NPR News Now - NPR News: 07-22-2026 8PM EDT

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Janine Hervst. The Trump administration has signed a nuclear power agreement with Saudi Arabia that the kingdom says will enhance their cooperation on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The U.S. Energy Department says it could lead Saudis to enrich their own fuel from nuclear reactors, which has U.S. lawmakers worried that that could lead to a nuclear weapon or at the very least heightened tensions in the Middle East. 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. And peers Emily Fang has more. 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 Peer News. Artificial Intelligence Giant Open AI says its AI models went rogue during testing, triggering a significant security incident at a startup. And here's Jenna McLaughlin has more. 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. 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 and PR News. Tropical storm Bertha made landfall this afternoon east of New Orleans. And while the storm is weakening a bit as it moves to the west, officials are warning people to turn. remain vigilant as heavy rains and high winds are possible along with a storm surge.

Meteorologist Megan Borowski. 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 South Texas Plains over the next few days. The National Hurricane Center says tropical storm warnings and watches are up for parts of the Gulf. U.S. features contracts are trading lower at this hour. Dow futures down about 46. Points, NASDAQ futures down 57. This is NPR News.

A trial date has been set for former Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife on drug trafficking charges. It will happen June 1st. Maduro's lawyers say he will fight the charges on sovereign immunity grounds. His lawyers object to the U.S. military action that snatched Maduro from power. He and his wife, who are in a Brooklyn jail, have pleaded not guilty to charges that they cited with drug dealers in a multi-decade scheme to ship large quantities of the drugs to the United States. Researchers have discovered a kind of transmissible skin cancer in catfish in a lake that stretches from the province of Quebec into Vermont. And here's Ari Daniels says it may have important things to teach us about how tumors spread.

More than a decade ago, all of a sudden, melanomas started showing up on brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphromagog. 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. And I'm Janine Hurst, NPR News in Washington.