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LOS ANGELES — Iranian asylum-seekers who fled the Islamic Republic in hopes of resettling in Los Angeles have been arrested recently by immigration officials despite having what lawyers and advocates consider credible-fear cases pending in court.

The detentions follow a pattern developing throughout the country of targeting Iranians as tensions continue between the Trump administration and Iran.

Many of the asylum-seekers are Christians who fled Iran and its intolerant views toward non-Muslim religions. There are 4 million Iranian exiles worldwide, just under a third of them in the United States, according to Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry statistics from 2021.

The sudden detentions have prompted some Iranians to go on hunger strikes in custody and triggered at least one medical emergency during an attempted arrest.

On Tuesday, an Iranian woman experienced a severe panic attack after she witnessed her husband’s arrest near an area known as “Tehrangeles” because of its large Iranian population. The woman called her pastor, Ara Torosian, to help intervene, but he could do little as he watched her panic attack escalate into convulsions.

The couple’s lawyer asked that the woman and her husband remain anonymous for privacy reasons.

In a video recorded by Torosian and shared widely on social media, the woman lay on the ground spasming while masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hovered over her. Torosian can be heard pleading with them to administer medical aid. He can also be heard asking whether they know about the situation in Iran and why Christian Iranians fear returning to their native country.

According to Torosian, the woman and her husband are members of his church and entered the United States last year under CBP One, the mobile app the Biden administration launched to streamline the asylum-seeking process. President Donald Trump ended the program shortly after he returned to office.

The woman was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where ICE agents were met by immigrant advocates and detention protesters. Torosian said that he was not allowed into her hospital room and that immigration officials gruffly brushed away a nurse who tried to intercede on his behalf.

UCLA Health said in a statement that it treated a patient under federal custody and later released the person.

“Despite reports on social media, there is no ICE operation happening at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,” the hospital said.

A lawyer for the woman and her husband declined to comment. Immigration officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The incident left Torosian shaken, he said Wednesday.

He arrived in the United States in 2010 as a Christian refugee and is now a U.S. citizen raising two children in Southern California. But the recent immigration raids and arrests, coupled with anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, remind him more of Iran than he ever imagined possible, he said.

“I was seeing a woman on the ground and masked people who wouldn’t show their warrants,” he said. “I was just shocked. Am I in Iran or am I in L.A.?”

Another Iranian Christian family in Torosian’s parish were arrested this week during a scheduled check-in with immigration officials.

Seyedmajid Seyedali received a text over the weekend telling him to report to the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Monday with his wife and 4-year-daughter, said the family’s lawyer, Kaveh Ardalan.

Thinking it was a routine visit, the family of three left their dog at home. But when they arrived, they were taken to the basement and arrested despite having an asylum hearing scheduled for September, Ardalan said. They were transferred to a detention facility in Texas, where Seyedali’s wife is on a hunger strike, he said.

Ardalan said he has at least five Iranian clients who are seeking asylum and were arrested recently. He also has clients from Honduras and Venezuela with pending asylum cases who are now in ICE custody.

When he can, Ardalan said, he will ask immigration judges to release eligible families on bond. Torosian said his parish is working to collect enough to pay rent for Seyedali’s home should the family get released.

“I’m ready for the fight,” he said. “I’m standing for my people.”

Former “Blue’s Clues” host Steve Burns is starting a podcast that aims to continue conversations from the iconic Nickelodeon show, except now for grown-ups.

Burns, 51, who hosted “Blue’s Clues” from 1996 to 2002, is coming out with a new podcast this fall called “Alive” with Lemonada Media, according to a YouTube video he shared on Wednesday.

“It’s basically a societal requirement at this point that everyone has a podcast, so why don’t we have one?” he says in the video.

“It could basically be what we’ve always done. You and I have always been about this deep and curious investigation of our world in search of these little bits of information that lead to greater understanding,” he continues.

The weekly show will feature the actor speaking about adult topics.

“It used to be about shapes and colors and letters and numbers and vegetables and stuff, but now it could really be about death and sex and taxes and everything that makes it so weird and wonderful to be alive,” he says in the video.

The podcast comes years after an outpouring of support for Burns following a viral tweet in 2021. In a video, Burns addressed his departure from “Blue’s Clues” as the show celebrated its 25th anniversary.

