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Episode Date: July 22, 2026

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Live from NPR news, I'm Lakshmi Singh. President Trump is threatening to bomb one power plant or bridge in Iran for every projectile Iran launches at the Strait of Hormuz. This comes as Iran and the U.S. continue attacks on each other's infrastructure for nearly two weeks straight. Here's NPR's Emily Fang. Iran says the U.S. has hit power plants and several bridges already in the last week and a half of daily strikes. And Iran has bombed water desalination plants and a gas. plant in the Gulf in retaliation. Under the Geneva Convention, which the U.S. is a signatory of, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure could constitute a war crime. The renewed hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have slowed ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and vessel tracking data shows some ships making a U-turn in another key channel, the Bab al-Mandab Strait,

after a Yemeni militant group, the Houthis announced a blockade of that waterway this week. Emily Fang and Pier News. Iran says the war has claimed thousands of its citizens' lives, including many civilians. The United States has now lost at least 18 service members today. President Trump attended the dignified transfer of four service members recently killed in action. Artificial intelligence giant Open AI is disclosing what it describes as a significant security incident. The company says an AI agent escape containment to target another company's digital infrastructure. Here's NPR's Jenna McLaughlin.

Experts at OpenAI say they were testing a combination of cutting-edge AI agents to see if they could conduct sophisticated targeted cyber attacks when the test went wrong. In a new blog post, the company says the AI agent was contained in an internal digital testing environment when it managed to find a way to connect to the open internet and then broke into another AI company called Hugging Face. It's unclear what specific technical instructions or prompts Open AI engineers were using that led to the incident. Though Hugging Face says it detected and contained the attack quickly.

OpenAI argues that the incident reveals the real-world capabilities of AI agents to conduct long-running complex cyber attacks and the importance of building safeguards into frontier models. Jenna McLaughlin, NPR News. Millions of people are in the path of a tropical storm that is expected to continue to affect portions of the northern Gulf Coast from the western Florida panhandle to south-eastern Louisiana through tonight. Megan Barowski, senior meteorologist at the

University of Florida is tracking Bertha the second name storm of the current Atlantic hurricane season. We don't expect widespread freshwater flooding from Bertha, but localized pockets of heavy rain could lead to isolated flash flooding over parts of Louisiana and the Texas Gulf Coast and the Texas Gulf Coast over the next few days. So overall, limited storm surge flooding, limited flash flooding from rainfall and tropical storm force wind gusts for the Central Gulf Coast and the Texas Gulf Coast. From Washington, this is NPR News. The former Navy SEAL who got fired last year for disagreeing with President Trump's suggestion that FEMA should go away is now a step closer to returning to the disaster response agency. Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton to take charge of FEMA permanently, and today a Senate panel advanced his nomination for a full Senate vote.

Former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife are set to go on trial in New York for drug trafficking next June. The date was set today during a brief hearing in Manhattan. federal court. Researchers have discovered a kind of transmissible skin cancer in catfish in a lake that stretches from the province of Quebec into Vermont. And P.R.S. I. Daniels says it may have important things to teach us about how tumor spread. More than a decade ago, all of a sudden, melanomas started showing up on brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphamagog. Peter Emerson is a fish biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife

Department. It looks like black tar on the skin. Not very pretty. The melanomas don't appear to be caused by anything in the environment. Rather, when researchers sequenced the DNA of the fish and their cancers, they found the tumors resembled one another closely, suggesting the cancers are clones that likely arose in a fish some time ago and have been spreading from catfish to catfish ever since. The research may provide clues about how cancer migrates. and metastasizes within our own bodies.

Ari Daniel, NPR News. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News.