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U.S. oil futures fluctuated between losses and gains on Friday, but held onto a climb for the week, after remarks Federal Reserve Chairman indicated that more interest-rate hikes are on tap as the central bank continues its efforts to combat rising inflation.Speculation surrounding a possible production cut by major oil producers helped provide some support for the oil sector, but traders also kept an eye out for more news about a potential nuclear deal with Iran that could eventually lead to more oil on the global market. Price action West Texas Intermediate crude for October delivery fell 49 cents, or 0.5%, to $92.03 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, with prices fluctuating between losses and gains for the session. Front-month contract prices traded 1.8% higher for the week, FactSet data show. The front-month October Brent crude oil contract traded flat at $99.34 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe, with prices up by 2.7% for the week. Back on Nymex, September gasoline lost 6.8 cents, or 2.4%, to $2.7446 per gallon, while September heating oil gained 3.8 cents, or 1%, to $3.9867 per gallon. Natural gas for September delivery traded nearly flat at $9.373 per million British thermal units, with prices up around 0.4% for the week. What analysts are saying “Bullish sentiments” arising from talk of potential production cuts by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies also known as OPEC+ was offset by an “unenthusiastic mood” painted by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, said Manish Raj, chief financial officer at Velandera Energy Partners. Powell delivered a blunt message that the Fed will keep at the job of bringing inflation down until it is done and that the fight will be costly in terms of jobs and economic growth. In his speech, he drove home the point that the Fed has an “overarching focus right now to bring inflation back down to our 2% goal.” he left the door open for a 0.75 percentage point interest hike in September. “High interest rates will certainly lower economic activity and oil consumption is no exception,” Raj told MarketWatch. Economic data released Friday showed a key gauge of U.S. inflation fell 0.1% in July on the heels of declines in gasoline prices. For the week, oil prices have risen as hopes for a nuclear deal with Iran were offset by comments about potential production cuts out of Saudi Arabia. The comments from Saudi Arabia’s energy minister suggest international oil benchmarks won’t be allowed to trade below $90 per barrel without at least some verbal intervention from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, according to analysts at Commerzbank. “Admittedly, sources close to OPEC stressed shortly afterwards that a production cut would probably only happen if Iran were to return to the oil market as a result of a new nuclear agreement. Nonetheless, the impression remains that Saudi Arabia is not willing to tolerate any price slide below $90,” Commerzbank team wrote. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/oil-prices-rise-as-traders-await-news-about-iran-deal-opec-production-cuts/ar-AA117QF4?fromMaestro=true

Video Game Fables deconstructs the typical RPG tropes in a way that brings a good sense of humor and levity to the game. While it can’t completely escape some of the tropes that it brings up, you will have a good time playing along with a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Have you ever wondered what it would be like when video game characters point out what’s wrong with their world? What if someone took the time to point out the absurdity that NPCs and players experience on a regular basis? That is what Video Game Fables sets out to do, and it does a fantastic job deconstructing the typical RPG tropes for players, NPCs, and game design. The game doesn’t take itself seriously, which results in a light-hearted humorous adventure that never fails to put a smile on your face. While the deconstruction itself doesn’t allow you to magically bypass some in-game annoyances, Video Game Fables is still a fun RPG for those looking for a good mix of laughs and adventure. Video Game Fables is currently available on PC for USD 19.99. STORY – GOING OFF SCRIPT TOO MANY TIMES Video Game Fables starts with a princess named Aru, who is supposed to be captured by a Gator King and imprisoned in a castle. A Hero gets a task from the King to rescue Aru from the jaws of evil. Before the Hero even sets out on their quest, Aru decides the situation is ridiculous and escapes herself. With the help of a random villager named Nate who just happens to pass by, Aru brings herself back to her kingdom. This enrages the Hero, who was actually looking forward to the adventure. With the pre-established script no longer possible, the Hero allies with a Witch to destroy the King’s castle. He takes the King and the Gator King hostage before flying away with the witch. Aru will have to recruit Nate and the Gator King’s son Tator to try and fix the situation. Along the way, Aru will speak with Nate and Tator about their adventures, commenting on how silly or inane something might be. Nate happens to be an expert in heroic knowledge, while Tator really just wants things to go back to normal. This is your typical RPG adventure where the protagonists defeat the villains after a hero’s journey. What makes it special is that Aru is playing the only sane man, commenting on how silly the journey is because of the tropes they have to go through. Nate seems to enjoy the whole journey, while Tator is just a budding villain who really wants to go home. It’s an absurd set of circumstances that the characters frequently reference, which brings most of the humor and light-heartedness. Unlike most RPGs that need a serious tone, Video Game Fables succeeds because it doesn’t take itself seriously. Aru is aware most of their challenges are absurd, dungeons are weird, and NPCs act strange. Having the characters dig their heels in or fail to see the absurdity provides great comedic effect. The script manages to balance this light-hearted humor with the constant reminder of the rescue mission. The result is a deconstruction story that never fails to make you smile and makes you want to see what’s next. https://www.keengamer.com/articles/reviews/pc-reviews/video-game-fables-review-silly-deconstruction-fun-pc/

