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A popular YouTube streamer posted on social media that he “almost [died] today” after Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies drew their weapons on him and briefly detained him Sunday afternoon in what he said appears to be a swatting incident.

Rapper DDG posted on a YouTube video that he was at a paintball tournament in Castaic when police surrounded him and other participants.

“I turned around and there’s like six police cars and I’m like, ‘OK, what’s going to happen?’” he said in the post.

DDG said he expected law enforcement would inform him of what was happening. Instead, he said, he was detained without an explanation.

Video on social media shows DDG being searched and being walked to and placed inside a sheriff’s vehicle just before 6 p.m.

“Bro, he pulled up. Ain’t no ‘what’s up,’ ain’t no nothing, ain’t no, ‘dude, we got a call.’ Nothing,” DDG said.

He then mimicked the pointing of a gun and said police yelled at him, “Hands in the air!”

DDG said that he had “just got done smoking … so, you’ve got to think what’s going through my mental, bro.”

He didn’t elaborate on what he was smoking but added, “I’m thinking to myself the whole time, ‘is this real?”

Multiple calls to the Sheriff’s Department’s Santa Clarita station went unanswered. The department’s main media relations office said it had no information about the incident.

As he sat in the back of the sheriff’s vehicle, DDG said, he told deputies he believed he was being swatted, which occurs when a false report of a crime or emergency is made to provoke an aggressive law enforcement response.

The most extreme examples of swatting have involved responses from Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, teams.

While sitting in the sheriff’s vehicle, DDG said, he read information about the potential swatting call on an open sheriff’s laptop. He believed someone provided the Sheriff’s Department with a description of the exact type of car he drove. He added that whoever called in the complaint said that the rapper was armed and was going to hurt himself and others.

DDG said he was held for 20 minutes before being released.

“Enjoy life, life life like there’s no tomorrow,” he said on his stream, “because you never know.”

Tuesday night, Gustavo Dudamel was back at the Hollywood Bowl. This summer is the 20th anniversary of his U.S. debut — at 24 years old — conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and becoming irrepressibly besotted with the amphitheater.

He walked on stage, now the proud paterfamilias with greying hair and a broad welcoming smile on his face as he surveyed the nearly full house. The weather was fine. The orchestra, as so very few orchestras ever do, looked happy.

For Dudamel, his single homecoming week this Bowl season began Monday evening conducting his beloved Youth Orchestra Los Angeles as part of the annual YOLA National Festival, which brings kids from around the country to the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood. But it is also a bittersweet week. Travel issues (no one will say exactly what, but we can easily guess) have meant the cancellation of his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela‘s trip to the Bowl next week. Dudamel will also be forced to remain behind with them in Caracas.

After 20 years, Dudamel clearly knows what works at the Bowl, but he also likes to push the envelope as with Tuesday’s savvy blend of Duke Ellington and jazzy Ravel. The soloist was Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, whose recent recording of Ravel’s complete solo piano works along with his two concertos, has been one of the most popular releases celebrating the Ravel year (March 7 was the 150^th anniversary of the French composer’s birth).

Ellington and Ravel were certainly aware of each other. When Ravel visited New York in 1928, he heard the 29-year-old Ellington’s band at the Cotton Club, although his attention on the trip was more drawn to Gershwin. Ellington knew and admired Ravel, and Billy Strayhorn, who was responsible for much of Ellington’s music, was strongly drawn to Ravel’s harmony and use of instrumental color.

On his return to Paris, Ravel wrote his two piano concertos, the first for the left hand alone, and jazz influences were strong. Cho played both concertos, which were framed by the symphonic tone poems “Harlem” and “Black, Brown and Beige, which Ellington called tone parallels.

There has been no shortage of Ravel concerto performance of late — or ever — but Ellington is another matter. Although the pianist, composer and band leader was very much on the radar of the classical world — “Harlem” was originally intended for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony; Leopold Stokowski attended the Carnegie Hall premiere of “Black, Brown and Beige,” as did Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Frank Sinatra — Ellington never played the crossover game. The NBC “Harlem” never panned out and became a big-band score. Ever practical, Ellington, who composed mostly in wee hours after gigs, always wrote for the occasion and the players. He tended to leave orchestration to others, more concerned with highlighting the fabulous improvising soloists in his band.

The scores, moreover, were gatherings, developments and riffs on various existing songs. “Harlem” is an acoustical enrapturement of the legendary Harlem Renaissance and one of the great symphonic portraits of a place in the repertory. “Black, Brown and Beige” is an ambitious acoustical unfolding of the American Black narrative, from African work songs to spiritual exaltation with “Come Sunday” (sung by Mahalia Jackson at the premiere) to aspects of Black life, in war and peace, up to the Harlem Renaissance.