“I mean, we started out with clues,” he says in the 2021 video. “And now, it’s what — student loans and jobs and families? And some of it has been kind of hard, you know? I know you know.”

“I wanted to tell you that I really couldn’t have done all of that without your help,” he adds. “I’m super glad we’re still friends.”

The host said during a 2024 commencement speech at SUNY Delhi in New York that he is regularly approached by adults who tell him how much the show mattered to them as children.

He also has become a regular presence on TikTok, where he dispenses advice, shares his fears and provides inspiration while taking time to listen to his nearly 4 million followers.

Burns hopes for the new podcast to continue what he started with “Blue’s Clues.” On the educational children’s show, he played a fictional version of himself, also named Steve, who followed paw prints that served as clues left by an animated dog named Blue.

He now joins a Lemonada Media lineup that also includes podcasts from the former Meghan Markle, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny.

WASHINGTON — Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate in the House, told NBC News on Wednesday she was going to seek another term in Congress.

A short while later, her office walked back the remarks.

It was the second time that’s happened this month.

Speaking to NBC News on Wednesday, Norton said, “Yeah, I’m gonna run for re-election.”

A spokesperson for Norton later told Axios that “no decision has been made” about seeking another term.

Norton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The conflicting responses from Norton and her staff echo a similar proclamation earlier this month.

On June 10, Norton said she planned to seek re-election, telling NBC News, “I’m going to run.” She also brushed off critics who raised questions about whether she should seek another term, saying, “I don’t know why anybody would even ask me.”

Hours later, Norton’s office said she wanted to run again but was “in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best.”

The questions over Norton’s future come at a pivotal moment on two fronts. The Republican-led Congress is seeking to impose its will on Washington by repealing local laws on policing and voting, and some city leaders have questioned whether Norton is the right person to lead the pushback. Meanwhile, Democrats are in the midst of a reckoning over age and power after President Joe Biden’s ill-fated attempt to run for re-election last year and the deaths of three House Democrats in office this year.

At 88, Norton is one of the oldest members of Congress.

A similar miscommunication over re-election plans took place with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who at the time was then the longest-serving senator, and her staff after a statement announced her retirement. Feinstein served in the Senate until she died in 2023 at age 90.

Norton has served in the House since 1991. Before she was elected to Congress, President Jimmy Carter appointed her as the first woman to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in 1977.

Sahil Kapur reported from Washington, Zoë Richards from New York.

HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam will remove the death penalty for eight offenses starting next month, including embezzlement and activities aimed at overthrowing the government, parliament said Wednesday, sparing the life of a tycoon in a $12 billion fraud case.

The National Assembly, the country’s lawmaking body, unanimously ratified the amendment to the Criminal Code earlier Wednesday to abolish the death penalty for the crimes, it said in a statement.

Other crimes that will no longer lead to the death penalty include vandalizing state property, manufacturing fake medicine, jeopardizing peace, triggering invasive wars, espionage and carrying drugs, the official Vietnam News Agency said.

The maximum sentence for these crimes will now be life imprisonment, the report said.

Those who were sentenced to death for these offenses before July 1 but have not yet been executed will have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, the report added.

These will include real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, the chairwoman of real estate developer Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group, who was sentenced to death last year on embezzlement charges.

Lan’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

“According to the amendment of the Criminal Code, her sentence will automatically be reduced to life imprisonment,” lawyer Ngo Anh Tuan, who is not part of Lan’s defense team, told Reuters.

Ten offenses will remain subject to capital punishment in Vietnam, including murder, treason, terrorism and the sexual abuse of children, according to the report. Drug trafficking will also remain a capital offense.

Capital punishment data is a state secret in Vietnam and it is not known how many people are currently on death row in the country. Lethal injection is the only method of execution after firing squads were abolished in 2011.

Denis Villeneuve is going from “Dune” to Bond.

Amazon MGM Studios announced Wednesday that Villeneuve will direct the next James Bond movie. The untitled film will be the first since the studio took creative reins of the storied film franchise after decades of control by the Broccoli family.

Producers Amy Pascal and David Heyman had maintained that before the next Bond is cast, they would develop a screenplay and find a director first. Now, they have one of the most respected blockbuster makers in Hollywood, who’s coming off a pair of widely acclaimed “Dune” films.