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Top Tech News, and today we are talking about Apple’s new program, Microsoft pushing ads for users and a quick tech tip. Apple is now extending its self-repair service to MacBook users. The company started this unique program with iPhones earlier this year, and now you have MacBook users getting the option to repair their machines at home using original Apple tools. Apple will start selling genuine parts and service tools from August 23. The company is starting the self-repair program for the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro with the M1 chipset. Apple will offer the tools that can be bought to or rented for one-time use by paying $49 (Rs 3,920 approx). Microsoft Bringing Ads To Outlook App On Mobile Microsoft wants to push more ads on the Outlook mobile app for Android and iOS users. The company is doing this so that more people sign up for the Outlook service with a nominal fee. So, if you have been enjoying the Outlook app for free, chances are you are going to see a lot more ads pasted on the UI of the mailing app. Till date, Outlook was mostly showing ads in the Others tab where you have all the mails listed in the same list, while the Focused tab was left alone. But from now, even the personalised list will show ads for Outlook users, as reported by The Verge. Microsoft has a core range of plans for its Microsoft 365 subscription that also includes Outlook, and the company wants to give users the choice of seeing ads, or paying to use the service. https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/technology/top-tech-news-august-23-apple-macbook-self-repair-microsoft-ads-and-more/ar-AA10ZBYN

GrubMarket today announced it has completed the acquisitions of New York-based Frantoni Corporation (“Frantoni”) and Kansas-based Granite State Software (“GSS”), highly reputable enterprise software providers that specialize in building advanced food supply chain software solutions, with a focus on the Eastern and Midwest regions of the U.S. Both companies are led by software veterans with decades of industry experience in the fresh produce space. Founded nearly 40 years ago by experienced computer professional Peter Kimball, GSS is now managed by seasoned software engineer Glenn Sherman, who joined GSS in 1990 and took over ownership of the company in 2014. Frantoni is still run by original owner Frank Gemeinhardt, accomplished tech sales executive and software engineer who built Frantoni into industry-leading software used by many prominent produce wholesalers in New York City. In addition to offering specialized produce ERP software systems, both GSS and Frantoni seamlessly integrate with Orders IO, GrubMarket’s innovative, custom-branded eCommerce mobile app for customer ordering and communications. Known for their commitment to customer satisfaction, both Frantoni and GSS have loyal and dedicated customers who have grown with the companies for decades. After the acquisition, GSS and Frantoni will continue to be managed by Glenn Sherman and Frank Gemeinhardt, respectively, and GSS and Frantoni customers will have the opportunity to add on additional modules offered by GrubMarket’s Orders IO and WholesaleWare products. “We are thrilled to join GrubMarket and continue our legacy by working with the team here to improve the archaic and old-school food supply chain industry. Our deep technical expertise from 39+ years of produce wholesale software development experience, combined with our strong customer relationships across the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast U.S., puts us in a unique position to help further GrubMarket’s mission to digitally transform this under-digitized sector,” said Glenn Sherman, owner of GSS. Frank Gemeinhardt, owner of Frantoni, adds: “We are excited to join the GrubMarket team to provide our customers with the opportunity to adopt additional modules offered by the visionary WholesaleWare ERP software. GrubMarket’s tech team is among the best in the industry, and we can’t wait to collaborate as a greater team to solidify our status as the most impactful technology enabler in the food space.” According to Mike Xu, CEO of GrubMarket: “Both Frantoni and GSS have strong reputations in the software development space for fresh food supply chain players. Both companies have a customer-first philosophy that matches our own here at GrubMarket. They’ve been in business for decades, have proven track records of high customer satisfaction, and offer strong synergies with our flagship product, WholesaleWare. We’re excited to bring Glenn and Frank’s considerable expertise to GrubMarket, to help us continue building a best-in-class software and eCommerce experience for our software customers. This acquisition enables us to further strengthen our ability to accelerate digital transformation in this traditional food supply chain space.” GSS and Frantoni’s software offerings will become an addition to GrubMarket’s eCommerce and software product family, which already includes the innovative and proprietary WholesaleWare software suite, the company’s software-as-a-service platform that provides food industry wholesalers and distributors with seamless financial management, powerful sales, and online ordering features, precise inventory management, lot traceability, grower accounting, and automated routing and logistics, as well as Orders IO, GrubMarket’s custom branded mobile eCommerce solution. https://enterprisetalk.com/news/grubmarket-buys-produce-software-providers-frantoni-and-granite-state-software/

