Weekly News Montage — August 17–23, 2026

• Week start: 2026-08-17
• Week end: 2026-08-23
• Title/date text shown: WEEK IN REVIEW / AUG 17-23, 2026
• Saved image: My-Library/Images/News-Images/Weekly-News-Montage/Images/August_2026/Weekly-News-Montage_2026-08-17_to_2026-08-23.png

Selected stories and sources

1. U.S. national debt surpassed $40 trillion — Associated Press
2. U.S. imposed 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian goods after talks collapsed — Associated Press
3. Hawaii recovered from Hurricane Lala as Tropical Storm Moke brought another flood threat — Associated Press
4. Tens of thousands in northwest Indiana remained without power after deadly storms — Associated Press
5. Four states took Meta to federal trial over alleged harms to children — Associated Press
6. Federal investigators examined a fatal small-plane/police-helicopter collision in Pennsylvania — Associated Press
7. Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily allowed White House ballroom construction to continue — Associated Press
8. A federal judge vacated the suspension of immigrant-visa processing for nationals of 75 countries — Associated Press

Generation and delivery

• Engine: built-in gpt-image (recovered from session transcript)
• Canvas: 1536×1024 PNG, RGB, 3:2 landscape
• Prompt record: script/logs/weekly-news-montage/gemini-prompt_2026-08-17_to_2026-08-23.txt
• Recovery: the required post-RUN_START ig_*.png freshness query returned no result after the initial render and one retry; recovered the last image from the current Codex session with codex_extract_images.py, then normalized it with Pillow LANCZOS.
• Validation: passed visual inspection for unified scene, exact title/date, legible story labels, no grid/panel borders/numbered boxes, no recognizable real-person likenesses, and detailed editorial-cartoon quality.
• Commit/push result: artifact commit 0afdf241 pushed successfully to origin/mike_desktop before email.
• AgentMail email result: attachment sent successfully through Resend; message ID 967b2c6e-24ff-4082-a5ed-a3b4ffcbd61a.
• Issues: built-in persistence filename bug required session-transcript recovery; no Gemini fallback used.