NPR News: 07-12-2026 4AM EDT

Dale Willman· Host0:01

Live from NPR News, I'm Dale Willman. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has died. His office says the seventy-one-year-old Republican died Saturday evening after what it called a brief and sudden illness. No other details about his death have been made public. Graham was first elected to the Senate in two thousand two, and he's been planning to running for a fifth term. Graham was most known for his hawkish foreign policy positions. He was also once a vocal critic of President Trump. Trump this morning called Graham a true American patriot. Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is once again closed. That country's military fired on a commercial ship in the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, saying it was using an unauthorized route. In response, the US military struck targets along Iran's coast. The renewed fighting is jeopardizing the already tenuous ceasefire. Dominic Tierney is a professor at Swarthmore College. He says reaching a peace deal is always difficult.

Dominic Tierney· Soundbite0:54

Arguably, the single most difficult task that a, an American president can face is extricating the US from one of these failed wars. The US was negotiating for two years to get out of the Korean War. It took five years to negotiate a way out of the Vietnam War. We spent three months in Vietnam just negotiating the shape of the table around which we would negotiate. And similarly, it took years to get out of Afghanistan. So this is not gonna be a, a quick process.

Dale Willman· Host1:25

Houston activists are educating the community about their rights when dealing