Imagine building some of the most sophisticated hardware-driven technologies in the world spacecraft, drones or autonomous vehicles. Then imagine being unable to easily share your data to different teams, having to use clunky user interfaces and relying on a single person manually inputting data in an Excel spreadsheet to bottom-line your project. “You’d be shocked at how archaic the tools are,” Lucy Hoag, co-founder of Violet Labs, said. She wasn’t referring to the sophistication of the tools, but the way in which the hardware production toolset is balkanized across both teams and tasks. It’s a problem, common across the industry, that she and her co-founder Caitlin Curtis say leads to major inefficiencies. To solve this problem, Violet Labs is developing a cloud-based platform that can act as a single source of truth, collecting the data from all the tools and making them easily accessible across teams. Hoag likened the product to Zapier, which uses APIs to talk to different tools. The Violet platform would function similarly, generating API requests and collating the data into a single powerful database. The company is also developing a no-code user interface that can act as an all-in-one toolkit for hardware engineers. Hoag, who has a background in astronautical engineering, cut her teeth building a tool called Spider to automate the satellite design process. That led her into a career working for some of the biggest companies in the world: Google, Waymo, Lyft and most recently Amazon, for its broadband satellite initiative Project Kuiper. When she returned to aerospace at Amazon, after years mostly working on self-driving cars, she said she was shocked at how little the tool set had developed. “We’re really still doing things the exact same way,” she said. “At Kuiper is where I met Caitlin and we both really bonded over that frustration. That brings us here.” “Here” is quitting their jobs to work on the Violet platform full-time. The duo is now eight months deep into building the company to develop that tool. Violet Labs just closed a $4 million seed round to accelerate product development as Hoag and Caitlin race to market later this year. The round was led by Space Capital, with participation from MaC Venture Capital, Felicis, V1.VC and technologists. A multitude of software tools are used through the lifecycle of hardware product development, from more generalized tools to the very specialized. The tools themselves are very sophisticated but, as Hoag put it, “the problem is they really don’t talk to each other.” To work around this problem, teams will usually hire a system engineer or a technical program manager to manually maintain a source of truth between the different tools. Let’s make it concrete. Say a mechanical engineer is working on building a spacecraft. She has the physical model of the satellite in a CAD design software, like Solidworks, and she needs to get parameters related to the spacecraft’s Guidance, Naviagtion and Control (GNC) system to another team. Today, she might manually extract those parameters, insert them in a Google Sheets document, email that to the system engineer or post it to a workspace like Confluence, and then the GNC team would manually take those values and hard-code them into GitHub or Bitbucket. “It’s just incredibly slow,” Hoag explained. “As you can imagine, it’s error-prone because there are so many humans in the loop and so many steps in the process. It’s needlessly inefficient, and that’s what Violet is trying to solve.” She added that teams could go from spending months or many months to get something built in prototype to as little or days or weeks with Violet’s platform. In the worst cases, the legacy way of doing things isn’t just inefficient a problem on its own, for companies that want to aggressively get products out to market but it can be disastrous. One notorious example is the Mars Climate Orbiter, a space probe launched in December 1998. The mission resulted in failure due to a navigation error specifically, a failure of translating units from metric to Imperial. It resulted in a complete loss of payload. The Violet platform, Hoag says, would help teams avoid errors like that one. The company is still just Hoag and Curtis, who’ve been working on a prototype and chatting with customers in the aerospace, autonomous vehicles and robotics fields. Heartened by the feedback they received, the duo decided to raise funds back in May to bring the product to market faster. Their pitch obviously resonated. Ryan Isono, VP at Felicis, said he heard echoes of these pain points from others in the hardware and robotics space. Violet Labs has already landed a few agreements with some of the applications they plan to integrate with, including the product lifecycle management tool Duro and the requirements management software Jama. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and hire more full-stack software developers. Hoag said that while there’s been massive innovation for software development, hardware engineers are noticing the lack of innovation on their side of things. “We’re at this inflection point where there’s all these different companies and startups and people being empowered to build these systems,” she said. “We feel that this next generation of engineers won’t tolerate this outdated toolset. They will demand something that’s more streamlined or data-driven or frictionless, and we want to be the ones to enable that.” https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/22/meet-the-ex-project-kuiper-engineers-wanting-to-disrupt-hardware-workflow/

