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Federal Agents and Los Angeles Police Arrest 18 in Drug Raid
Federal agents and local police officers conducted several raids at homes and businesses around Los Angeles on Wednesday in a drug enforcement operation that the authorities said was targeting a network of fentanyl and methamphetamine dealers concentrated in the MacArthur Park area near downtown.
The operation resulted in 18 arrests, including two people believed to be the main source of fentanyl and methamphetamine in the park, officials said. Seven other people are being sought. A federal complaint filed Wednesday charges 25 people with possession of a controlled substance with the intent to distribute and distribution of a controlled substance.
The historic 35-acre park, which includes a lake, was once an idyllic haven amid an urban landscape in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, just west of downtown. But it has been troubled in recent years by homelessness and drug and gang activity even as city officials have taken steps to address the issues.
News and police helicopters whirred overhead during an outdoor news conference next to the park as Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, was joined by Jim McDonnell, the Los Angeles police chief, and Anthony Chrysanthis, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles field office, in announcing the monthslong investigation that led to the arrests on Wednesday.
“Today’s operation is only one step taken by a handful of agencies working hard to alleviate anguish and the sense of hopelessness plaguing MacArthur Park,” Mr. Chrysanthis said.
Images captured by news helicopters showed D.E.A. agents in tactical gear raiding stores along a busy commercial corridor across the street from the park. Agents served search warrants at six businesses there, Mr. Chrysanthis said. More than 100 Los Angeles police officers participated in the operation, he added.
In court filings, prosecutors accused Mallaly Moreno-Lopez, 31, and her boyfriend, Jackson Tarfur, 28, of Los Angeles, of hand-delivering drugs to the businesses near the park for stashing and later distribution to street dealers. The authorities began their investigation in March, according to court filings.
If convicted, Ms. Moreno-Lopez and Mr. Tarfur face minimum 10-year prison sentences, officials said.
The authorities also raided the couple’s home in South Los Angeles, and the home of Yolanda Iriarte-Avila, 40, who court filings said had supplied Ms. Moreno-Lopez with methamphetamine. Officials said they had seized 40 pounds of fentanyl at Ms. Iriarte-Avila’s home in Calabasas on Wednesday.
The operation at MacArthur Park highlighted larger tensions between the federal government and California’s political leaders, whom the Trump administration has long accused of fostering lawlessness.
Last summer, the city was the scene of a federal show of force led by Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander-at-large who was subsequently ousted from the agency. In July, Mr. Bovino led heavily armed immigration agents and National Guard troops in a march across the park in an operation that led to a confrontation between Mr. Bovino and Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.
At the news conference, Mr. Essayli, an ally of President Trump, was joined by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former talk show host who now runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and has recently embarked on a campaign targeting hospice care fraud in the state.
Both men blamed state and local policies for the conditions at the park. Mr. Essayli opened the news conference by saying, “We’re here today because California policies have failed.”
Mayor Bass and city officials have tried in recent years to clean up the park, exploring the installation of a fence and ramping up the police presence in the area.
“As we work to change MacArthur Park so that it’s safe and clean for families, we have zero tolerance for people who deal deadly drugs and prey on the community,” Mayor Bass said in a statement. “We will continue to aggressively pursue our comprehensive strategy to restore MacArthur Park.”
The mayor, who is running for re-election, also acknowledged the operation when asked about it at a Wednesday evening mayoral debate, and pointed to her plan to hire more police officers.
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Have you lost or are worried about losing SNAP benefits? NPR wants to hear your story
SNAP is the country’s largest anti-hunger program, serving the 1 in 8 U.S. residents who live at or just above the poverty line.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America
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Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America
States are starting to enforce expanded work requirements and other changes for people receiving aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps.
Those newly at risk of losing the benefit include able bodied recipients aged 55-64, parents of children 14-17, veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young people who are aging out of foster care.
The changes are part of a 20% funding cut to the program under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
The NPR Network wants to hear from you about the threat of losing these benefits. If you’ve already lost SNAP, what does that mean for your current situation and future plans?
If you’re a state employee or work in food assistance, we’d also like to hear how you see these changes unfolding.
Fill out the form below and tell us your story. If you would be open to an NPR or member station producer contacting you for a story, please indicate that in the appropriate field. We will not use your submission in our story until we have obtained your consent to use the details that will be published.
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Tennessee Republicans Unveil New Congressional Map Carving Up Majority-Black House District
Tennessee Republicans on Wednesday proposed a congressional map aimed at diluting the state’s lone majority-Black district, a swift response to last week’s Supreme Court ruling that weakened a landmark voting rights law.
The new map slices Memphis, a majority-Black city, and Shelby County into three districts and likely will give Republicans the ability to flip Tennessee’s lone remaining Democratic seat, which includes the city.
Democratic lawmakers, whose opposition means little under a Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly, and Black leaders across Tennessee have compared the effort to carve up the Ninth Congressional District to Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics. They have accused conservatives of a power grab that undermines Black voters in Memphis, who have long favored Democrats.
Republicans, cheered on by President Trump, have rejected those claims. Instead, they have said, they are responding to the Supreme Court ruling, which raised the bar for what constitutes a racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Tennessee joins a series of states that have engaged in tit-for-tat redistricting battles since last summer, when Mr. Trump called for Republican-led states to redraw their maps and Texas became the first. Since then, new maps have materialized in half a dozen states controlled by both Republicans and Democrats, with more on the horizon, in the fight for Congress in November’s elections. Tennessee’s new map, if passed, would be the first directly responding to the high court ruling.
Under the map, Shelby County — which includes Memphis — is split into three districts. One district now runs along the state’s western border before extending down to include part of Williamson County, a suburban county just outside Nashville. Two other districts now share part of Shelby County and more rural, conservative communities in Tennessee.