Both works are best known today, if nonetheless seldom heard, in the conventional but effective orchestrations by Maurice Peress and are what Dudamel relies on. The version of “Black, Brown and Beige” reduces it from 45 to 18 too-short minutes.

The primary reason for these scores’ neglect is that orchestras can’t swing. The exception is the L.A. Phil. With Dudamel’s surprising success of taking the L.A. Phil to Coachella, there now seems nothing it can’t do.

The time has come to commission more experimental and more timely arrangements. But even these Peress arrangements, blasted through the Bowl‘s sound system and with the orchestra bolstered by a jazz saxophone section, jazz drummer and other jazz-inclined players, caught the essence of one of America’s greatest composers.

Ravel fared less well. The left-hand concerto has dark mysteries hard to transmit over so many acres and video close-ups of two-armed pianists trying to keep the right hand out of the way can be disconcerting. This summer, in fact, unmusical jumpy video is at all times disconcerting.

Ravel’s jazzier, sunnier G-Major concerto is a winner everywhere. But for all Cho’s acclaim in Ravel, he played with sturdy authority. Four years ago, joining Dudamel at an L.A. Phil gala in Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cho brought refined freshness to Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. In Ravel at the Bowl, amplification strongly accentuated his polished technique, gleaming tone and meticulous rhythms, leaving it up to Dudamel and a joyous, eager orchestra to exult in the Ravel that Ellington helped make swing.

An appeals court has briefly extended temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 12,000 Afghans in the United States, hours before it was to expire.

Monday’s order came 60 days after the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Donald Trump announced that it was ending the legal protections for thousands of Afghans legally living in the United States.

The order by the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, granted an administrative stay on the termination until Monday after a request from the immigration advocacy organisation CASA.

The appeals court gave no reason for its decision but indicated it would be deciding what to do swiftly.

CASA had sought an emergency stay on Monday when the protection of Afghans was due to be terminated, court documents showed.

Its case also includes Cameroonians whose TPS is to end on August 4.

The immigrant advocacy group said the step to remove the status was arbitrary and discriminatory and would cause “irreparable harm” to those affected.

The court has asked both sides to submit briefs this week.

The Trump administration has until 11:59pm US Eastern time on Wednesday (03:59 GMT on Thursday) to respond.

A federal judge on Friday allowed the lawsuit to go forward but didn’t grant CASA’s request to keep the protections in place while the lawsuit plays out.

The stay is not a final decision but gives time for the legal challenge, said Shawn VanDiver, founder of AfghanEvac, the main coalition of US military veterans and advocacy groups that coordinates resettlements of Afghan refugees with the government.

“AfghanEvac stands firmly behind the legal challenge and calls on DHS and the Trump administration to immediately reverse course and extend TPS protections,” VanDiver said in an email to the Reuters news agency.

That status had allowed Afghans to live and work in the US and meant the government could not deport them.

Millions of Afghans who fled their country over previous decades are now being forced back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan from countries including Iran, Pakistan and the US.

Deportations of Afghans are also anticipated in Germany as its government seeks talks with the Taliban.

About 180,000 Afghans have come to the US since the Taliban retook control of the country in 2021. About 11,700 of them are currently covered by TPS.

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ended temporary protected status for Afghans, the department wrote in the decision that the situation in their home country was getting better.

“The Secretary determined that, overall, there are notable improvements in the security and economic situation such that requiring the return of Afghan nationals to Afghanistan does not pose a threat to their personal safety due to armed conflict or extraordinary and temporary conditions,” according to the May announcement.

But rights advocates said many Afghans who helped the US during its war in Afghanistan would be targets of the Taliban if they return home.

Particularly at risk would be women, whose rights the Taliban have rolled back since its return to power after the US withdrawal, rights groups said.

The International Criminal Court last week issued arrest warrants for two top Taliban leaders in Afghanistan on charges related to abuses against women and girls.

“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement.

The US homeland security secretary may grant TPS to people from specific countries.

Countries that are currently designated for TPS include Afghanistan, Myanmar, Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.

In addition to Afghanistan and Cameroon, the Trump administration has moved to end the designation for an estimated 260,000 Haitians and 350,000 Venezuelans.

The Trump administration has also announced it will revoke the two-year “humanitarian parole” of about 530,000 people in the US, including Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.