Britain’s factories are bearing the brunt of the slowdown in the economy as higher costs, weaker demand and supply bottlenecks combine to send output plunging. Two separate snapshots of industrial activity showed a decline in manufacturing activity – part of a Europe-wide trend exacerbated by the economic fallout from the war in Ukraine. The monthly purchasing managers’ index from S&P/Cips found manufacturing output at its weakest level since the early stages of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Other than the fall suffered during the Covid lockdown, the decline from 48.9 to 42.4 between July and August was the quickest since the global financial crisis in 2009. A reading below 50 indicates contraction rather than expansion. Modest growth in the UK’s much bigger service sector prevented the overall measure of private-sector activity dipping below 50, but the drop from 52.1 to 50.9 left the composite index at its weakest in 18 months. The eurozone’s overall PMI fell from 49.9 to 49.2 in August, also the lowest in 18 months. Annabel Fiddes, economics associate director at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said: “The UK private sector moved closer to stagnation in August, as mild growth of activity across the service sector only just offset a deepening downturn at manufacturers. “Waning customer demand amid the weaker economic outlook, and shortages of both staff and inputs, were reported to have hit goods producers hard, with firms registering the quickest drops in output and new work since May 2020. Excluding the initial phase of the pandemic in early 2020, the reduction in manufacturing output was the quickest seen since the start of 2009. Meanwhile, the service sector registered the weakest increase in activity since the recovery began in early 2021.” The CBI’s industrial trends survey showed that in the latest three months manufacturers’ order books shrank and output fell for the first time since February 2021. Alpesh Paleja, a CBI economist, said: “From rising prices to bottlenecks in supply chains, manufacturers continue to operate against a background of high input costs and significant operational delays. When coupled with an oncoming economic downturn, it is not surprising to see orders and activity ebb away as we move through the year.” In addition to rising energy bills, manufacturers are also braced for further increases in interest rates from the Bank of England. The City expects official borrowing costs, currently 1.75%, to reach 4% by next spring. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/factories-bearing-the-brunt-of-uk-economic-slowdown?amp;amp;amp

Vermont Fish and Wildlife says a Strafford woman was attacked by a bear on her property, and one of her dogs lured the animal away from her. Game wardens say Susan Lee, 61, was walking on her property Saturday with her two dogs when she heard a loud noise and realized a bear was charging her. Lee tripped and fell and felt pain in her upper left leg, and realized the bear was on top of her and had bitten her. That’s when her Jack Russell terrier intervened by barking at the bear and drawing its attention away from Lee. The bear got off her and focused on the dog. Lee was able to return home with her dogs without seeing the bear again. She was treated at the hospital for a bite wound on her upper left leg and multiple scratches between 2- and 9-inches long on both her sides. Her wounds were not life-threatening. Fish and Wildlife biologists investigated the attack site but did not find the bear. They believe the bear was a female with cubs, and the attack was likely provoked when Lee and her dogs surprised them. “Bear attacks are extremely rare in Vermont,” Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department Bear Biologist Jaclyn Comeau said in a statement, adding that the department has records of only three prior bear attacks in the state. “However, at this time of year black bears are moving in family units and mothers will be protective of their cubs. If confronted by a bear it is essential to remain calm and back away slowly, and to fight back immediately if attacked.” https://www.wcax.com/2022/08/23/vermont-woman-attacked-by-bear-barking-dog-lures-animal-away/

The Russian government tightened its grip on the internet on Tuesday, as a state-controlled company with close links to President Vladimir Putin agreed to buy the news feed and homepage of the country's most po[CENSORED]r website. Yandex, often referred to as Russia's Google, said it was selling its news aggregator, content platform Zen and yandex.ru homepage to VK to focus on other business areas, such as food delivery and ride-hailing. In exchange, Yandex will acquire food delivery company Delivery Club from VK. Values for the assets were not disclosed. VK runs Russia's largest social network, VKontakte, and an overhaul last year saw state-controlled gas exporter Gazprom and banker Yuri Kovalchuk, whom Putin has publicly called a personal friend, assume greater control over the company. Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of Putin's first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko, is its CEO. Russia's years-long suppression of independent media intensified after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. It passed a law banning what it calls "false information" about the armed forces and quashing many organisations' ability to broadcast freely. It has blocked access to some foreign platforms, including Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram. "The board and management of Yandex have concluded that the interests of the company's stakeholders ... are best served by pursuing the strategic exit from its media businesses and shifting to a focus on other technologies and services," Yandex said in a statement. Yandex has, like many Russian companies, had a turbulent few months. It plunged to a first-quarter loss and its shares tumbled to six-year lows before trading was suspended in late February. Revenues and profits recovered in the second quarter, and while its Nasdaq-listed shares remain suspended, trading in its Moscow shares resumed after about a month. Yandex has in recent years complied with Moscow's demands, under threat of fines, over which publications' stories can feature on its news aggregator, drawing criticism from free-speech advocates. Moscow has not blocked access to most foreign-language media, which remain freely available in Russia and on Yandex, but search results do restrict access to any sites that communications regulator Roskomnadzor has banned, many of which are Russian-language independent media. In February, Yandex started warning Russian users seeking information about events in Ukraine of unreliable information online. A former head of Yandex News, Lev Gershenzon, on March 1 described Yandex as a key element in hiding information about the conflict in Ukraine. Yandex has denied being complicit in censorship. "We are buying our freedom," a source close to Yandex said. "This business had been such a weight on our feet. "This will enable us to do our business significantly depoliticised, practically completely depoliticised." ONLINE SEARCH Yandex dominates Russia's online search market with a share of around 62%, according to its analytics tool Yandex Radar. Google accounts for about 36%, with VK's mail.ru at less than 1%. That stronghold over the online search market will likely continue. Yandex.ru displays a bundle of news stories below its search bar, followed by a rolling stream of content. The company's entry point for search will now become ya.ru, a site that resembles Google's homepage and is already po[CENSORED]r with those who prefer uncluttered searches. Yandex.ru, its News feed and Zen, will be renamed dzen.ru, Yandex said, with VK to take over development and control over "content, look and feel". The asset swaps require anti-monopoly approval and are expected to close in the coming months, Yandex said. E-COMMERCE SHAKE-UP Search, advertising and ride-hailing are among Yandex's strongest revenue-generating businesses, but it has several other units, such as cloud services and self-driving cars. It is expanding services in Africa and Latin America, but pulling back from e-grocery in Europe. The terms of the deal look broadly neutral, said BCS Express in a note. The profitable Zen and News divisions are positive for VK, while Yandex strengthens its position in foodtech with the likely loss-making Delivery Club, analysts said. Yandex's Moscow-listed shares rose 2.7%, while VK's depositary receipts were up 2.9%, both outperforming the wider market. Dmitry Masyuk, head of Yandex's foodtech division, said Delivery Club would improve speed and choice on its food delivery offering. Yandex estimated the size of the market at 650 billion roubles ($11 billion) in 2021 and sees annual growth of 20%, he said. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-tightens-grip-media-landscape-072051773.html

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Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories. On today’s episode, the crew discusses the Android 13 update, the battle between the vertical video apps, and a lightning round of tech news. Android 13 is here, and newer Pixel phones are able to upgrade to it (my Pixel 3A did not make the cut). The Vergecast discusses why this is Android’s “Snow Leopard” release, how it affects the greater Android phone world, and whether an update like this will convince iOS users to switch. Later in the show, the topic shifts to social video apps. Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts are all trying to shame you or prevent you from posting your content made in other video apps. The crew discusses creation tools and distribution being tied or locked together and how people may react to this increasing limitation. There’s a whole lot more discussed in the show like a fake exhaust sound from an electric vehicle or weird computer monitors so listen here or in your preferred podcast player for the full discussion. https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/shopping/vergecast-android-13-arrives-galaxy-watch-5-review-and-instagram-gets-competitive/ar-AA10Qu07

