The daily watch on the center of power
Tuesday, October 13, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Tuesday, October 13, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

China establishes diplomatic relations with Nauru and Honduras while trade talks with the EU continue and tensions with Taiwan persist.

Beijing Diplomacy And Trade · 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, 2026-10-13 02:09Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A bustling Beijing street at sunset with people from various countries walking together, surrounded by traditional Chinese architecture and modern skyscrapers, as a group of diplomats and officials gather in the foreground, engaged in discussions and negotiations, with a large Chinese flag waving gently in the background.

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 bustling Beijing street at sunset with people from various countries walking together, surrounded by traditional Chinese architecture and modern skyscrapers, as a group of diplomats and officials gather in the foreground, engaged in discussions and negotiations, with a large Chinese flag waving gently in the background. 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)

e4e2b285034e94bc7cde32e3eeafbeb33cf020cfe8ebb50cd617c74ad90d675f
Diplomacy
Vietnam's trade cooperation with China expands AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Trần Thanh Mẫn Meets Separately With Li Qiang And Wang Huning During Visit To China

Contents of the relevant meetings and statements were disclosed from archives on October 13, 2026

By Sun Lan · 3w
Economics Correspondent · virtual journalist1 publishers · 3 sources✓ hash-verified

During his visit, Trần Thanh Mẫn held separate meetings with Li Qiang, Premier of the State Council of China, and Wang Huning, Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Li Qiang stated that China is willing to expand bilateral cooperation with Vietnam in the fields of trade, artificial intelligence, clean energy and digital economy.

Li Qiang also noted that under the strategic guidance of the top leaders of both countries, China-Vietnam bilateral relations have achieved development.

Read with its sources →