Orange County scores and player stats for Saturday, April 29

• April 29, 2023

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Scores and stats from Orange County games on Saturday, April 29

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SATURDAY’S SCORES

BOYS VOLLEYBALL

CIF-SS PLAYOFFS

Round 2

DIVISION 4

El Dorado def. Mark Keppel, 25-19, 26-24, 25-22

DIVISION 5

Samueli Academy def. Temescal Canyon, 25-18, 25-23, 25-22

BOYS LACROSSE

NONLEAGUE

Corona del Mar 6, St. Ignatius College Prep 5

​ Orange County Register 

Search area widened for man who killed 5 in Texas after family complained about gunfire

• April 29, 2023

By JUAN A. LOZANO and PAUL J. WEBER

CLEVELAND, Texas — A Texas sheriff said Saturday that authorities have widened the search area for a man suspected of killing five of his neighbors near Houston.

San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told reporters the search area for 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza could now be as large as “10 or 20 miles” as the gunman remained at large more than 15 hours after the shooting Friday night.

The shooting happened near the town of Cleveland, about 45 miles north of Houston. Capers said Oropeza may still have a weapon.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

CLEVELAND, Texas — A Texas man went next door with a rifle and fatally shot five of his neighbors, including an 8-year-old boy and a teenage girl, after the family asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because they were trying to sleep, authorities said Saturday.

The suspect, identified as 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza, remained at large more than 12 hours after the shooting that began just before midnight Friday near the town of Cleveland, about 45 miles north of Houston. Some residents who live on the street said it was not uncommon to hear neighbors unwind at the end of the work week by firing off guns.

San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said Oropeza used an AR-style rifle and that all the victims were believed to be from Honduras.

“All of his rounds were from the neck up, so basically in the head,” Capers told The Associated Press.

The attack was the latest act of gun violence in what has been a record pace of mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, some of which have also involved semiautomatic rifles.

The mass killings have played out in a variety of places — a Nashville school, a Kentucky bank, a Southern California dance hall, and now a rural Texas neighborhood inside a single-story home.

Capers said authorities were using scent-tracking dogs and an overhead drone in the search for Oropeza, who they believe was intoxicated at the time of the shooting and then fled toward a heavily wooded forest a few miles from the scene.

Capers said there were 10 people in the house — some of whom has just moved there earlier in the week — but that that no one else was injured. He said two of the victims were found in a bedroom laying over two children in an apparent attempt to shield them.

Authorities did not immediately release the names of the victims. Three were female, including a 15-year-old girl, said Rob Freyer, a prosecutor in San Jacinto County. He did not know the ages of the adult victims, which included one male.

Two of the victims were found by the front door and the slain 8-year-old boy was in the front room, according to Capers. He said three other “blood-covered” children in the home were taken to a hospital but did not have injuries.

“The Honduran ladies that were laying over these children were doing it in such an effort as to protect the child,” Capers said.

The confrontation followed family members walking up to the fence and asking the suspect to stop shooting rounds, Capers said. The suspect responded by telling them that it was his property, according to Capers, and that one person in the house got a video of the suspect walking up to the front door with the rifle.

The shooting took place on a rural pothole-riddled street where single-story homes sit on wide one-acre lots and are surrounded by a thick canopy of trees. A horse could be seen behind the victim’s home, while in the front yard of Oropeza’s house a dog and chickens wandered

Rene Arevalo Sr., who lives a few houses down, said he heard gunshots around midnight but didn’t think anything of it.

“It’s a normal thing people do around here, especially on Fridays after work,” Arevalo said. “They get home and start drinking in their backyards and shooting out there.”

Capers said his deputies had been to Oropeza’s home at least once before and spoken with him about “shooting his gun in the yard.” It was not immediately clear whether any action was taken at the time.

Capers said the new arrivals in the home had moved from Houston earlier in the week, but he did not know whether they were planning to stay there.

Across the U.S. since Jan. 1, there have been at least 18 shootings that left four or more people dead, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today, in partnership with Northeastern University. The violence is sparked by a range of motives: murder-suicides and domestic violence; gang retaliation; school shootings and workplace vendettas.

Texas has confronted multiple mass shootings in recent years, including last year’s attack at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde; a racist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019; and a gunman opening fire at a church in the tiny town of Sutherland Springs in 2017.