“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be colorblind — the decision indicated states like Tennessee can redistrict based on partisan politics,” Speaker Cameron Sexton said in a statement. “Tennessee’s redistricting will reduce the risk of future legal challenges while promoting sound and strategic conservatism.”
The General Assembly is expected to vote as soon as Thursday.
The Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that included two majority-Black districts, arguing that it violated the Constitution by using race as the primary factor in redistricting. The ruling has set off a scramble across Southern states with Republican leadership, all of which have at least one majority-Black district, before the 2026 midterms.
Louisiana last week delayed its House primaries — though thousands of absentee votes had already been cast — to allow its Legislature to draft a new map. The South Carolina legislature is also facing conservative pressure to quickly adopt a new congressional map.
Alabama is barred by court order from adopting a new map until after the 2030 census but is trying to get the order lifted. In anticipation of a favorable ruling, lawmakers convened a special session this week with the goal of allowing the state to delay certain House primaries.
In Florida, debate over a new map that could give Republicans up to four new seats was underway as the Supreme Court ruling became public.
Mr. Trump spoke directly to Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, a Republican, to press for a new map the day after the ruling, and top Tennessee Republicans have raced to ease the way for rapid passage.
To do so, the legislature must first repeal a state law banning redistricting between census years each decade.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the State Capitol on Tuesday to voice opposition to a new map. Once inside, their chants and boos reverberated around the halls of the building. (On Tuesday, the House approved a strict rules package, which bans anyone removed from the gallery or committees for disorderly conduct from returning for the remainder of the session.)
“History will not look back kindly on you when you had an opportunity to do what was right and you chose to do something else,” said State Senator Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat, who delivered an emotional plea to Republican colleagues on Tuesday.
The Ninth Congressional District seat is currently held by Representative Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who has repeatedly maintained the support of many Black voters since he first won the seat in 2007. He is facing a Black primary challenger, State Representative Justin J. Pearson; both men joined a rally against the new map on Tuesday.
The new map is likely to scramble existing congressional races, including the one between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pearson. Under the proposed map, the proposed Ninth Congressional District would stretch much farther east along the Tennessee border with Mississippi.
It was not immediately clear whether every Republican would support the map, but given the party’s supermajority, some amount of defection will not matter.
The map also affects Middle Tennessee, where the legislature had already split the Democratic stronghold of Nashville among three Republican-leaning districts. The Fifth Congressional District, which is currently held by Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican, no longer contains parts of Davidson County, which encompasses Nashville.
Should a new map be passed and signed into law, a legal challenge is expected. The primary in Tennessee is currently scheduled for Aug. 6.
Leanne Abraham and Katherine Chui contributed reporting.
News
Pope Leo rejects claim he supports nuclear weapons after Trump tirade
Pope Leo has said he has never supported nuclear weapons and that those who criticise him need to speak the truth, in response to Donald Trump’s latest tirade accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics” with his stance on the Iran war.
Speaking to journalists on Tuesday night after leaving the papal retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the first US-born pontiff said: “The mission of the church is to preach the gospel, to preach peace.”
Leo, who is to meet the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in the Vatican on Thursday in an effort to ease tensions sparked by previous Trump broadsides, made a plea for honesty in political debate.
“If anyone wants to criticise me for proclaiming the gospel, let them do so with the truth: the church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, there is no doubt about that,” the pope said. “I simply hope to be listened to because of the value of God’s word.”
Earlier in the day, Trump told Hugh Hewitt, a prominent conservative radio talkshow host: “The pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don’t think that’s very good.
“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people. But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
In April, the US president lashed out at Leo in response to the pope’s criticisms of the war on Iran, calling Leo “weak on crime” and “terrible on foreign policy” and saying he had only been elected pontiff because Trump himself was in the White House. Trump then shared an AI-generated image of himself depicted as a Christ-like figure before deleting it.
Leo, who marks his first year as pope on Friday, often goes to Castel Gandolfo at the start of the week, leaving on a Tuesday night and on some occasions stopping to chat to journalists. But until Trump’s latest tirade against him, he had not been planning to speak this week.
“We were told yesterday that there would be no papal chat,” said Andrea Vreede, a Vatican correspondent for the Dutch public radio and TV network NOS. “But there was, because he thought it was necessary and it was necessary.”
Vreede added: “Things have become really tense because Trump isn’t talking about the church or Vatican, but Leo; he has made it personal. We’re back to the middle ages when holy Roman emperors and popes did this kind of [thing], used this kind of language.”
The Rubio meeting will be the first known private audience Leo has had with a member of Trump’s cabinet since the secretary of state and the US vice-president, JD Vance, met the pope a day after his papal inauguration mass in May last year.
A “frank” conversation is expected, the US ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, said, although Rubio has played down the rift between Trump administration and the Vatican, saying “obviously we had some stuff that happened” but there was “a lot to talk about with the Vatican”.
On Friday, Rubio will also meet the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whom Trump berated in April after she criticised his remarks against Leo. The president lambasted the Meloni government for not supporting the strikes on Iran and threatening to withdraw US troops from Italy as a result.
But Rubio’s meeting with the pope, which the US secretary of state has been seeking for weeks, could have an ulterior motive, said Vreede.
“For Leo, it’s important to have a photo moment with Rubio and then release a short statement saying they are continuing their dialogue and all want world peace,” she said. “Privately, it won’t be a nice talk, it cannot be a nice talk … but Rubio needs to keep the diplomatic channels with the Vatican open as he’s thinking about himself [ahead of the US presidential elections] in 2028.”
Trump’s rivalry with Rubio possibly triggered his latest outburst, Vreede added: “He believes in rivalry, in winning … perhaps he’s trying to interfere with Rubio because Rubio is being a bit too diplomatic.”
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