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3 takeaways from the Chicago Cubs’ 4-6 West Coast trip, including Seiya Suzuki’s vague injury and Christopher Morel’s power

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

Usually a position player ending the game on the mound is a bad sign for a team.Instead, San Francisco Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford throwing a scoreless ninth inning Sunday against the Chicago Cubs represented a sour way to cap a 4-6 mark on their three-city 10-game West Coast trip.The Cubs salvaged the trip with the series win in San Francisco, though they wasted a chance to sweep the Giants in a 13-3 blowout loss Sunday at Oracle Park.“When we play good defense and get good pitching we’re in games,” manager David Ross said afterward. “Just not a lot of margin for error. Pretty ugly performance pitching today. Left a lot of guys on base today. But love the way the guys responded after getting swept in Anaheim.“When our starting pitchers are carrying the load we’re doing alright.”Here are three takeaways from the road trip.1. Uncertainty around Seiya Suzuki’s ailment.For fans looking for specifics about Seiya Suzuki’s absenc...

Column: Chicago White Sox’s ugly season could get uglier if Liam Hendriks is out for long

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

“Winning Ugly” became the mantra of the 1983 White Sox, a team that stormed back from being 8 games under .500 on May 26 to win the American League West by 20 games.Despite a postseason reckoning, that ’83 season was so special to Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf that the Sox wear the sartorially-challenged uniforms from that era during Sunday home games on the South Side.Forty years later, the 29-38 Sox perfected the art of losing ugly while wearing those throwbacks.The bullpen blew their second straight ninth-inning lead Sunday in another stomach-churning loss to the Miami Marlins, leaving manager Pedro Grifol to declare “those guys are human.”Without Liam Hendriks to close either game, Joe Kelly and Kendall Graveman took turns gagging on cue, turning a would-be sweep of the Marlins into a series loss and killing any momentum from an uplifting 5-1 stretch against the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees.With a day off for recovery, the Sox begin a six-game Wes...

10 wounded in Denver mass shooting after Nuggets win and suspect taken into custody, police say

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

DENVER (AP) — Ten people were wounded in a mass shooting early Tuesday in Denver in an area where basketball fans had been celebrating the Nuggets first NBA title win, police said, and a suspect was taken into custody.The shooting happened about 12:30 a.m. — about 3 1/2 hours after the game — and three of the injured were in critical condition, the Denver Police Department said in a statement. The suspect, a man, was one of the seven people who suffered injuries believed to be non-life-threatening.The shooting happened about a mile from Ball Arena, where the Nuggets defeated the Miami Heat on Monday night.“As far as what led up to this altercation that resulted in the shots being fired, that’s still under investigation at this time,” police spokesperson Doug Schepman said. “It did occur in the area where we had largest gathering of folks celebrating during the night.”The area was taped off and evidence markers were at the scene.A small crowd was in the area at the time o...

Russian missile attack on Ukraine kills at least 10 in Zelenskyy’s hometown

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian missiles hit civilian buildings in a central Ukrainian city overnight, killing at least 10 people and wounding more than two dozen in a warehouse and a residential building, regional officials said Tuesday.The devastation in Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown, is the latest bloodshed in Russia’s war in Ukraine, as Ukrainian forces are in the early stages of a counteroffensive using Western-supplied firepower.Images from the scene relayed by Zelenskyy on his Telegram channel showed firefighters battling the blaze as pockets of fire poked through multiple broken windows of a building. Charred and damaged vehicles littered the nearby ground. “More terrorist missiles,” he wrote. “Russian killers continue their war against residential buildings, ordinary cities and people.”The governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Serhiy Lysak, wrote on the social media app that the bodies of six people were recovered from the warehouse of an unspecified pr...

AI helped create ‘last Beatles record,’ Paul McCartney says

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” Paul McCartney said Tuesday. McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” The new song is set to be released later this year, he said. Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he added. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”McCartney described AI technology...