Republican leaders in Texas have continually rejected calls for new firearm restrictions, including this year over the protests of several families whose children were killed in Uvalde.

A few months ago, Arevalo said Oropeza threatened to kill his dog after it got loose in the neighborhood and chased the pit bull in his truck.

“I tell my wife all the time, ‘Stay away from the neighbors. Don’t argue with them. You never know how they’re going to react,’” Arevalo said. “I tell her that because Texas is a state where you don’t know who has a gun and who is going to react that way.”

Weber reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writer Ken Miller contributed to this report.

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​ Orange County Register 

Stagecoach 2023: Trixie Mattel slays Late Night in Palomino performance

• April 29, 2023

“I’m probably the only person on the Stagecoach lineup who has like 45 different careers,” country-pop star and drag queen Trixie Mattel, the persona of Brian Michael Firkus, said during a phone interview just days before her Late Night in Palomino performance at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio on Friday, April 28.

“When I’m not doing a million other things, it’s so great to be back on stage,” she continued. “And for Stagecoach, I’m probably going to be the nastiest, most naked person in drag there, but that’s a good thing.”

Performance by performance, Mattel’s taken over the world, one stage and wig at a time.

During her set over at the Diplo-curated Late Night in Palomino after-party on Friday, Mattel made sure to give fans a slew of original songs and fun covers, including “Venus” by Bananarama, “Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes and she whipped out the autoharp for Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.”

“If you go on Wikipedia for autoharp players, it’s literally June Carter Cash and me, and I’m very proud of that,” she said, gleaming to the audience with her harp. “But putting this thing on is like wearing underwear, don’t be fooled. It’s difficult.”

The performance is also Stagecoach history-making as Mattel is the first drag queen booked to play the three-day festival. For Mattel, country music has consistently played a crucial part in her character archetype since living in rural Milwaukee during her adolescence, nodding to women like Dolly Parton and June Carter Cash as influences. Her style evokes a retro-tinged ’60s glamour midcentury housewife with a dash of Barbie pink.

“You know, you’d be surprised, but a lot of queer people like country music,” Mattel said during our interview. “They just don’t play it at gay clubs usually, but that type of community does exist. But also, you don’t have to be gay to like us. It’s irrelevant.”

Fans that left Friday headliner Luke Bryan’s set a little early to catch Mattel in the Palomino were seemingly star-struck by the queen, who changed into at least six different pink fits with glitter and fringe.

It wasn’t a packed house, but the crowd she did have were die-hard fans holding up pink or LGBTQ+ flags and screaming, “Trixie, I love you!”

The show was a nice blend of comedy and glamour as the queen spun around the stage, laughing, singing and occasionally speaking to fans about “important matters,” which included a chat on the recent Bud Light controversy that’s taken social media storm.

“Do you like my hair? Do you like my body? Do you like my face? You know I had one sip of Bud Light, and this is what happened. You gotta be careful,” she said to the crowd.

In April, Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney, a well-known transgender influencer, a pack of beer to post in a promotional video where Mulvaney is seen dressed like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The video shows Mulvaney celebrating her first year of womanhood with the cans featuring her face. When the video appeared online, some more conservative country artists took to their social media accounts to bash the company for supporting LGBTQ+ names and even went as far as wanting to boycott the beer. The company is also a sponsor of this year’s Stagecoach, so for artists like Mattel, it was necessary to note that the issue at hand is something she doesn’t appreciate.

“I’m not offended by somebody supporting trans people with a product, and I’m not offended by people choosing not to support trans people,” Mattel said. “But I find it very offensive when you show support for a community and a marginalized group, and at the first sign of pushback, you not only don’t say anything or even change your tune and backpedal. Instead, you just put up a big, fancy corporate PR word salad and call it a day.”

But that’s as serious as Mattel wanted to get because for her, the Stagecoach performance means connecting with fans and a new crowd.

Since her appearance on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” back in 2015 and winning the all-stars season in 2018, it’s been a non-stop stream of success for the 33-year-old artist. Now, the multi-hyphenate Mattel operates Trixie Cosmetics, co-hosts the widespread YouTube series UNHhhh alongside drag superstar Katya Zamolodchikova, is a New York Times bestselling author and co-owns Wisconsin’s oldest running gay bar.