Modern DevOps turned back the clock on agile software development. Them’s fighting words, but they’re words Cory O’Daniel, the CEO of Massdriver, stands by. From his point of view, engineers today are often stuck waiting on other teams so that they can write code, creating frustrating bottlenecks. “DevOps was supposed to be practices,” O’Daniel told TechCrunch via email. “[It’s] not agile, it’s ‘waterfall.’ Modern DevOps is waterfall in agile clothing.” Some surveys show that DevOps is indeed hampered by challenges with infrastructure. According to CloudBolt, 11% of developers responding to a 2021 poll found their CI/CD infrastructure reliable while over half (55%) had difficulty creating consistent pipeline environments. That’s why O’Daniel, together with Chris Hill and Dave Williams, co-founded Massdriver in 2021. Massdriver’s platform is designed to assist with managing infrastructure and apps at enterprises, allowing engineers to deploy infrastructure without cloud expertise. “Williams and I were working on a side project and we got into an argument about who was going to do the operations work. Here we were, two seasoned ops engineers with more than 15 years experience each in cloud operations, arguing over who was going to have to do the grunt work,” O’Daniel said. O’Daniel was previously principal software architect at The RealReal and a cloud solutions architect at Container Heroes, an IT consultancy. “We both just wanted to write value-producing software for the business. This is where the idea of Massdriver was born.” Using Massdriver, customers choose from prebuilt infrastructure “bundles” that they can connect to create systems across regions or cloud providers with a visual tool. Postdeployment, the systems can be monitored from Massdriver’s admin dashboard, which also helps orchestrate features like cloud outage detection and automated status pages. O’Daniel emphasized that Massdriver’s alert notifications take users to a diagram of their infrastructure and highlight the impacted components, rather than forcing them to hop between tools like PagerDuty, Datadog, and Terraform. This month will see the release of continuous deployment support, complementing the existing support for container registries and DNS management. “ “We are taking a different approach to building out internal developer platforms … We give engineers a diagramming interface. It’s their source of truth. It’s their documentation when onboarding new teammates. It’s how they managed and monitor their infrastructure,” O’Daniel said. “We want to meet companies where they are at and let them pick the best tool for the job.” Since soft launching in March, O’Daniel says that Massdriver has reached “well into” six-figure annual recurring revenue and “mid-80%” gross margin. (Gross margin is the difference between revenue and cost of goods sold, divided by revenue; a figure above 75% is considered healthy.) Despite competition from Upbound and Humanitec, the company has around 100 developers across 35 organizations managing over 80 compute environments, and plans to expand its 11-person workforce within the next month. Recently, Massdriver which is backed by Y Combinator raised $4 million in seed funding. O’Daniel says that the funds will be used to exit the minimum viable product phase and “continue to make the product simpler for all caliber of engineers to deploy production-ready infrastructure.” “Massdriver enables engineers and IT staff to deliver secure infrastructure faster with guardrails less worrying about infrastructure, more confident delivery … Anyone in the org can open the tool and get insights into infrastructure, data services, and applications at a glance,” O’Daniel said. “At Massdriver, we want to let engineers engineer so they can focus on delivering business value, not toiling over configuring commodity infrastructure and that’s what the C-suite wants, too.” https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/massdriver-wants-to-abstract-away-infrastructure-to-let-devs-focus-on-coding/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFrXWKEah2u7g7ma3qZ8GeB7HPVTGXFNLvSFpcRryqRq1unDjIGJlxtoDutyh3VWRZ279PC3sgjSKLDhE3tECEW2Jov9urRgkcwNmHuw1s8GJ_7Zv-NqKkfbcVnYqNUVYbGMjOim6zJcT55Zl2JJjOnbPcHhn8uz4OX2oKkdZxE3

Vladimir Putin has warned of a 'large-scale catastrophe' at Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant which is being occupied by his own forces. The Russian leader claims the Zaporizhzhia plant is being constantly shelled by Ukrainian forces, but Kyiv argues it is Kremlin forces carrying out the attacks themselves as a false flag pretext for the feared 'provocation'. To add to the safety concerns, shocking video that appears to have been taken from inside the plant has revealed Russia military hardware being stored inside a turbine hall - just feet away from one of the reactors. Meanwhile, Ukrainian nuclear company Enerhoatom said Russian troops are planning to cut off Zaporizhzhia from the lines that feed power into the Ukrainian energy system. The firm said on Telegram that Putin's men are looking for fuel suppliers for the 'diesel generators, which are expected to switch on after the power units are shut down'. The generators would be necessary to keep the power supplied to the cooling systems for spent nuclear fuel, Enerhoatom said. Footage emerged overnight showing the inside of what looks like a turbogenerator hall, with at least five Russian military trucks parked inside next to a stack of crates. While it is not clear from the footage exactly what the trucks are doing there, they have 'Z' war markings on the hoods and are painted camouflage green - almost certainly meaning they are being used by the Russian armed forces. The video is the clearest evidence that has yet emerged to back Ukrainian assertions that Russia is storing explosives and other military hardware in and around the nuclear reactors, risking a disaster which could blanket Europe in radioactive ash. If the video was indeed taken in a turbogenerator hall - as seems likely from machinery visible in the footage - then it would mean the trucks are just 100ft from a reactor, putting it at risk in the event of an explosion. Ukraine warned overnight that Russia could be preparing a 'major provocation' at Zaporizhzhia today after ordering its staff not to come to work today, as a terrifying graphic revealed how far the fallout would spread in the event of a disaster. Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron discussed the situation at the plant in a phone call today, the Kremlin said. According to the Kremlin readout of the call, Putin said shelling of Zaporizhzhia, which he blamed on Kyiv, created the risk of 'large-scale catastrophe'. Both presidents agree on the need to send a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the plant. Data from the Ukrainian hydrometeorological institute shows the worst of the fallout would be concentrated within Ukraine itself, particularly its central regions. But dangerous particles would also be swept across Europe, blanketing Poland, the Baltics, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova, all of whom are NATO members. Significant radiation would also drift across the border into Russia itself, and fall across close ally Belarus. The warnings came as UN chief Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Volodymyr Zelensky in the western city of Lviv to discuss issues, including the safety of the Zaporizhzhia plant. President Erdogan, on his first visit to Ukraine since the war broke out, said he is 'worried' about the situation there and added: 'We don't want another Chernobyl.' Guterres, who has been calling for independent UN inspectors to be given access to the plant to ensure its safety, said any attack on it would be akin to 'suicide'. 'We must tell it like it is - any potential damage to Zaporizhzhia is suicide,' he said. Ukraine's military intelligence said: 'Considering the number of weapons that are currently located on the territory of the nuclear plant, as well as repeated provocative shelling, there is a high probability of a large-scale terrorist attack at the nuclear facility.' Zaporizhzhia, which houses six nuclear reactors, is Europe's largest nuclear plant and accounts for about a fifth of Ukraine's annual energy use. It is located close to Crimea, on the eastern side of the Dnipro River that divides Ukraine in two. Russia has occupied the site since early in the war when troops took control after a brief but alarming firefight that set an administrative building on fire. The situation there has been tense but stable for the last several months, though has ramped up in recent weeks as Ukraine attempts to push Russia out of the south. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11126467/Russia-tells-staff-Zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-not-come-work.html

First Read is your briefing from “Meet the Press” and the NBC Political Unit on the day’s most important political stories and why they matter. If it’s Friday ... A Judge says he’s inclined to unseal parts of Mar-a-Lago search affidavit. ...Fox News polls show Democrats up in Arizona Senate and Wisconsin Senate. ... Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admits GOP might not flip the Senate, citing candidate quality. ... NBC’s Antonia Hylton interviews Democrat Cheri Beasley in North Carolina Senate. ... And 73% of second year college Democrats don’t want Biden to run in 2024, poll finds. The Sunshine State has dropped from the top spot of America’s most consequential battleground states, due in large part to the GOP’s continued statewide success in the state since Barack Obama’s victory there in 2012. But Florida returns to the spotlight when it and New York hold primaries on Tuesday. You have Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis along with his 2024 possibilities running for re-election. And we’ll find out which Democrat (either Charlie Crist or Nikki Fried) will take him on in November. So far, DeSantis has found success wading in the Trump Era waters, picking social fights that energize the Republican base, but also touting his economic stewardship during Covid (see this TV ad, for example). You also have Sen. Marco Rubio’s, R-Fla., Senate showdown with Democrat Val Demings, though there’s not really any primary action in that race. And you have controversial Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., getting a primary challenge; you have several open congressional seats (due to redistricting and retirements); and you have Democrats trying to make a comeback in South Florida’s 27th District. One of the conundrums of Florida politics over the last 10 years is how both Republicans and Democrats have been treating it more and more like a ruby-red state when, in fact, the races there are almost always close. (And we have a strong feeling that both the state's gubernatorial and senate races will be within 5 points in November.) The other thing to watch: Do national Democrats and especially the folks over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. begin paying more attention to Florida’s gubernatorial race in the fall, given the potential 2024 implications? Data Download: The number of the day is … $28 million That’s how much the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund is booking in TV and radio ad time for the fall to help boost Republican author J.D. Vance in Ohio’s Senate race. It’s a signal the calvary is coming to help Vance, who made it through his primary thanks to the help of an endorsement from former President Donald Trump and major financial backing from venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But since then, he’s been outspent by an overwhelming figure Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan has spent $18.6 million on ads since the primary, compared to just $382,000 from Vance and another $1.6 million spent on coordinated ads from Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The combined Democratic effort has regularly hit $700,000 or more a week, while the combined GOP spend didn’t eclipse $20,000 per week until August. https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/desantis-key-primaries-florida-returns-political-spotlight-tuesday-rcna43879

