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Fernando Tatis Jr. hits 1st homer in a month in Padres’ loss
SEATTLE — Over the last month, Fernando Tatis Jr. has been a perfectly useful leadoff man. In the calendar month leading up to Monday’s 9-6 loss to the Mariners at T-Mobile Park, Tatis had reached base at a .406 clip. He’d been a constant threat on the bases. The Padres were 18-9 in that span.
Then again, he didn’t look much like Fernando Tatis Jr. during that stretch. Namely, because he wasn’t hitting home runs.
That changed on Monday night. Tatis snapped the longest homerless drought of his career at 128 plate appearances with his 416-foot drive just to the right of straightaway center field.
“Obviously, it felt good,” Tatis said. “Hopefully I can do it again. Very soon.”
The swing was trademark Tatis — violent and compact. He watched the ball for a few moments and dropped his bat with his left hand. A sigh of relief, perhaps.
“That’s what I’m capable of doing,” Tatis said. “So, ‘How can I stay consistent in that area?’ is going to be the big factor.”
It probably goes without saying that the Padres need Tatis as a power threat. Their 115 home runs are second fewest in the Majors, ahead of only Pittsburgh. That includes the four home runs they hit on Monday night in Seattle, one shy of their season high.
Just about everything else on the Padres’ offense works. They’re elite at making contact and putting the ball in play. They run the bases well and manufacture runs. But the power has been lacking.
To some extent, that’s a creation of the ballpark they call home. Petco Park has notoriously suppressed home-run totals through the years.
“We know there’s power on this team,” said Gavin Sheets, who homered in the second inning and just missed another in the eighth. “A little bit is playing to our ballpark. You can’t go into Petco and try to hit home runs. … We’re an offense that’s built to our ballpark and has a really good, solid approach. We have plenty of power up and down this lineup.”
No, these Padres are not built to slug. But given their personnel, they should rank higher than 29th in homers — probably significantly higher. The most obvious source of that additional power would be Tatis.
Then again, the Padres don’t want Tatis changing much else about who he’s been. Entering play Monday, his 13.8% walk rate was easily a career high and his 17.9% strikeout rate was easily a career low.
“That would be huge,” said manager Mike Shildt when asked about a potential power surge from Tatis. “But, again, I love his at-bats. I love what he’s doing. His swing decisions have been elite almost all year.”
Tatis’ two-run home run was the last of three Padres homers in the second inning, their first three-homer inning of the season. They grabbed a quick 4-1 lead — and then quickly relinquished it. Starter JP Sears allowed four runs and exited in the fourth. Reliever David Morgan, who has largely been excellent in the middle innings this season, allowed a career-high five runs.
The Padres did their best to claw back. Ramón Laureano continued his red-hot start to his Padres tenure with a home run leading off the seventh. Then, with two men aboard in the eighth, Sheets launched a towering, majestic drive down the right-field line, headed toward the pole. It snuck foul by inches.
“Fair until the last second,” Sheets said. “It sucked. It was a really good feeling, and then a really, really bad feeling really quick.”
There would be no fifth home run for the Padres. But their four homers were the most in a loss since Sept. 21, 2021. All season, they’ve only gone deep four times in the same game three times.
And obviously, this wasn’t the result the Padres wanted. They fell a game back of the Dodgers in the National League West race. (Not to mention, their chances of a comeback in the Vedder Cup were dashed.)
But if Monday was a sign that the Padres might be tapping into their power, it could be a hugely important trend.
As for Tatis, well, it had been a while since he last went deep, on July 24 in St. Louis. As he rounded third base at T-Mobile Park on Monday, he went light on his signature stutter step. After the game, it was pointed out to him.
“I probably forgot how to do it,” Tatis said.
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Report: DeAndre Hopkins to join Georgia Tech coaching staff
After spending some time with the Patriots during training camp, DeAndre Hopkins has found a more permanent job in coaching.
Per Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports, Georgia Tech is expected to hire Hopkins as a member of the program’s offensive staff.
After departing New England’s training camp, Hopkins has spent time this week visiting with the team.
George Godsey, Georgia Tech’s offensive coordinator, was previously Hopkins’ OC with the Texans from 2015-2016. Godsey was also on last year’s Ravens staff as tight ends coach when Hopkins was with Baltimore.