And coming to the desert feels right at home for Mattel given her other business venture, the Trixie Motel, located in Palm Springs, just a few miles from the Empire Polo Club in Indio. The Motel opened its doors in April 2022 and has now been selling out months in advance, cementing itself as a mainstay in the LGBTQ+ scene in the city. Mattel adds that she built the business in Palm Springs to have somewhere to go that was campy and summer-like.

“Everything I put out is from my own money, my own investment,” she said. “So I don’t go into anything without 100 percent knowing it’s going to be a great idea.”

Her motel, which sports bubble gum pink walls, is also hosting events during the Stagecoach weekend.

“If anybody is in town for Stagecoach, we’ll be doing events all weekend long,” she said. “I’m literally cocktail waitressing in drag which will be a ticketed event where you can drink by the pool. So I’ll be running around in drag serving people. I mean, tell me how many celebrities are willing to do that.”

She’ll also be serving drinks on Sunday morning and made sure to park her tour bus in front of her motel so fans could come and hang out. When asked about what she was looking forward to the most with her Stagecoach performance, she said it wasn’t so much about that particular show, but allowing her fans to connect with something even bigger than herself, a character that’s now connected with millions worldwide.

“Trixie means a lot to me, but it means a lot to other people,” she shared. “And when you build a brand for fans to basically worship, it’s a way for people to connect with Trixie without breaking into my house.”

 More Stagecoach Country Music Festival news

Stagecoach 2023: See photos of performers and fans from Day 1

Stagecoach 2023: Country music fans, performers brave the heat and cut loose during Day 1

Stagecoach 2023: How to livestream the country music festival from home

Stagecoach 2023: Brooks & Dunn return to the desert and they’re ready to party 

Stagecoach 2023: Everything you need to know about the country music fest 

Stagecoach 2023: Guy Fieri’s barbecue, sushi and lots of drinks on the menu 

Stagecoach 2023: When to see Luke Bryan, Kane Brown, Chris Stapleton and more 

Stagecoach 2023: See who will be grilling with Guy Fieri

Stagecoach 2023: Girl Talk, Dillon Francis, Lost Frequencies hit the Honky Tonk 

Stagecoach 2023: Trixie Mattel, Nelly and Diplo host Late Night in Palomino 

Stagecoach 2023: Luke Bryan, Kane Brown and Chris Stapleton will headline the country fest in Indio 

​ Orange County Register 

UCLA football inspired by Bruins in the NFL draft

• April 29, 2023

LOS ANGELES — As UCLA football alumni are answering phone calls during the NFL draft, current players are doing whatever they can to put themselves in that same position.

Zach Charbonnet, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, Antonio Mafi and Jon Gaines II were each selected in the NFL draft Friday or Saturday. As spring football practice continues in Westwood, players use draft updates as reason for celebration as well as motivation.

“I get the chills for them,” Bruins linebacker Kain Medrano said. “They’re for sure role models to me because that’s where I want to be. Just seeing Zach and all the hard work he put in; he was here grinding every single day, and just shows you what it takes to get to that level.”

Charbonnet was selected by the Seattle Seahawks in the second round as the No. 52 overall pick Friday. Gaines was picked in the fourth round Saturday, followed by Thompson-Robinson and Antonio Mafi in the fifth round.

The Bruins have the opportunity to not only learn from the habits of former teammates who made it to the NFL, but also from coaches with NFL experience.

Medrano said working with inside linebackers coach Ken Norton Jr. is energizing physically and mentally. Norton was the linebackers coach as well as the defensive coordinator for the Seattle Seahawks, winning a Super Bowl with the team in 2013. He also served as defensive coordinator for the Oakland Raiders from 2015-2017.

“The confidence that he brings and gives off, that just comes right into our group,” Medrano said. “We get a lot of confidence and he’s yelling, screaming. That energy that he brings every day just helps us accelerate practice.”

Norton is an orchestra of demanding yet motivational coaching phrases during practices (on Saturday morning, “hit with a punch” was a favorite). The dry-erase board in the linebacker meeting room is lined with Norton-isms.

Each phrase is connected to an instruction for the linebackers. So when Norton yells “linebackers 100,” his position group knows what to do. Players learn from him how to balance the chaos of being a linebacker with the intelligence on and off the field.

“You want to be in (meetings),” linebacker Choè Bryant-Strother said. “That’s one thing I can really appreciate about Coach Norton. When you walk into that meeting room … you know you’re going to learn something that you’ve never even thought about before because Coach Norton just has so much experience and so much knowledge about the game.”

