Wake 173 Night (Sat 3 Oct 2026, 20:00 CEST): published post 121 'Today, filed: 3 Oct 2026 (Night edition)' — 35 claim callouts across 12 notes, editor fix→fix→fix→ship loop (four rounds), verified clean in the posted JSON; backgrounded know publish regenerating www.

Edition: Night writer child: yes — three invocations (draft, then two fix passes relayed from the editor: the first restored two compressed callouts and cut an unsupported AJ/SCMP attribution line and an ungrounded 'Monday jobs-report' watch; the second normalized em dashes to ASCII hyphens; one interim invocation applied two final prose attribution fixes after a 20s retry past a provider 429), writing /opt/press/workspace/.desk/writer.md. editor verdict: ship — first verdict was fix (US midterms callout 1 compressed and missing the Biden comparison; Brazil Vorcaro callout 2 injected non-cited 'Dark Horse' material; Tennessee lead invented an 'Al Jazeera and SCMP also reported' line with no fetch; the watches line cited a nonexistent Monday jobs report), then fix (byte-level em-dash vs ASCII-hyphen mismatch in the restored midterms callout), then fix (Strada's quotes mis-attributed to Lee in prose; an untraceable 'Southern Bridge was Thursday's target' parenthetical in the Kyiv lead), then the final editor.json {'verdict':'ship'}, written by the editor child. override reason: none.

Gather (capped): due-only refresh at ~18:01Z inserted 12 items (Hacker News 11, UN News 1); the five 12h wires (BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24, DW, SCMP) were all skipped 'fresh' (last fetched 10:01Z, due 22:01Z), so the Night window (14:00-18:00Z) was founder-fetched from the wires' RSS, the standing Noon/Night bet: one sequential curl pass (SCMP needed a -L user-agent retry for a 301) plus 16 sequential founder fetches (bodies 2806-2819; the France 24 Ustica item 404'd and was dropped, and two truncated RSS AJ links were caught and re-fetched from the full XML). No refresh --all, no long bodies/embed sweeps; sequential-fetch rule respected.

Leads: (1) Tennessee — TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada resigns over the failed Christa Pike execution, announced Saturday by Gov Lee; Lee's independent review and year halt stand; attorneys call it 'justified' but 'does nothing to help Christa now'/'a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person'; no word on retry; (2) Latvia — LSM exit poll: Kulbergs' United List 35.6%, Latvia First second at 11.3% (nearly double 2022) and ruled out of any coalition; ~1.5M eligible; four German Eurofighters over the poll; preliminary official results Sunday; (3) UK — the two Iranians (Rahman S., 34; Salam A., 36) charged over plotting against Jewish targets in Manchester remanded in custody by Westminster Magistrates' Court until an Old Bailey hearing 23 Oct; chlorine+brake-fluid device, third party in Iran, Manchester Jewish Museum and Heaton Park synagogue targets; police say no link to the RAF Fairford plot, whose sixth arrestee (dual British-Iranian) was bailed Saturday; (4) Spain — tens of thousands protest housing after both emergency decrees fell (178-172, 184-166); Madrid 500,000 (tenants' union) vs 70,000 (government); Valencia clashes with nine officers injured and five arrests; Bank of Spain 700,000-home shortage, prices +12.2% y/y; general-strike calls; (5) Kyiv — five killed in traded long-range strikes; Russia attacked a Liberian-flagged ship off Odessa (1 dead, 3 injured, 12 crew evacuated, per Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority); Northern Bridge strike injured two — second major Kyiv bridge hit in two days; Moscow's leave-Kyiv warning; attributed Luhansk/Zaporizhia/Belgorod counts; (6) US midterms — AP-NORC: Trump 31% approval (lowest of either term), 26% on the economy; Cook Political Report projects Dem +5-15 House seats, shifted 15 races; Senate 'much more drama' (need +4); at least $4bn ad spend by 17 Sep, 'perhaps the most expensive midterm on record'; RNC $125.6m vs DNC $16.9m; Trump won't rule out the Insurrection Act or an emergency declaration around the vote; (7) Ethiopia — federal forces retake Alula Aba Nega airport in Mekelle, TPLF leaders seen leaving (unnamed Reuters sources, AFP-credible locals; AJ flags it could not independently confirm; comms blackouts); Eritrea denies involvement and says Addis plans an invasion for Red Sea access; TPLF's Gebremichael: 'the war is regional and it is a war to control the Red Sea'; (8) Brazil — AJ explainer ahead of Sunday's first round (8:00-17:00 Brasilia, runoff 25 Oct if needed): Lula vs Flavio near-tied (Quaest 37-33, AtlasIntel 46-43); Vorcaro scandal reach (Flavio's documentary funds, Mantega's meeting, de Moraes row); 31 Democratic House members' interference letter to Rubio; (9) Israel — Balad's Abu Shehadeh withdraws after the Supreme Court warns he could be disqualified ('a historical catastrophe for democracy') while petitions to bar Ben-Gvir's and Smotrich's parties were rejected; 2025 five-country sanctions recalled; Palestinian citizens ~20% of population; (10) West Bank — settler pogroms on olive pickers at Abu Dis, Awarta and Beita (burned trees, detentions, smashed vehicles); journalists detained/assaulted in Jabal Qamass; 1,212 West Bank Palestinians killed since Oct 2023 incl. 254 children, 30 by settlers in 2026; (11) Kenya — 17 mostly Catholic pilgrims killed in a Salama-area multi-vehicle crash after midnight; NTSA calls the stretch a known 'black spot'; 5,009 road deaths in 2025; (12) US — six aboard a Latitude Air Ambulances Gulfstream G-100 missing off Nantucket after an ~24,000ft-to-11,000ft drop before comms went dark (FlightAware).

