Baltimore swaps invasive pear for native tulip poplar as official city tree

Baltimore has officially replaced the Chanticleer pear with the tulip poplar as its city tree, ending the pear's 52-year tenure since 1974. The change follows Maryland's ban on the sale of the callery pear, an invasive species. Six native tree species were in contention for the title, with Baltimore residents casting votes to determine the winner. The final announcement was made in a festive costumed tree race held at Cylburn Arboretum, drawing hundreds of attendees.

Why Apple Keeps iPhone Prices High in India Despite Low Affordability

Apple maintains premium pricing for iPhones in India, making them accessible to only around 5% of the population. However, that small percentage still represents approximately 70 million potential customers. This figure surpasses the entire population of several major European nations, including the UK, France, and Italy. The sheer size of India's aspirational consumer base gives Apple little incentive to reduce its prices in the market.

Developer Reflects on AI Taking Over Coding as Profession Faces Uncertain Future

A software developer writing on DEV Community describes how, within just one year, AI has become deeply embedded in nearly every stage of their product development workflow, from architecture and UI design to testing and SEO. The developer recently built a Chrome extension called meelang almost entirely with AI assistance, including a fully functional operations dashboard completed in under an hour. While they acknowledge AI's power to bridge skill gaps and democratize knowledge, they express concern that it may be eroding the foundations of software engineering as a profession. Newcomers are missing hands-on coding practice, experienced developers are declining in number, and the author warns this could create a damaging cycle for the industry. They conclude that AI's disruption extends well beyond tech, affecting designers, scientists, and creatives alike, marking what they call a genuine turning point in human history.

SBI: FCNR liquidity deployment to take 4 months

Kanpur Murder Case: WhatsApp Chats Link Daughter-in-Law to Father-in-Law's Killing

Investigators in Kanpur have uncovered WhatsApp messages suggesting that a woman named Shalu allegedly manipulated Vishal Gautam into murdering her father-in-law, Vineet Minocha. The chats, exchanged over several months, show Shalu complimenting Vishal and probing into his personal life, which police believe was part of a deliberate effort to influence him. Authorities suspect Shalu orchestrated the killing by exploiting her relationship with Vishal. Although Vishal attempted to delete the chat history, he failed to erase all WhatsApp call records, which investigators were able to recover as key evidence.

Vande Bharat food complaints, train water issues: Railways plans key changes to RailMadad portal

Asian Games: Can India better its 107-medal haul?

Xbox to publish Hideo Kojima's Physint after PlayStation cancelled the project

Xbox has stepped in to publish Physint, an action game from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, after PlayStation unexpectedly dropped the project. Sony, which previously published both Death Stranding titles, described the move as a difficult decision while maintaining that its relationship with Kojima Productions remains intact. Kojima himself contradicted the diplomatic tone, stating on X that Sony delivered a surprise cancellation notice in June. According to Kojima, his studio has spent the past three months scrambling to find a new publishing partner following the abrupt exit. The announcements came simultaneously from PlayStation, Xbox, Kojima Productions, and Kojima personally.

7 cases dropped: HDFC scores big win in Bahrain

Developer builds 59 privacy-first browser tools in vanilla JS with zero dependencies

A developer has publicly launched Antigravity Tools, a collection of 59 free, browser-based utilities built entirely in vanilla JavaScript with no external dependencies, backend servers, or analytics. The project was motivated by privacy concerns over popular online tools that send user data — such as JWT tokens and regex test strings — to remote servers. Every operation runs locally in the browser using native APIs including Web Crypto, Canvas, Web Audio, and IndexedDB. The toolkit covers a wide range of developer needs, including JWT inspection, RSA key generation, JSON formatting, cURL conversion, regex testing, and AI prompt utilities. The tools are freely accessible at antigravitytools.app and require no installation, accounts, or cookies.

ChatGPT Prompts Fuel 1980s Kerala Retro Photo Trend on Social Media

A new social media trend is using ChatGPT to transform modern photos into images styled after 1980s Kerala and Malayali culture. Users are crafting specific prompts to generate portraits resembling family, wedding, college, and studio photographs from that era. The AI-generated images feature traditional Kerala clothing, jewellery, and home interiors authentic to the period. Facial features of the subjects are preserved while retro photographic qualities are layered over them. The trend reflects a growing interest in using AI tools to explore regional cultural aesthetics and nostalgia.