Tired but ‘lit’

The defense has had a recurring saying throughout spring practices:

“The more tired we get, the more lit we get,” Bryant-Strother said. “When we get tired, that’s when we want to play our best. So the louder we get, just know we’re coming.”

The last 11-on-11 live period of practice Saturday was certainly the most “lit.” The defense forced a false start from the offense on the first play of the period. Defensive back Alex Johnson broke up a pass early on and multiple players broke through to get to the quarterback.

Defensive end Laiatu Latu broke up a pass toward the end of the period and linebacker Jalen Woods hauled in an interception.

Officials were on hand to monitor plays and hand out penalties when necessary, but the Bruins were also playing by Chip Kelly rules. The head coach lightheartedly doled out a 15-yard penalty to the offense for complaining and issued multiple sideline warnings.

“It’s about how we respond to everything,” Medrano said. “Some of that is to try and get us prepared because some of those calls are gonna come in the game … and we can’t react with emotion. We can’t let emotion play with us.”

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​ Orange County Register 

Trump ups competition with DeSantis in planning trip to Iowa

• April 29, 2023

By Thomas Beaumont | Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa — The competition between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis is intensifying as the former president is scheduling a return trip to Iowa on the same day that the Florida governor was already going to be in the state that will kick off the Republican contest for the White House.

A Trump campaign official said Saturday that the former president plans to be in Iowa on May 13 to headline an organizing rally at a sprawling park in downtown Des Moines. That’s when DeSantis was already slated to headline Iowa Rep. Randy Feenstra’s annual summer fundraiser in northwest Iowa and speak at a party fundraiser later that evening in Cedar Rapids.

The Trump campaign official, who requested anonymity to discuss the trip before it was announced, said the Des Moines organizing rally has been in the planning stage for weeks and is aimed at identifying caucus supporters and volunteers.

The move is a sign of the escalating competition between the two men who, at least for now, are leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump and his allies have become increasingly emboldened in their efforts to attack and marginalize DeSantis, who is expected to announce his White House bid sometime after the Florida Legislature wraps up its work in the coming week.

But Trump’s trip is also notable for its emphasis on the type of ground-level organizing that is vital in Iowa politics and was often missing during his 2016 campaign, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz overtook him and won the state’s GOP caucuses.

Trump has been almost singularly focused on swinging at DeSantis, whom he has attacked for policy positions on entitlement reform, his loyalty to conservative causes, even his character. While DeSantis has largely ignored Trump’s jabs, a pro-DeSantis super political action committee, Never Back Down, began to respond in paid ads this month.

Meanwhile, the super PAC promoting DeSantis is hiring Iowa staff to begin organizing support for the governor before he enters the race.

The stakes for both men are particularly high in Iowa, where the caucuses in February offer opportunities for them to cement their status atop the GOP. A poor performance, however, would give an opening for other Republicans to mount an upstart campaign.

Trump’s 2016 Iowa campaign was a seat-of-the-pants operation disparately managed by campaign newcomers who, including the candidate, had little idea what the caucuses are. The roughly 1,700 precinct-level Republican political meetings, vestiges of prairie civic life, include a presidential preference question but require in-person participation on a typically frigid winter evening.

Eight years ago, Trump’s Iowa team had left contact information for roughly 10,000 Iowans interested in supporting him unprocessed before the caucuses, where Trump had led in lead-up polls, but fell short against Cruz’s more organized campaign.

Armed with not just refined 2016 caucus data but information collected during two national campaigns, Trump’s advisers says they are building a data and digital engagement strategy they say would put him in position to win the caucuses. It’s an expectation Iowa GOP strategists say is an absolute must for the former president, who carried Iowa comfortably in the 2016 and 2020 general elections.

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Meantime Never Back Down, run by DeSantis’ 2022 Florida re-election campaign senior strategist, Phil Cox, has named Iowa Republican operatives to its roster as it seeks to tap into interested GOP activists as the Iowa 2024 campaign gets underway. Among them are Ryan Koopmans, the former chief of staff to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

The group has been airing TV advertisements in Iowa and other early-voting states, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, for weeks, and plans to launch a new one Monday.

​ Orange County Register 

US conducts first evacuation of its citizens from Sudan war

• April 29, 2023

By ZEKE MILLER, COLLEEN LONG, MATTHEW LEE and ELLEN KNICKMEYER

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of Americans fleeing two weeks of deadly fighting in Sudan reached the east African nation’s port Saturday in the first U.S.-run evacuation, completing a dangerous land journey under escort of armed drones.

