developer building AI agents near real systems warns that the most dangerous failure mode is not a crash but a silent false success. In these cases, the agent appears to complete a task and the UI confirms it, yet the underlying command never ran, ran incorrectly, or validated its own assumptions rather than actual system state. The author argues that isolation alone is insufficient as a safety measure for agentic systems. The more critical question, they contend, is whether engineers can fully reconstruct what was executed — including the command, arguments, timestamp, and outcome. The post invites practitioners who have deployed agents near live systems to share how they detect these invisible failures.

India may let AI agents make small ​digital payments

Octomind adds image and voice support, refuses queries when model lacks vision

Developer tool Octomind has shipped a new update introducing image attachments and voice input across browser, Telegram, Slack, and WhatsApp sessions. Unlike most AI tools that silently strip unsupported images and respond anyway, Octomind explicitly refuses such requests upfront and names a compatible model instead. Voice input includes safeguards like a 15-second silence cutoff, a two-minute hard stop, and a minimum three-word threshold before any query is sent. All inputs — screenshots, voice notes, or typed messages — share a single persistent session across devices, with no re-uploading needed after model switches. Images are available on all plans at no extra cost, while voice features are limited to paid plans at $0.010 per minute to listen and $0.025 per minute to speak.

Reflexio

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Eight Assam Workers Return Home After Harrowing Experience in Nepal

Eight workers from Assam have safely returned to India after a distressing ordeal in Nepal. The group traveled by air to reach India, after which they were transported by road to Dhubri. From there, the workers proceeded to their respective home districts across Assam. The workers described their experience as a close brush with death, indicating the severity of what they endured abroad.

Kerala Family Has Narrow Escape After Wild Elephant Charges Their Vehicle

A Kerala family experienced a terrifying encounter when a wild elephant charged directly at their vehicle during what had begun as an ordinary wildlife sighting. The incident was captured on video, which has since circulated widely. The elephant approached and charged at the vehicle aggressively, leaving the occupants in a dangerous situation. Fortunately, the family managed to escape without reported injuries. The incident highlights the risks faced by people in areas where human and elephant habitats overlap in Kerala.

Apify Actor audits GitHub Markdown links and files issues without cloning the repo

A developer built a GitHub Documentation Link Auditor using an Apify Actor and an MCP connector that reads Markdown files directly from GitHub without cloning the repository or storing credentials in the Actor input. The tool checks up to 100 public HTTP links per run and creates or updates a single marker-owned GitHub issue with its findings, avoiding the noise of repeated daily issue creation. On August 9, 2026, the Actor was tested twice against a public fixture, successfully identifying one broken 404 link, one rejected loopback URL, and two reachable links across both runs. The workflow uses two separate MCP connector inputs — one read-only and one write-only — so dry runs do not require write permissions, and the Actor never gains access to branch, pull-request, or file-editing tools. The approach inverts the typical Apify MCP pattern, where an external AI client calls Actors as tools, instead having the Actor call a third-party service at two narrow points in its pipeline.

Developer builds AI sourcing agent that screens suppliers using trade data and GST checks

A developer created an AI-powered supplier sourcing workflow using three Apify tools: a UN Comtrade scraper for trade signals, an IndiaMART scraper for supplier discovery, and a GST verification tool for registration checks. The workflow was tested on August 8, 2026, revealing that India imported $11.12 billion worth of organic chemicals from China in 2024. The agent identified 18 product listings across 10 Mumbai-based companies on IndiaMART and successfully verified two supplier GSTINs as active. The modular design keeps each tool focused on a single question, allowing the agent to stop early if a trade signal is weak or skip verification if a GSTIN is missing. The setup connects to Apify's hosted MCP server and is compatible with AI clients like Claude and Codex, requiring only a single CLI command to configure.

Developer builds wildcard-detection layer into AI subdomain scanner to cut false positives

A developer used an AI agent connected to an Apify MCP server to enumerate subdomains for a domain they own, thirdwatch.dev, but found the initial results were misleading because the domain had a catch-all DNS route that made non-existent subdomains appear valid. Of 129 resolved hostnames, 98 were ultimately flagged as wildcard-likely rather than real assets. To fix this systematically, the developer embedded wildcard detection directly into the scanning tool itself, using three random negative controls per run to establish a DNS and HTTP baseline fingerprint. The updated Actor now assigns each result one of four evidence classes — observed, candidate, wildcard-likely, or unresolved — preventing the AI agent from misinterpreting raw DNS resolution as confirmed asset existence. The developer also applied a strict usage policy limiting the workflow to explicitly authorized domains and barring the agent from making vulnerability claims or calling write-capable tools without human confirmation.

Apify Actor scans GitHub dependencies and auto-files triage issues using just 3 tools

A developer built an Apify Actor that uses a restricted GitHub MCP connector limited to exactly three tools — reading a dependency manifest, searching existing issues, and writing or updating one. When tested on August 8, 2026 against a public repository with three outdated npm packages, the Actor identified 16 dependency advisories via the OSV database and created a single triage issue. Running the same scan a second time updated the existing issue rather than opening a duplicate, demonstrating idempotent behavior. The Actor never receives the user's GitHub token directly; credentials remain server-side and the effective permissions are the intersection of connector-level, proxy-level, and GitHub token scopes. A built-in dry-run default and a confirmation target field further prevent accidental writes to unintended repositories.

Content-Aware Video Sampling Tool Outperforms Uniform Frame Selection for AI Analysis

A developer has released VTL (Video Timeline Library), a tool that selects video frames based on visual change rather than fixed time intervals, aiming to improve how language models analyze video content. In benchmark tests across five real-world videos, uniform sampling missed 9 of 28 distinct shots entirely and wasted 12 of 40 frames on near-identical images, while VTL missed no shots and wasted only 2 frames. The tool works by placing frames at moments of visual change, skipping near-duplicates, and ensuring every scene receives at least one frame within a set coverage limit. However, the developer acknowledges a tradeoff: VTL can leave wider gaps during static segments than uniform sampling would, and labels these as 'frozen spans' rather than hiding them. The project is open source, includes a benchmark script for independent testing, and transparently notes measurement limitations such as a roughly 30% underestimation of zoom magnitude.