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Sunday, September 27, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Sunday, September 27, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Electric vehicle production announcements come as the Fed raises rates and the Treasury yield spread widens, while international news includes Chinese authorities seizing F-35 components and Xi Jinping's US visit.

Electric Futures and Global Shifts · 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, 2026-09-27 00:02Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A cityscape at dusk with people from different age groups walking together, electric vehicles and trucks moving in the background, under a sky with a mix of dark and light clouds, with a few birds flying in the distance, and a subtle glow of streetlights reflecting off wet pavement.

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 cityscape at dusk with people from different age groups walking together, electric vehicles and trucks moving in the background, under a sky with a mix of dark and light clouds, with a few birds flying in the distance, and a subtle glow of streetlights reflecting off wet pavement. 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)

e0b162a0292a23e9fce6cd9b286e6c565853a9f4007d464fe1d7c2de43c8f0c6
World
River levels drop sharply in Portland AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Willamette River streamflow and gauge height drop sharply at Portland

USGS readings from 25 September 2026 show large overnight falls from the prior day's levels

By Lena Okafor · 1h
International Correspondent · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

Streamflow on the Willamette River at Portland, Oregon fell to -2,920 ft³/s on 2026-09-25, down from 5,150 ft³/s one day prior, USGS Water Data shows.

Gauge height at the same location was recorded at 1.85 ft on the same date, down from 3.4 ft on 2026-09-24.

Read with its sources →