If this is indeed the end for Hopkins as an NFL player, he’ll finish with 1,006 receptions for 13,295 yards with 85 touchdowns in 195 games over 13 seasons. He had 22 catches for 330 yards with two TDs with the Ravens last year.
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A Tragedy in Iran Might Persuade Hegseth to Change Course
When President Trump plucked Pete Hegseth from Fox News to be his secretary of defense, Pentagon officials scrambled to get with their new boss’s pugnacious program: Lethality and battlefield swagger were in; “wokeness” and operational restraint were out. Hegseth’s subsequent purge at the Defense Department included the dramatic downsizing of staff dedicated to avoiding civilian casualties in war. They had been part of a military-wide system built up after tens of thousands of ordinary people were killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress mandated some of the enhancements. But Hegseth fired or reassigned almost all of the staff working on the program.
Now the Pentagon is considering restoring as many as half of the roles that were cut as the military reckons with the human impact of its five-month, on-again, off-again war with Iran, in particular an air strike in the first hours of the conflict that killed almost 170 people, most of them children, at a school in Minab, in southern Iran. The potential reversal, which hasn’t previously been reported, now awaits Hegseth’s signature.
A Pentagon inspector-general report this spring found that the department’s deep cuts in civilian-harm protections may have violated laws designed to safeguard noncombatants. Democrats are urging the Defense Department to reverse course. Hegseth’s comments and service history suggest that he will do otherwise. A Pentagon official—who, like other officials, spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations—said in a statement that the setup for preventing civilian harm is “currently undergoing a strategic reassessment to inform its future reorganization” and would remain in compliance with congressional requirements, but that no final decisions have been made.
Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the National Guard, arrived at the Pentagon early last year with a record of railing against what he characterized as unnecessary shackles on battlefield operators, such as military “jagoffs” (a play on judge advocates general, known as JAGs) and international law. His on-air advocacy for troops accused or convicted of war crimes helped forge his bond with Trump. Within months of his taking office, the Pentagon had slashed the number of total staff working to prevent and investigate civilian-casualty incidents by about 90 percent.
Hegseth brought the same gloves-off mentality to the war in Iran, which remains in a protracted limbo that has crippled maritime commerce and thrust Persian Gulf allies into open conflict with Tehran. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth told reporters early in the conflict. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” Trump also has made repeated threats to strike bridges and power plants, actions that under many circumstances could constitute war crimes.
Hegseth has said that Tehran positions its military assets alongside civilian sites such as hospitals and schools. Iran has also struck apartment buildings and energy facilities across the Gulf and killed at least 18 U.S. troops in the region. But the strike on the school in Minab appears to have been the worst on civilians in a U.S. operation since the Gulf War in 1991. Immediately after, U.S. defense officials professed disbelief that the U.S. military could have hit a school. They wondered whether the Israeli military had done it. Trump suggested that Iran was responsible. But the strike had involved a Tomahawk missile, a weapon Iran does not have. And an initial examination found that although Iran’s military had once occupied the building, that was no longer true. The U.S. government had possessed intelligence about the site’s conversion into a school; that information never made its way to the strike’s planners, defense officials told us.
At the recent G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters that “nobody did that on purpose” and said that the findings of an official Pentagon investigation—the only one of its kind so far in the Iran war—should eventually be released. Hegseth has repeatedly said that the U.S. military does not intentionally target civilians and has promised to make the investigation’s conclusions public, but he has not said when or whether that will include all of the report.
Inside Iran, the death toll in Minab—168—has become a defining symbol of U.S. aggression. State media and government officials regularly invoke the incident and commemorate it in public ceremonies. During the FIFA World Cup, members of Iran’s team wore #168 pins and posed before rows of children’s backpacks.
Military operations are judged almost instantaneously by audiences around the world, making public perception an important strategic consideration, Geoffrey Corn, the director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told us. Corn is a proponent of embedding experts on avoiding civilian casualties in military targeting teams. The most important thing the United States could have done soon after the Minab strike, Corn told us, would have been to publicly address what happened: Was the strike based on faulty intelligence? Outdated information? A missile malfunction, or some other error? “Because if you don’t, you’re ceding the narrative to anybody who wants to condemn you,” Corn added. “You are setting the conditions for strategic failure.”