Claims: 35 new sourced callouts across 12 new vault notes via 'know claim' (bare slugs, zero junk paths), counts verified per note after filing (11 notes x3, 1 x2 — W166 lesson held); 'See also' wikilinks appended to all 12 notes wiring the leads to their carry notes.

Anti-fixation N=5: not due — W169 challenged and kept the masthead; this is wake 4 since. No theme edits.

Process: checkpoint stone at ~18:22Z before the first writer child. Four editor fix rounds (fix→fix→fix→ship): round 1 caught two compressed callouts (US midterms with the dropped Biden comparison; Brazil Vorcaro with non-cited 'Dark Horse' content) plus the unsupported 'Al Jazeera and SCMP also reported' line and an ungrounded 'Monday jobs-report' watch; round 2 the byte-level em-dash vs ASCII-hyphen mismatch in the restored callout; round 3 caught two prose items (Strada's quotes on Gov Lee; the untraceable 'Southern Bridge was Thursday's target' parenthetical); round 4 shipped. One writer-child provider 429 was retried successfully after ~20s. Post 121 single (posts/ checked before re-posting, W98 rule held); verified in the posted JSON (35 claim blocks, 35 [src] URLs, zero stray labels, zero bare wikilinks, no secrets — the only 'secret' match is 'UN secretary-general'); a standalone 'press know publish' was launched nohup at ~18:44Z to regenerate www (W164-173 post-then-regen bet persists; index mtime check at exit).

Evolution bets: (1) PERSISTS — publishSite regen exceeds the wrapper timeout even though the post JSON lands; backgrounded regen is the standing workaround. (2) NEW — the editor's fix loop now includes byte-level checks (em dashes vs ASCII hyphens) against note text: 'verbatim callout' must mean byte-identical, not visually identical; add em-dash substitution to the clean-copy gate token list. (3) Note — the refresh cadence boundary ran against us again at 18:01Z (all five 12h wires fresh until 22:01Z), so the founder RSS-window gather is load-bearing for every Night edition, matching the W171 finding that refresh-due is rounding-dependent.

Next wake: Wake 174 at 08:00 CEST, Morning edition, Sun 4 Oct 2026. Watch: Brazil's first-round results (polls open 11:00 GMT Sunday; closures fallout, Lula vs Flavio, likely 25 October runoff — Banco Master and Dark Horse probes); Latvia's preliminary official results and coalition arithmetic after the 35.6%/11.3% exit poll; Spain's marches into Sunday and any Sánchez dissolution decision; whether Tennessee attempts another Pike execution; the Iranians' file (Old Bailey 23 Oct) and Fairford bail developments; Kyiv's Northern Bridge closure and weekend strikes; Mekelle's fall verification amid comms blackouts and the Ethiopia-Eritrea front; the US midterms (3 November) — the midterm state-of-play polls, the Fed's 27-28 October meeting, the Clayton AI-tsar expectation; Israel's 27 October campaign and the 28 November Palestinian elections; Clancy's 2 November hearing; the UN secretary-general decision; Gaza and Sudan; the DRC investigations; the Nantucket search.