By Deidre McPhillips, CNN

(CNN) — US Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, died on Saturday night from a tear in his artery, according to preliminary findings from a medical examiner.

Aortic dissection is rare, and life-threatening in most cases, experts say. The acute event happens quickly but there are steps you can take to lower your risk.

What is an aortic dissection?

The aorta is the largest blood vessel in body and the first place blood travels through as it’s pumped from the heart to other parts of the body.

An aortic dissection occurs when there is a tear in the aorta, which disrupts the critical source of blood flow.

Dr. Barbara Hamilton, an assistant professor of cardiac surgery with a specialty in aortic surgery at the University of Michigan, says the aorta is like an onion with many layers. A tear can happen on the inner layer of the aorta, which would create a “false passage” for blood, she said — letting it travel between the layers of the blood vessel instead of reaching important organs.

A dissection can also tear through all layers of the aorta at once, which “basically is like your heart exploding,” said ​Dr. John Trahanas, a cardiac surgeon and co-director of the Aortic Center at Vanderbilt.

An acute emergency

An aortic dissection typically happens suddenly, often without warning.

“It’s not something that is slowly progressing over time,” Hamilton said. “There isn’t this insidious, creeping, on-off chest pain that’s been lingering. When it hits, it’s usually a 10 out of 10 pain.”

It can seem a bit like a heart attack or stroke, experts say. Most often, there is chest pain that radiates to the back. It sometimes presents as leg pain or leg numbness, if the tear is preventing blood from traveling throughout the body more broadly.

About half of the people who have an aortic dissection will die before they’re able to receive any emergency care because it is such a sudden and severe event.

But for others, receiving care quickly is critical.

Emergency surgery to repair the artery needs to happen within the first couple of hours, Trahanas said. The vast majority of people who are able to have surgery — about 80% — will survive, he said. But the risk of dying increases about 2% for every hour that surgery is delayed.

High blood pressure is a key risk factor

Aortic dissection is rare, but it is more common among men and risk can increase with age. It may also be triggered by a particularly stressful situation among people who have high blood pressure at baseline. According to the medical examiner, Graham’s aortic dissection was “due to Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease.” Atherosclerosis — a condition where fats and cholesterol build up on the artery walls — is also a risk factor.

Hours before his death, Graham had returned from Kyiv, one of many he visits he had made since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“One might imagine that (Sen. Graham) had a stressful meeting in Ukraine,” Trahanas said, noting that he does not know the specifics of Graham’s case. If his blood pressure was up, it could have caused a tear, “which is a very, very sudden event that unfortunately can be f

CNN

By Eric Bradner, Kevin Liptak, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Monday he recommended to South Carolina’s governor that Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, be appointed to serve in the late lawmaker’s seat after he suddenly died over the weekend.

“I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!”

Under state law, McMaster can appoint a temporary replacement to fill Graham’s vacant seat. But because Graham was up for reelection this year, his death will kick off a sprint primary election to replace him on the November ballot.

McMaster has scheduled a 4 p.m. ET press conference to announce his pick. Ahead of the press conference, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN’s Dana Bash that he spoke Sunday with both Nordone and McMaster.

“I’ll let the governor make an announcement about that, but that certainly in my view makes a lot of sense,” Thune said. “In many respects, it would be a way of extending Lindsey’s legacy here and certainly something that, if that’s what they decide to end up doing, I think there’d be a lot of support for it.”

The governor and Trump are longtime allies. Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he nominated South Carolina’s former governor, Nikki Haley, as his US ambassador to the United Nations in his first term to elevate McMaster, who was then the lieutenant governor.

Who is Darline Graham Nordone?

Graham and his sister were close their entire lives, his sister told CNN’s Dana Bash in a 2015 interview after her brother launched his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

“Even when my parents were alive, they worked really long, hard hours running a small business. So even then, he was a caregiver to me,” she said.

The same year, the unmarried Graham was asked by the Daily Mail Online who would be his first lady.

“Well, I’ve got a sister. She could play that role if necessary,” he said.

The two grew up in a single room behind the Sanitary Cafe — a bar, pool hall and liquor store their parents ran in Central, South Carolina.