In a major win for animal welfare groups “one of the worst" animal welfare issues in Australia will be phased out by 2036 - with battery cages for egg-laying hens to be banned within 14 years. Australia will phase out battery cages for hens by 2036 following a lengthy battle between the egg industry and animal welfare groups. The Australian Animal Welfare Standards and Guidelines was released on Thursday, after being under review for nearly seven years, requiring conventional layer hen cages to be phased out over the next 10 to 14 years. If a cage system was installed before the end of 2011, it must be updated by July 1, 2032. Those installed after 2014 must meet the new requirements by 2036. Under the new rules, all hens that are caged with other birds must have at least 750cm sq of usable space per bird. If the hen is caged alone, it must have 1m sq of usable space. RSPCA Australia chief executive Richard Mussell has praised the move, calling it a “significant win for animal welfare”. “This is a win for animal advocates and for the community who have been calling for an end to these barren, wire cages for over 40 years,” he said. “But most importantly, it will eventually be a win for the millions of layer hens confined to battery cages." The guidelines once implemented, will bring Australia into line with over 75% of OECD countries who have already moved to phase out battery cages. RSPCA Australia Chief Science Officer, Dr Suzie Fowler, said that the animal welfare science was clear - that hens suffer in barren battery cages. “This is one of the worst animal welfare issues in Australia right now,” she said. “Good welfare simply can’t be achieved in a battery cage because the animal welfare issues are inherent to the system itself – restricted movement, constantly standing on a wire floor, and no ability for a hen to perform natural behaviours like perching, nesting and stretching and flapping her wings. "So to finally see a phase out date put in place is very significant and we welcome today’s news.” Egg Farmers of Australia, CEO Melinda Hashimoto slammed the new guidelines, labelling them a ‘slap in the face’ for our nation's cage egg farmers. “Unfortunately, the review totally ignored evidence on why conventional cages should continue until 2046,” Ms Hashimoto said "It’s 10 years too early and could drive many family egg farmers to the wall. "This is because bank loans can spread over 30 years for existing cages and equipment. Farmers now don’t have time to pay-off that debt before they must dump their cages.” https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/animal-welfare-groups-major-win-battery-caged-hens-banned-by-2036-after-lengthy-battle-between-egg-industry-and-animal-welfare-groups/news-story/10da3d885001ecf00be5d8e412fb1548

It was Thursday afternoon, and, not for the first time, Fox News host Jessica Tarlov was pursuing a line of reasoning not often heard on her network. “If this was actually an illegal search, which is what he’s saying it was, you could bring that to court,” Ms Tarlov said during a discussion of the FBI’s serach of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on the programme The Five. “And his lawyers are not doing that. They’ve had ten days now to do that and they’ve done nothing.” That’s as far as Ms Tarlov made it before she was interrupted by a fellow panelist. “This is nothing but process,” Greg Gutfeld said moments later. “We have to start thinking about people instead of boxes of paper, and I’m going to go back to my original point: I wish Merrick Garland was agonising for weeks over riots, or over smash-and-grab, or over the ten percent rise in rape in New York City. Instead, they are so focused on Trump that that’s the only criminal they see.” Mr Gutfeld concluded his remarks by looking into the camera and announcing that Mr Garland, and, persumably, liberals at large believe that Trump supporters are “worse than Hitler.” This is not the first time that Ms Tarlov has incurred the wrath of her colleagues on the right wing network. Last week, shortly after the FBI executed its search, Ms Tarlov challenged former judge Jeanine Pirro on an assertion that the FBI could have planted evidence on Mr Trump’s property during the search. “[FBI Director] Christopher Wray is a Trump appointee,” Ms Tarlov said. “Christopher Wray is as much a part of the Deep State as the rest of them,” Pirro shouted in response. Ms Tarlov also wound up her conservative co-hosts by asserting that Mr Trump clearly had not been fully cooperating with law enforcement over the course of a tense segment that at several points saw Ms Tarlov’s colleagues shout her down. Ms Tarlov’s presence and willingness to challenge Mr Trump during Fox News’ daytime programming has boosted her profile while showing the lengths to which Fox News personalities will go to defend Mr Trump even as other po[CENSORED]r Republicans like Florida Gov Ron DeSantis prepare to challenge him for the Republican nomination in 2024. In addition to her Fox News duties, Ms Tarlov is a political strategist who also serves as head of research at the women’s magazine Bustle. Ms Tarlov and her Fox colleagues may have plenty more to discuss soon: a judge is reportedly considering releasing a partial version of the affidavit connected to the search warrant that allowed the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago. https://www.yahoo.com/now/fox-news-pundit-driving-colleagues-042243329.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGEwNmXm71S0C4cQXr4t_CzA9c8mpjPEvKlAxKQavk3xJI6u8_7DE2EZJpK2XgI1DfswVy4BFRwaUqknGlXehPJfZlb-l_9TmxriSZGduyBdsIDvfaXAKngzdC3Bj2A-PRk4C7gRUgyhewmxd8uGM0zb3s2TgN8dNiRRHWXa-MQf

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