The need to improve protections for civilians was a lesson learned at the cost of many innocent lives over two decades of U.S. counterinsurgent wars.
In September 2006, the Pentagon formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as “the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.” The conclusion from Iraq and Afghanistan was that battlefield success alone was insufficient; military force had to be perceived as not only lawful but also just and prudent if it was going to achieve lasting results. Corn pointed to the United States’ reputational damage caused by the Trump administration’s lethal campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, and the global outcry against Israel over the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.
Civilian-harm mitigation within the U.S. military ramped up during the campaign against the Islamic State. Watchdog groups such as the United Kingdom–based Airwars began working closely with U.S. Central Command, providing on-the-ground information for U.S. forces who often struggled to assess the results of their strikes. After a U.S. drone mistakenly killed 10 civilians during America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, then–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered up the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan to formalize those practices across the Pentagon.
Over time, Centcom and other combatant commands built up these operations. Experts on civilian patterns of life and other advisers helped military targeters assess risks before strikes were launched and investigated casualty reports after. The Pentagon opened an office to train personnel across the ranks and incorporate lessons into future operations. (The gap between official and outside estimates on civilian casualties has at times, however, remained wide: Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2018; the official toll is roughly 1,500.)
Some of that structure still exists, but is much diminished. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has been engaged everywhere—Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela. In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the U.S. says that it has killed 221 people in small boats over 11 months; the U.S. alleges that the crews are smuggling drugs but has presented no evidence. Human-rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran in the U.S. and Israeli air campaign.
“Over the last year, we have seen a total disconnect between the willingness to wage wars all over the world, at an unprecedented pace and scale, while at the same time all but abandoning their leading role in setting up the systems and approaches needed to better protect civilians,” Emily Tripp, the head of Airwars, told us.
The leadership of the Pentagon’s combatant commands have uniformly voiced support internally for the restoration of the personnel, a U.S. official told us, because they value the additional safeguards. Commanders learned over the years that civilian casualties fueled insurgent recruitment, eroded local support, and undermined political objectives. Advances in intelligence, surveillance, and precision targeting also have helped reduce the risk of hitting civilians. (Civilian-protection advisers were never given the power to overrule or veto actions proposed by commanders; they could only advise and provide additional information.)
“Restoring personnel dedicated to civilian protection—and actually allowing them to do their jobs—is one critical step towards preventing future harm,” Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told us.
Even if Hegseth endorses the proposal, future success may depend on whether he embraces a different tone. “If there is a change in attitude from the top, that could be significant,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told us. “But if this is a box-checking exercise, it won’t make a difference.”
Hegseth and Trump have both, at least so far in the Iran war, used much more belligerent language than their own military commanders have. The White House, early on, posted images of U.S. strikes alongside the caption “No pause. No hesitation.” Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, had a contrasting message for troops in a memo this spring. “Our commitment to the law of armed conflict is not a constraint on our lethality,” he wrote. “It is the source of our legitimacy.”
A Hegseth endorsement of the proposal to restore protections against civilian harm would mark a rare acknowledgement that his radical reforms at the Pentagon may, at least in one area, have gone too far.
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LA model accused of robbing dating app matches is arrested again – NBC Los Angeles
A Los Angeles model and influencer who was charged earlier this year for allegedly burglarizing homes of people she met online was arrested again in Beverly Hills, NBC Los Angeles learned Wednesday.
Adva Lavie, also known as Mia Ventura, was charged in March with two counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information; two counts of grand theft; one count of first-degree residential burglary with a person present and one count of first-degree residential burglary. After pleading not guilty, the 28-year-old was released from custody with an electronic ankle monitor, LA County prosecutors had said.
Then, around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Lavie was arrested again by Beverly Hills police on North Cannon Boulevard near Brighton Way in connection with a separate theft allegation in Riverside County.
Lavie is also in violation of a court order, according to the Beverly Hills Police Department.
She is expected to appear in court on Thursday.
Officials said from 2023 to 2025, Lavie developed relationships through dating apps to steal from wealthy older men and younger women in Westlake Village, West Hollywood, Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. She is also accused of posing as a girlfriend and travel companion to steal cash, gold and designer items from her victims’ homes.
She faces up to 11 years and eight months in state prison, if convicted as charged.
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