American unmanned aircraft, which have been keeping an eye on overland evacuation routes for days, provided armed overwatch for a bus convoy carrying 200 to 300 Americans over 500 miles to Port Sudan, a place of relative safety, U.S. officials said.

The U.S., which had none of its officials on the ground for the evacuation, has been criticized by families of trapped Americans in Sudan for initially ruling out any U.S.-run evacuation for Americans who wanted out, calling it too dangerous.

U.S. special operations troops briefly flew to the capital, Khartoum, on April 22 to airlift out American staffers at the embassy and other American government personnel. Several thousand U.S. citizens were left behind, many of them dual-nationals.

More than a dozen other nations had already been carrying out evacuations for their citizens, using a mix of military planes, navy vessels and on the ground personnel.

A man walks by a house hit in recent fighting in Khartoum, Sudan, April 25, 2023. The U.S. conducted its first organized evacuation of citizens and permanent residents from Sudan, the State Department said Saturday, April 29, two weeks into a conflict that has turned Khartoum into a war zone and thrown the country into turmoil. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali, File)

A wide-ranging group of international mediators — including African and Arab nations, the United Nations and the United States — has only managed to achieve a series of fragile temporary cease-fires that failed to stop clashes but created enough of a lull for tens of thousands of Sudanese to flee to safer areas and for foreign nations to evacuate thousands of their citizens by land, air and sea.

Since the conflict between two rival generals broke out April 15, the U.S. has warned its citizens that they needed to find their own way out of the country, though U.S. officials have tried to link up Americans with other nations’ evacuation efforts. But that changed as U.S. officials exploited a relative lull in the fighting and, from afar, organized their own convoy for Americans, officials said.

Without the evacuation flights near the capital that other countries have been offering their citizens, many U.S. citizens have been left to make the dangerous overland journey from Khartoum to the country’s main Red Sea port, Port Sudan. One Sudanese-American family that made the trip earlier described passing through numerous checkpoints manned by armed men and passing bodies lying in the street and vehicles of other fleeing families who had been killed along the way.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the convoy carried U.S. citizens, local people employed by the U.S. and citizens of allied countries. “We reiterate our warning to Americans not to travel to Sudan,” he said.

From Port Sudan, away from the fighting, the Americans in the convoy can seek spots on vessels crossing the Red Sea to the Saudi port city of Jeddah. U.S. officials also are working with Saudi Arabia to see if one of the kingdom’s naval vessels can carry a larger number of Americans to Jeddah.

U.S. consular officials will be waiting for the Americans once they reach the dock in Jeddah, but there are no U.S. personnel in Port Sudan, officials said.

Two Americans are confirmed killed in the fighting that erupted April 15. One was a U.S. civilian whom officials said was caught in crossfire. The other was an Iowa City, Iowa, doctor, who was stabbed to death in front of his house and family in Khartoum, in the lawless violence that has accompanied the fighting.

In all, the fighting in the east African country has killed more than 500 people.

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​ Orange County Register 

Angels’ José Suarez might be pitching for his job Sunday

• April 29, 2023

MILWAUKEE — José Suarez is going to get the ball again Sunday, with his job on the line.

While Manager Phil Nevin won’t publicly say that Suarez is going to lose his spot in the rotation if he doesn’t pitch well against the Milwaukee Brewers, he did concede earlier this week that they are now going “start to start” with Suarez after he began the year with four disappointing outings.

Suarez, a 25-year-old lefty who had a 3.86 ERA over 207 1/3 innings in the previous two seasons, has a 10.26 ERA this season. Opponents have hit .382 with an OPS of 1.184 against him.

Nevin oversaw the work the pitching coaches did with Suarez during his bullpen session Thursday. A manager would not normally be around for a routine bullpen session.

“Working on being more consistent with his location, more consistent with his delivery,” Nevin said. “That’s the only thing we see. I stood down there, watched film, everything.”

Suarez’s poor command has led to him throwing a first-pitch ball 43% of the time, up from 35% last year.

When he has gotten ahead, he’s still gotten hit hard, because his put-away pitches have missed their spots. Opponents are hitting .379 with a 1.276 OPS when Suarez is ahead in the count. Last year it was .184 and .489.

