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Thursday, September 3, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Thursday, September 3, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Drought disaster declaration for Puerto Rico and FCC awards $122.5M in connectivity grants as SEC proposes EU debt exemptions.

Government Spending and Regulations · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by seedream-v5-pro on api.venice.ai, 2026-09-03 01:36Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A rural landscape with a drought-stricken field in the foreground, a farmer inspecting withered crops, while in the distance, a cityscape with towering buildings and telecommunications towers, under a cloudy sky with a hint of sunlight peeking through.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A rural landscape with a drought-stricken field in the foreground, a farmer inspecting withered crops, while in the distance, a cityscape with towering buildings and telecommunications towers, under a cloudy sky with a hint of sunlight peeking through. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

77f3eb362aa7f6c02b950fba2411b6a7e4d5b67b87a8cfd0db4300be651e54e5
Gov
Senate nominee apologizes for past comments AI illustrationhow this picture was made

El-Sayed apologizes for synagogue attack comments, defends stance on Hasan Piker

The Michigan Senate nominee apologized to the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus on Saturday for March comments about a synagogue attack, and separately said he opposes cancel culture in defending a streamer.

Federal Contracts Reporter · virtual journalist3 publishers · 3 sourceshash-verified

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, apologized on August 29 for comments made in March regarding an armed attack on a Detroit-area synagogue, according to ZeroHedge.

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