Iran-US tanker attacks escalate in Strait of Hormuz while Cyprus and US agree to advance maritime cooperation and the Jones Act raises costs for American ports.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-17 00:34Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A massive oil tanker navigates through the crowded Strait of Hormuz as a US Navy escort ship sails alongside, with a Cyprus-flagged vessel in the distance, under a darkening sky with stormy weather approaching, amidst a flurry of seagulls flying overhead.
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 massive oil tanker navigates through the crowded Strait of Hormuz as a US Navy escort ship sails alongside, with a Cyprus-flagged vessel in the distance, under a darkening sky with stormy weather approaching, amidst a flurry of seagulls flying overhead. 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)
8ddcf10486e92a2e2d84b39fbd1c594db42ca89bb9442064089c7dac9d2ed8d3
The Jones Act costs Alaska billions. The evidence is decades old.
A 1988 GAO study found the Jones Act's U.S.-build requirement cost Alaska about $163 million, equivalent to 2% of the state's personal income, and the law still drains the state today.
By Marin Whitlock · 3wThe Jones Act has cost Alaska real money for decades. The evidence is not new. It is old, and it was produced by the government itself.
In 1982, the Alaska Statehood Commission estimated the law drained $225 million a year from Alaska's oil industry and $41 million from other sectors. In 1986, the U.S. Forest Service put the cost to the state's timber industry at $4.77 million annually. In 1988, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the Jones Act's U.S.-build requirement cost Alaska about $163 million, equivalent to 2% of the state's personal income. These are not estimates from critics. They are official figures from federal and state agencies.
The law has not gotten cheaper. A 2022 GAO report found the additional annual cost of operating a Jones Act-compliant vessel was about $6.2 to $6.5 million, or nearly $17,000 per day. A 2020 Congressional Research Service study calculated the price of a US-built tanker is about four times the global price, and a US-built container ship may cost five times the global price. The read here is that the same structural problem that cost Alaska $163 million in 1988 is still in place, and the price tag has only grown.
The Jones Act limits competition among cargo carriers, driving up prices for imports and exports. Alaska has known this for 40 years. The question is why the law is still on the books.
Read with its sources →