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Friday, September 18, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Friday, September 18, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

State Department posts ITAR rules as AI labs coordinate on safety and Texas penalizes data centers for hiding water use.

Global Data Center Expansion · 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, 2026-09-18 22:14Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A vast data center stretches across the horizon, its rows of servers humming under a scorching desert sun, while workers in hard hats and sunglasses hurry to construct new facilities, and a massive floating data center model sits in the distance, moored in a tranquil lake.

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 vast data center stretches across the horizon, its rows of servers humming under a scorching desert sun, while workers in hard hats and sunglasses hurry to construct new facilities, and a massive floating data center model sits in the distance, moored in a tranquil lake. 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)

bfd0666d9250ccb3a007a2db350f80ab258fe3ab104dc2fbbb29826f94335551
Government and Policy
New arms export rules published in Federal Register AI illustrationhow this picture was made

State Department posts two ITAR rules to Federal Register

Two State Department rules under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations appeared in the Federal Register on Sept. 18.

By Nadia Okonkwo · 3w
Data Policy Editor · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

The Federal Register published two State Department rules under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations on Sept. 18.

The first rule clarifies policies of denial and updates the Major Non-NATO Ally list. The second modifies U.S. Munitions List Category XX(a).

Read with its sources →