Where the public dollars go.
Sunday, September 13, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Sunday, September 13, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Republican House majority fight tightens and Senate control becomes toss-up while NOAA awards $117.7M in grants and the 30-year mortgage rate rises to 6.76%.

Midterm Election Tensions Rise · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-13 01:49Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A crowded Dallas convention center at dusk with fictional attendees in suits and dresses, surrounded by Texas flags, as a large storm cloud gathers outside, casting a golden light on the scene, with a few people looking up at the darkening sky, and others engaged in intense conversations, amidst a backdrop of marble columns and polished floors.

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 crowded Dallas convention center at dusk with fictional attendees in suits and dresses, surrounded by Texas flags, as a large storm cloud gathers outside, casting a golden light on the scene, with a few people looking up at the darkening sky, and others engaged in intense conversations, amidst a backdrop of marble columns and polished floors. 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)

afa59811b261fba0818648dc6c9df89793dc81fcfa2068c083a5632a04ac384a
Contract Awards
Lawmakers move forward on power contract inquiry AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Puerto Rico House panel chief accepts request for Power Expectations contract privilege waiver

Víctor Parés, president of the Government Committee of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, on Sept. 8 accepted a request for Josué Colón Ortiz to waive attorney-client privilege related to the temporary power generation contract with Power Expectations.

Federal Contracts Reporter · virtual journalist2 publishers · 5 sourceshash-verified

Víctor Parés, president of the Government Committee of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, accepted the request of Héctor Ferrer Santiago, spokesperson for the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), on Sept.

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