Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who spent more than two decades in the U.S. Senate and emerged as one of Washington’s most influential voices on defense and foreign policy, died Saturday night after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness. He was 71. A medical examiner’s preliminary findings pointed to an aortic dissection as the cause of death, according to officials familiar with the case. Graham had recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. It signed, then unsigned, and has spent two decades constructing a legal and diplomatic wall against the institution the statute created. The current confrontation — sanctions on court officials, visa bans, statutory authorization to extract Americans held at The Hague — is not an improvisation. It is the enforcement phase of a position Washington has held since 2002. That position rests on four arguments.

Donald Trump’s posture toward Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara has been striking even by Trump’s own standards. He has praised the Turkish leader as a “hell of a leader” and a good friend, floated reversing a seven-year-old ban on F-35 sales to Turkey, and pushed a $700 million-plus jet engine deal through over bipartisan objections on Capitol Hill. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reasons behind it say as much about Trump’s own instincts as they do about Erdogan’s skill in exploiting them.

To the Members of Congress, Regulatory Agencies, and Policymakers, We write to urge restraint. As you consider new rules for artificial intelligence, we ask you to resist the instinct to regulate first and understand later. The history of transformative technologies — the printing press, electricity, the internet — teaches the same lesson every time: premature regulation calcifies incumbents, chills experimentation, and rarely protects the people it claims to serve. Innovation needs room to fail.

The Trump administration notified Congress on June 24 that it intends to sell more than $700 million worth of GE Aerospace F-110 engines to Turkey, enough to power roughly 80 units for Ankara’s indigenous KAAN fighter program. Congress now has a narrow, fifteen-day statutory window to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval. That window is closing, and it should be used. The case against the sale is not abstract. Turkey still operates the Russian-made S-400 air defense system it purchased in 2019 — the same purchase that got Ankara expelled from the F-35 program in the first place and triggered CAATSA sanctions that remain in effect today.

The same agreement produced two verdicts this week. Wall Street read the US-Iran memorandum of understanding as the end of a war, sent oil below $79, and pushed the major indices to records. A senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee read it as a hollow ceasefire that settles nothing. Both verdicts are defensible, because they are measuring different things — and the gap between them is the story.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures report for May arrives Thursday, June 25, and it is the strangest kind of market event: a number almost designed to be ignored. It is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, it lands with equities at record highs, and it will almost certainly run hot. None of that should matter, because the force that will make it hot has already reversed. The headline is stale before it prints May is the reference month, and May was the peak of the energy shock.

A federal judge in Delaware dismissed Raymond Epps’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News on May 8, marking the second time U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Hall has thrown out the case. The ruling ends Epps’ second attempt to hold the network accountable for broadcasts that portrayed him as a government agent who helped stage-manage the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot on behalf of federal authorities. Epps, a former Marine and onetime Trump supporter, brought the lawsuit after Fox — most prominently through Tucker Carlson’s prime-time program — repeatedly promoted the theory that Epps was an undercover FBI operative or government plant deployed to instigate the insurrection and redirect blame away from Trump supporters.

The Justice Department’s sustained effort to criminally prosecute former FBI Director James Comey has now produced a measurable institutional cost: more than a half-dozen prosecutors have been demoted or pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, others are weighing departures, and at least one major case has been disrupted. The campaign against Comey, spanning two separate indictments across nine months, has accomplished less legally than it has damaged the office pursuing it.

The United Nations has a structural absurdity problem, and it is no longer possible to dismiss it as an anomaly. Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, a country that executed 65 women in 2025 alone and enforces a system its own UN Special Rapporteur has called “gender apartheid” — now sits on UN bodies shaping policy on women’s rights, nuclear nonproliferation, and terrorism prevention. Rep. Brian Mast and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are not wrong to ask whether this is satire.