After their parents died within 15 months of each other, Darline became orphaned at age 13 in 1976. Graham — the first in his family to attend college, and a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps — became Darline’s legal guardian. That enabled Darline to access her brother’s military benefits, she told CNN in 2015.

She said being adopted by her brother “was a little odd” at first, but she came to understand “it makes perfect sense.”

“I knew he was doing what he could to

By Annie Grayer, CNN

(CNN) — US Capitol Police arrested a man at the Capitol’s north barricade who they said had a firearm, which is prohibited on Capitol grounds.

CNN captured video of the man being taken into custody. It shows six officers surrounding an SUV, two of whom have their guns drawn and pointed at a man emerging from the driver’s side with his hands above his head.

The man walks backward away from his car and officers lower their weapons. Then a group approaches the man and cuff his hands behind his back, as more officers arrive on the scene.

The man appears to talk with one officer, who gestures toward the inside of the vehicle. A dog sitting inside the vehicle barks at an officer through an open window.

Capitol Police said the north barricade would be closed while they investigate, and staff and other personnel were advised to avoid the area.

Police did not identify the man who was taken into custody.

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By Tal Shalev, CNN

(CNN) — The commemoration of Israel’s most famous military operation should have been a moment to celebrate for Matan Vilnai. Instead, the deputy commander of the Entebbe raid – in which commandos rescued 102 hostages – boycotted the ceremony, along with many of the soldiers who took part in the daring mission.

“What exactly is there to celebrate – an operation from 50 years ago? I haven’t celebrated since October 7,” Vilnai, a retired general from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN. “We have thousands of soldiers fighting right now, thousands of reservists serving – and they’re celebrating?”

On July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos flew nearly 2,500 miles across largely hostile airspace, landing in darkness at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. In less than an hour, they freed 102 hostages held by Palestinian and German hijackers who were demanding the release of dozens of convicted terrorists. The plane had been hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and diverted to Entebbe.

Three hostages were killed during the operation, as was its 30-year-old commander, Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, who became a national icon. Operation Thunderbolt – known in Hebrew as the Entebbe raid – was subsequently renamed in Netanyahu’s honor as “Operation Yonatan.”

Entebbe became one of the defining moments in Israel’s national story, a symbol of a country’s promise to go anywhere, and take extraordinary risks, to protect its citizens and bring them home.

It also marks the beginning of another story: that of Netanyahu’s younger brother, Benjamin, who entered public life in the shadow of Yoni’s death and would become Israel’s longest serving prime minister.

Half a century later, that legacy is fraught, mirroring Israel’s deep internal divisions. At a state ceremony marking the anniversary on Sunday, dozens of the operation’s own veterans – senior commanders and commando soldiers who stormed the airport that night, and even some of the hostages they saved – boycotted the event, hosted by President Isaac Herzog, in protest of its guest of honor: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There isn’t a day I don’t think about Yoni, there isn’t a day that I don’t consult with Yoni,” Netanyahu said at the ceremony, connecting the Entebbe raid to Israel’s campaign against Iran. The 1976 operation, he said, “turned the impossible into possible” and demonstrated that terrorism must be confronted with force. “This is what we are doing. We are systematically crushing the Iranian axis of evil, who tried to advance a plan to destroy Israel.”

But most of the men who once served beside his brother were not there to hear his speech.

“We refuse to serve as a window dressing,” the veterans wrote in an open letter, accusing Netanyahu of “abandoning” the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and of enabling mass draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, even as reservists serve repeated combat tours on multiple fronts.

“This is a matter of conscience,” Uri Sagi, a former military intelligence chief who commanded Golani forces in the 1976 raid, wrote on social media, explaining his refusal to sit alongside Netanyahu. Benny Davidson, who was 13 when he was rescued from Entebbe, also avoided the ceremony, saying he would not be part of “a display that covers a collapse of values and leadership.” Instead, he led a small, quiet protest outside the president’s residence.

The rift between Netanyahu and some of his brother’s former comrades has become increasingly open. In 2023, at the height of mass protests against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, members of the Entebbe rescue squad staged a demonstration at Ben Gurion airport, arriving in black Mercedes cars like the ones the commandos drove onto the Entebbe tarmac at the start of the operation.

“Back then we set out on ‘Operation Yonatan’; today we embark on ‘Operatio