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Saturday, September 12, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Saturday, September 12, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

US rivers show mixed flows and the contiguous US posts warmest January-August on record, while Hawaii declares a state of emergency as Hurricane Lowell approaches.

Climate Shifts and Global Tensions · 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, 2026-09-12 00:05Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A warm golden light casts long shadows across a serene landscape of rolling hills and winding rivers, as a few people in the distance prepare for a storm, boarding up windows and securing outdoor items, while a lone figure in the foreground stands at the river's edge, gazing out at the water with a contemplative expression.

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 warm golden light casts long shadows across a serene landscape of rolling hills and winding rivers, as a few people in the distance prepare for a storm, boarding up windows and securing outdoor items, while a lone figure in the foreground stands at the river's edge, gazing out at the water with a contemplative expression. 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)

1c3d78583ff8f34959314702009a2f0850e650cedc09a9a51a7e029cd1341cb2
World
US and Israel launch war against Iran AI illustrationhow this picture was made

US-Israeli war against Iran began Feb 28 with attack that killed Khamenei

The conflict opened with strikes that killed Iran's supreme leader and senior military commanders, followed by a naval blockade in April.

By Lena Okafor · 2h
International Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 3 sourceshash-verified

The US-Israeli war against Iran began on February 28, 2026, with attacks that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and high-ranking military officials, according to multiple reports.

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