In a statement, the 57-year-old French Canadian filmmaker said he grew up watching Bond movies.

“I’m a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he’s sacred territory,” Villeneuve said. “I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honor.”

Since taking creative control of Bond in February, Amazon MGM has worked quickly to get the next movie going. The studio is also trying to win over fans skeptical of the new corporate leadership and the fearful of future spinoffs.

“James Bond is in the hands of one of today’s greatest filmmakers,” said Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios.

With Pascal and Heyman lodged as producers and Villeneuve behind the camera, the next Bond movie will have an enviable brain trust. Villeneuve beat out a field of directors floated for the movie including Edward Berger (“Conclave”), Paul King (“Paddington 2”), Edgar Wright (“Baby Driver”) and Jonathan Nolan, co-creator of “Westworld” and brother to Christopher Nolan.

“Denis Villeneuve has been in love with James Bond movies since he was a little boy,” said Pascal and Heyman. “It was always his dream to make this movie, and now it’s ours, too.”

No release date has been announced for the next Bond movie. Villeneuve will shoot the third “Dune” film this summer. If production on Bond began next year, a release sometime in 2027 would be likely.

Villeneuve’s first two “Dune” films have together surpassed $1 billion in box office worldwide and been nominated for a combined 15 Academy Awards, winning seven. His other films include “Blade Runner 2049,” “Arrival,” “Sicario,” “Prisoners,” “Enemy” and “Incendies.”

Amazon bought MGM Studios in 2022 for $8.5 billion, but didn’t gain creative control of the studio’s most prized asset until this year. Until this film, every Bond director has been handpicked by the Broccolis.

A person at a baseball game who ridiculed the dead mother of the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Ketel Marte has been banned by the Chicago White Sox and Major League Baseball indefinitely, the league confirmed Wednesday.

Marte was in tears on the field after the person attending the White Sox home game in Chicago on Tuesday made the remark, and Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo comforted him.

Marte’s mother died in a 2017 car accident.

The fan, whom MLB did not identify, made a derogatory remark about Marte’s late mother, MLB.com reported.

The White Sox ejected the 22-year-old man who made the comment. A team spokesperson said the man was “very apologetic and remorseful” and admitted it was inappropriate, MLB.com reported.

The White Sox showed their support for Marte during Wednesday’s second game of a three-game series, displaying on boards “Baseball is family” and “the White Sox community supports Ketel Marte.”

DULUTH, Minn. — An Alaska brown bear at the Lake Superior Zoo in northeastern Minnesota has a gleaming new silver-colored canine tooth in a first-of-its-kind procedure for a bear.

The 800-pound Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown — the largest dental crown ever created, according to the zoo.

“He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said Wednesday.

The hour-long procedure was done by Dr. Grace Brown, a board-certified veterinary dentist who helped perform a root canal on the same tooth two years ago. When Tundra reinjured the tooth, the decision was made to give him a new, stronger crown. The titanium alloy crown, made by Creature Crowns of Post Falls, Idaho, was created for Tundra from a wax caste of the tooth.

Brown plans to publish a paper on the procedure in the Journal of Veterinary Dentistry later this year.

“This is the largest crown ever created in the world,” she said. “It has to be published.”

Tundra and his sibling, Banks, have been at the Duluth zoo since they were 3 months old, after their mother was killed.

Tundra is now 6 years old and, at his full height on his hind legs, stands about 8 feet tall. The sheer size of the bear required a member of the zoo’s trained armed response team to be present in the room — a gun within arm’s reach — in case the animal awoke during the procedure, Routley said. But the procedure went without a hitch, and Tundra is now back in his habitat, behaving and eating normally.

Other veterinary teams have not always been as lucky. In 2009, a zoo veterinarian at Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, Nebraska, suffered severe injuries to his arm while performing a routine medical exam on a 200-pound Malaysian tiger.

The tiger was coming out of sedation when the vet inadvertently brushed its whiskers, causing the tiger to reflexively bite down on the vet’s forearm.

The 2025 NBA Draft is here, and it’s not all about the prospects’ basketball skills. Outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday, the next great players took the red carpet to show off their fashion sense and style.

