Puerto Rico labor deal emerges as dredging disputes arise in New York and Florida while Jones Act repeal studies warn of US-flag fleet demise.
how this picture was made
Painted by seedream-v5-pro on api.venice.ai, 2026-09-12 00:40Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A stormy sky looms over a bustling shipyard where workers in orange vests assemble a large vessel as a dredger churns the water in the foreground and a cargo ship sails in the distance under a faint rainbow.
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 stormy sky looms over a bustling shipyard where workers in orange vests assemble a large vessel as a dredger churns the water in the foreground and a cargo ship sails in the distance under a faint rainbow. 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)
cf97f87ecbf58eaf177cf92c6ceb7e00ea46d1573f7f147fc45fde9ac2fded3b
Truck drivers face cabotage accusations as Jones Act debate widens
US authorities accuse drivers of hauling domestic goods after international deliveries, while a proposal to exempt foreign-built ships from the 1920 law gains attention.
By Marin Whitlock · 4wUS authorities are accusing truck drivers of violating domestic cabotage rules, alleging they transport goods within the country after completing international deliveries. The drivers say only ICE agents are harassing them.
The accusations come as the Jones Act, Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, remains the core cabotage law for waterborne trade. It requires all goods moved between U.S. ports to travel on U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned, and U.S.-crewed ships. Cabotage is the transport of goods or passengers between two points in the same country by a vessel registered in another country. The law was reinstated after World War I and expanded cabotage restrictions.
A proposal now on the table would grant an exemption for foreign-built vessels registered in the U.S., flying the U.S. flag, with U.S. owners and crew to carry cargo between the contiguous and noncontiguous jurisdictions. The read here is that the truck driver case and the shipping exemption push both point to the same pressure: a 1920 law designed for a different era is being tested on land and at sea. U.S. flag ships cost more to operate than international competitors because of full U.S. crews and citizenship rules. That cost advantage for foreign operators is what the cabotage rules are meant to block, and what the exemption would partly undo.
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