Embraer looks to make India bigger aerospace hub

‘Four firms, same controller, and old computers at inflated prices’: Madhya Pradesh probes new ‘scam’

Experiment finds AI mostly refuses company queries without register access, not lies

A developer behind the registry-mcp tool ran a controlled experiment on September 10, 2026, testing how accurately the Claude Sonnet 5 model answered company-related questions with and without access to official national business registers. Without tools, the model hedged or declined to answer on 34 of 45 calls, was confidently wrong on just 3, and gave correct but unsourced responses on 8. However, the study flagged two dangerous failure patterns: the model once fabricated detailed regulatory deadlines for a Norwegian company, and on two trials it appended a specific employee figure after disclaiming register access — a format that automated pipelines could easily misread as factual. With register tools attached, the model passed 18 of 27 eligible test cases under a strict three-trial agreement rule, equating to a 67% pass rate, though per-trial accuracy varied by up to 18 percentage points across identical prompts on the same day.

Cue: Open-Source Windows Coding Agent Lets Users Freeze Scope Before Execution

Cue is a free, open-source (MIT) coding agent for Windows 11, built with Electron and powered by Codex CLI, designed to give developers tighter control over automated coding tasks. The tool introduces a four-step loop — Describe, Review, Approve, and Inspect — where users define a goal, review the planned scope, grant a single approval, and then monitor progress via a ledger. A key feature is the 'execution envelope,' a human-approved boundary that locks the working directory and permitted actions before any file changes occur and cannot expand after approval. Workspace actions run inside AppContainer sandboxed workers, keeping mutations confined strictly to the approved directory. The project aims to address two common failure modes in desktop agents: unrestricted 'YOLO' execution and tedious per-action approval prompts that lead to oversight fatigue.

Mirzapur: The Movie nears Rs 139 crore in week one, targets Rs 150 crore mark

Mirzapur: The Movie, starring Pankaj Tripathi and Ali Fazal, has collected close to Rs 139 crore net in India by the end of its seventh day. The film enjoyed a strong opening weekend before settling into a slower but steady weekday pace. It has now entered its second week of theatrical release. The key question is whether the film can sustain screen count and audience turnout to cross the Rs 150 crore milestone.

Protocol-First Design Enables Consistent AI Agent SDKs Across Multiple Languages

Modern AI agent systems typically run on polyglot stacks combining Python, TypeScript, Rust, and Go, creating risks of duplicated logic and inconsistent governance. A more sustainable approach treats the capability protocol and schema as the primary artifact, with language-specific SDKs built as implementations on top. Each SDK shares the same conformance tests and produces identical runtime behavior, ensuring validation, approvals, and tracing remain consistent regardless of language. This means a capability written in Rust can be called by a Python agent or exposed via a TypeScript service without reinventing core logic. Experts recommend defining the wire-level protocol and tests first, then layering language-specific ergonomics — a slower start that pays dividends as stacks grow more complex.

Kentucky's 210-Year-Old Shaker Building to Get $1.5M Restoration by 2029

A historic Shaker building in Kentucky, over 210 years old, is set to undergo a major restoration project. The effort carries a budget of $1.5 million, sourced from a combination of federal grants and private donations. Once complete, the structure is planned to reopen as a community hub. The project is expected to be finished by 2029 and aims to highlight the building's significant historical heritage.

Mayawati 'frees' nephew Akash Anand from BSP

Practical Strategies to Keep Microservices Loosely Coupled in Production

Tight coupling between services — where changing one breaks others — slows development velocity and increases incidents, according to a software engineer's hands-on guide. The author recommends that services depend on stable, intentional contracts rather than each other's internal details, using consumer-defined interfaces and versioned network payloads. Event-driven communication is highlighted as a way to reduce runtime dependency, since publishers need not know which services consume their events. Shared databases, config keys, and retry logic are identified as hidden sources of coupling that can turn a microservices architecture into a distributed monolith. The core principle is to ensure each service can be deployed independently, treating loose coupling as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time architectural decision.