Here were the best looks from Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, Ace Bailey and more.

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New York City’s high-profile mayoral primary this week shined a bright light on the nation’s ongoing experiment with ranked choice voting, reopening the debate over the relatively new, unique and complex system.

New York City is among the 63 jurisdictions — which include cities, states and counties — that have in recent years implemented ranked choice voting for some or all of their elections.

Advocates have argued the system gives lesser-known candidates greater opportunities to compete and encourages politicians to build consensus and broaden their appeal, since voters have the ability to choose more than one name on their ballots.

Critics have pointed out that tabulating ranked choice ballots takes longer and delays final results and contend the system sows confusion among voters.

Tuesday’s election may end up providing both sides with fresh data points for their arguments. Final results of the Democratic primary for mayor most likely won’t be known until next week, even as former Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded to state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Supporters of the system say the campaign to lead American’s biggest city — which used ranked-choice voting for just the second time in a mayoral primary election — shows voters and candidates alike are acclimating to the system.

“What we’ve seen in the mayoral race is a better understanding among more candidates of ranked choice voting,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog and reform advocacy group that has advocated for ranked choice voting.

“That ranked choice allows you to cross-endorse, allows you to speak to more voters, that you don’t just have to focus on the people who have already decided you are their one and only choice,” she said in an interview ahead of Tuesday night’s results. “We have seen that understanding really being applied more broadly in the mayoral primary.”

Lessons learned from 2021

The rules for ranked choice voting differ depending on where it’s used. In New York City, voters may rank up to five candidates in one race.

After the votes are tabulated, the last-place candidate is eliminated. Ballots from voters who supported that candidate then have their next choices counted. If no candidate has hit 50%, counting continues, eliminating another last-place candidate and counting the next-ranked choices on all those ballots in the following round.

Tuesday’s results showed Mamdani with 43.5% support in the first-choice count, compared with 36.4% for Cuomo. Since no candidate hit the 50% mark, city election officials will now begin to count voters’ second choices.

Mamdani, 33, who identifies as a democratic socialist, ran an energetic, digitally savvy campaign centered on tackling higher costs and progressive policy promises he said he’d pay for with taxes on the rich.

Deb Otis, the director of research and policy for the election reform group FairVote, said in an interview that the system, combined in New York City with the availability of public financing of campaigns, “lets candidates stay in the race and make their case to voters.”

That’s in part because the system offers candidates incentives to support one another. Mamdani secured cross-endorsements with several fellow candidates, meaning he and those candidates directed supporters to rank each other second on their ballots.

“If this were any of the cities that don’t use ranked choice voting, these progressive candidates would have been sniping at each other the whole time and pushing each other to drop out so that they don’t split the vote,” Otis said. “Instead, we see those candidates all able to run, instead of shoving each other out of the race. And I think that that’s better for voters.”

Critics of New York City’s system have emphasized the delays ranked choice tabulation creates in releasing official results — a particular concern amid the rise of false allegations of widespread voter fraud made by President Donald Trump and his allies.

“There’s already lots of questions of trust in the [election] process — we are at point in the world where trust in the democratic process is low and flagging,” said Sam Oliker-Friedland, the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, which opposes ranked choice voting as a one-size-fits-all concept. “Part of implementing it properly is finding a way to count ballots at relatively the same speed that we’re counting ballots now and not adding a week or more than week to the ballot-counting timeline.”

Pointing to evidence from New York City’s maiden voyage with ranked choice voting in 2021, critics have also suggested voters may not fully understand how the complicated system works.

In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, 13.4% of voters ranked only one candidate, according to a CUNY Graduate Center analysis of the results, because either they chose to disregard or didn’t know that they could rank more.

In other ways, it became evident that candidates and other power players in New York City politics learned lessons from 2021.

For example, high-profile Democrats — most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who backed Mamdani — issued their endorsements in detailed statements or videos that conveyed to voters how they should rank their slates of candidates.

And unlike in 2021, when two Democratic mayoral candidates effectively split the progressive vote, providing a clearer path for the more moderate Eric Adams, liberals this time worked together in a concerted anti-Cuomo effort.

Rising ranked choice voting enthusiasm, followed by a retreat

The heightened national political focus on New York’s mayoral race could breathe new air into the debate over ranked choice voting — the expansion of which has plateaued in the United States after an explosive start just a few years ago.