Turkey says it’s ready to open consulate in city that Azerbaijan took from Armenian forces

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday his country is ready to open a consulate in Shusha, a city that Azerbaijan took from Armenian forces in a war in 2020.Erdogan made the comment during a visit to Azerbaijan at the start of his third term in office following presidential elections last month.“We are ready to open our consulate whenever you wish,” Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency quoted Erdogan as telling Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and other officials at the start of bilateral talks. “If we can open a consulate in Shusha, this would be a message to the world and especially to Armenia,” he said.Shusha, a center of Azeri culture for centuries, came under Armenian control in 1992 in fighting over the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region. Its retaking by Azerbaijan’s forces in 2020 was of symbolic and strategic importance because it sits high above the region’s nearby capital, Stepanakert.Turkey actively supported Azerbaijan in the last confli...

Police find 3 dead and 3 other people struck by van in UK city of Nottingham

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

LONDON (AP) — A man was arrested on suspicion of murder in the English city of Nottingham on Tuesday after three people were found dead in the street and three others were hit and injured by a van in related early-morning incidents, police said.“This is an horrific and tragic incident which has claimed the lives of three people,” said Nottinghamshire Police Chief Constable Kate Meynell.Two people were found dead in one street just after 4 a.m. and a third on a different street. The three wounded by the van were at a different location and were being treated in a hospital. There was no immediate word on their conditions.Witness Lynn Haggitt was on her way to work when a white van pulled up beside her at 5:30 a.m. She saw the driver look in his mirror and spot a police car approaching slowly from behind without its lights on. The driver then accelerated and struck a man and woman at a street corner. “He went straight into them, he didn’t even bother to turn,” Haggitt told ...

Bunge and Viterra sign merger agreement to create global agribusiness

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

TORONTO — U.S. company Bunge Ltd. has signed a deal to merge with Viterra Ltd., which is owned by Glencore, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and B.C. Investment Management Corp.The companies say the deal will create a global agribusiness company well positioned to meet the demands of complex markets and better serve farmers and customers.Under the terms of the agreement, Viterra’s shareholders will receive 65.6 million Bunge shares, valued at a total of about US$6.2 billion, and about US$2.0 billion in cash. Bunge will also assume US$9.8 billion of Viterra debt.Viterra shareholders will own 30 per cent of the combined company on a fully diluted basis when the deal closes and about 33 per cent after completion of a planned US$2-billion share repurchase plan by Bunge.The combined company will be led by Bunge chief executive Greg Heckman and Bunge chief financial officer John Neppl, while Viterra chief executive David Mattiske will become co-chief operating officer.This r...

COVID-19 inquiry in UK asks whether ‘terrible consequences’ could have been avoided

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

LONDON (AP) — A mammoth three-year public inquiry into the U.K. government’s handling of the response to COVID-19 opened Tuesday by asking whether suffering and death could have been avoided with better planning.Lawyer Hugo Keith, who is counsel to the inquiry, said the coronavirus pandemic had brought “death and illness on an unprecedented scale” in modern Britain. He said that COVID-19 has been recorded as a cause of death for 226,977 people in the U.K.“The key issue is whether that impact was inevitable,” Keith said. “Were those terrible consequences inexorable, or were they avoidable or capable of mitigation?”A group of people who lost relatives to COVID-19 held pictures of their loved one outside the inquiry venue, an anonymous London office building. The first day of public hearings began with a 17-minute video in which people described the devastating impact of the pandemic on them and their loved ones.Britain’s pandemic death toll is one of the highest in Europe, and t...

John Fru Ndi, leader of Cameroon’s main opposition party and critic of president, dies at 81

Published Thu, 26 Dec 2024 20:02:43 GMT

YAOUNDE, Cameroon (AP) — John Fru Ndi, the leader of Cameroon’s opposition Social Democratic Front and one of the party’s founders, has died after a prolonged illness. He was 81.The party said Fru Ndi, who had been battling health issues for months, died late on Monday at his residence in the capital, Yaounde, a month ahead of his 82nd birthday in July.“It is with sadness that we announce the transition into eternal glory of the National Chairman of the (party),” Joshua Osh, the party’s vice president, said on Tuesday. An influential figure, Fru Ndi he was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Front in 1990 and a prominent opponent of Cameroon’s longtime President Paul Biya. He went up against Biya in three elections — losing each one — and more recently, became a strong critic of the president’s handling of the country’s crisis following the 2017 rebellion of English-speaking separatists. Last November, Biya marked 40 years in power — the only president most of t...