Less than three years ago, voters in eight jurisdictions passed ballot measures adopting ranked choice voting. They included Alaska, which became the second state to use it in state and federal elections. Maine has used the system in state and federal elections since 2018. New York City adopted the system in 2019 for just a handful of city primary elections, including the mayoral primaries, and used it for the first time in 2021.

Meanwhile, other advances put the number of cities and towns that switched to ranked choice voting by 2022 at more than 50.

Progressives initially embraced the system as a way to help curb the influence and success of more establishment-friendly candidates, and conservatives and moderates began to see opportunity in the system for a short period of time before they turned against it. Seventeen GOP-controlled states have enacted laws banning ranked choice voting, and the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution formally opposing it in 2023.

More broadly, enthusiasm soon faded. Most of the legislation that sprouted in 2023 to implement or expand ranked choice voting failed. Last November, voters in all eight states where advocates had placed election reforms including ranked choice voting on their ballots — a group that stretched across the political spectrum — roundly rejected the proposals. In Alaska, an effort to repeal the state’s two-year-old ranked choice voting system failed.

After having spent more than $100 million in support of the ranked choice voting ballot measures, advocates said their failure was a product of established interests’ pushing back against something new.

But critics argued that the system is simply not meant as a cure-all for elections everywhere.

“Everyone would love to find the sort of gadget that’s going to save democracy. But ultimately, there are no silver bullets that are going to make everything better,” Oliker-Friedland said.

“That was sort of pitched that way to voters last year, and that message correctly failed — there is no social reform that is a magic bullet that works everywhere,” he said. “We have to do the hard work of pairing it to particular contexts.”

Federal prosecutors want to tighten their case against Sean Combs, asking a judge to strike language regarding “attempted” kidnapping and arson from jury instructions, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

While Combs still faces the same racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking counts — which includes the kidnapping and arson allegations — prosecutors said in a filing to U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian that they understand “the Court’s desire for streamlined instructions” to jurors.

“Specifically, the Government has removed instructions from the charge relating to attempted kidnapping under both California and New York law, attempted arson under California law, and aiding and abetting sex trafficking,” the note said.

Closing arguments in the Combs case are set for Thursday.

“If you look at the letter, what the government is saying is that they’re dropping what I call the inchoate, the attempt versions of those crimes,” NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said.

“I don’t think they’re abandoning arson and kidnapping. What they’re abandoning are what we call the inchoate crimes, because inchoate crimes are complicated, and they (jurors) may struggle with differentiating between attempted kidnapping and kidnapping.”

Any effort to show an “attempted” bad act could confuse jurors when the prosecution is pressing for those “completed” actions, said former federal prosecutor Nadia Shihata.

“They’re no longer going to proceed under the ‘attempted’ theory of liability,” Shihata said. “So they’re, I assume, going to argue that this is a completed kidnapping, it’s a completed arson.”

The removal of an “attempted” crime could also signal a prosecutor’s confidence in having shown that the defendant succeeded in accomplishing the charged offense, said New York criminal defense lawyer Maria Cruz Melendez.

“If the completed acts have been proven in their mind (of the prosecution), then there’s no need to have the alternative instruction,” Melendez said.

“It’s clear that the judge in this case is asking them to streamline, and if they (prosecutors) feel confident in their case, that they’ve proven the completed act, then you don’t need aiding and abetting. You don’t need an attempted.”

The definition of “attempted” crimes has been vexing lawmakers and attorneys since their days in law school, according to Cevallos.

“It’s one of the most interesting law school discussions about the attempt, when does an attempt begin?” Cevallos said. ” You’ve obviously thrown a Molotov cocktail. But when does it begin? Does it begin when you go to the liquor store and buy the grain alcohol?”

The arson allegation stems from evidence that someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into Kid Cudi’s car in early 2012. The rapper, born Scott Mescudi, had dated Combs’ girlfriend Cassie Ventura.

Prosecutors had accused Combs of breaking into Kid Cudi’s Hollywood Hills home in 2011, before the attack on his Porsche in 2012.

Ventura had testified that a jealous Combs had threatened to blow up Kid Cudi’s car.