In his seven-run debacle Monday, Suarez gave up homers on a 1-and-2 pitch and an 0-and-2 pitch. The latter was a hanging sweeper to No. 9 hitter Kevin Smith, who at that point was hitting .171.

“I think that when you’re trying to put a hitter away and throwing harder, you’re losing your mechanics,” Nevin said. “When he’s trying to bury one and he doesn’t quite get it there and he leaves it in the middle, those are the balls that get hit.”

Suarez, like many pitchers nowadays, throws a harder slider and a sweeper. Last year he threw his slider an average of 81.7 mph, and opponents hit .167 against it. This year it’s averaged 83.9 mph. The extra effort he’s putting into the pitch to get the extra velocity could be affecting his mechanics, causing the poor command. Most pitchers this side of Shohei Ohtani also lose movement as they add velocity, and Suarez is getting about three inches less drop on his slider this year.

Less break plus poor location have led to opponents hitting .588 against his slider.

“I wasn’t executing (the slider) at all,” Suarez said through an interpreter Saturday. “That’s what I’m working on.”

The other issue with Suarez was possible pitch-tipping during his last start against the A’s. Nevin said they investigated that and dismissed it.

“I don’t think that’s real,” he said.

The pitches Suarez was burned on in that game were simply poorly located. In the final two innings, he located better and didn’t give up any more runs.

There was no suggestion of tipping from Suarez’s first three starts, but he was still hit hard simply because his location was bad.

Nevin said they have made some changes that they believe will help Suarez have more consistent mechanics, which will help him get the ball where he wants it.

“We’re just getting him to repeat and repeat,” Nevin said. “I think he took a different approach to his last bullpen.”

Suarez said he understands what has been going wrong and he said he was happy with the work since his last start.

“I feel really good,” Suarez said. “I feel 100% confident. I feel it coming back.”

If it doesn’t work, the Angels will likely have no choice but to send him to the bullpen, putting either Tucker Davidson or Chase Silseth in the rotation.

WARD MOVED

Nevin moved Taylor Ward down from the leadoff spot to No. 7, a recognition of the slump that he’s been in for most of the first month of the season. Ward was hitting .216 with a .649 OPS. Rookie Zach Neto moved up to the leadoff spot.

“It’s just more trying to find the right fit for the moment,” Nevin said. “Nothing’s etched in stone with any spot in the lineup. Net’s been swinging the bat great. Wardo, let’s get him more at-bats maybe with runners on in front of him. His at-bats have been a little better in those situations. So maybe that’ll be something to get him going.”

Ward said he was cheating to get to inside pitches and that was causing him to come off the ball instead of having an approach to hit the ball up the middle or to right center.

DEVENSKI ARRIVES

Right-hander Chris Devenski joined the Angels, replacing left-hander José Quijada. Devenski, 32, was an All-Star reliever with the Houston Astros in 2017, but two surgeries in the past three years sent his career off the rails. He had pitched nine innings so far at Triple-A, allowing four runs.

“I felt like I was throwing well,” Devenski said. “I felt like I was executing my pitches. (The Pacific Coast League) is a tough league to pitch in. Every league’s tough to pitch in. Pitching is hard. But I felt like I was throwing well.”

Devenski is a product of Gahr High and Cal State Fullerton who grew up rooting for the Angels.

There is no timetable for Quijada’s return. He felt some discomfort in his elbow when he woke up Friday and underwent an MRI later in the day. He was traveling back to Southern California on Saturday to be evaluated by Angels doctors, Nevin said. They are expecting more information in the next couple days, Nevin said.

NOTES

Right-hander Ryan Tepera (shoulder inflammation) “felt good” a day after pitching a perfect inning for Class-A Inland Empire, Nevin said. The plan is for him to pitch another inning Sunday and be re-evaluated. He would be eligible to be activated for the start of the Angels’ series in St. Louis on Tuesday. …

The Angels moved catcher Logan O’Hoppe to the 60-day injured list to create a spot on the 40-man roster for Devenski. O’Hoppe is going to be out at least four months after undergoing shoulder surgery. …

The Angels don’t have a day off planned for Ohtani. Nevin said he would play Sunday and they would then talk about when he might need a day off.

UP NEXT

Angels (LHP José Suarez, 0-1, 10.26) vs. Brewers (RHP Colin Rea, 0-1, 5.17), 11:10 a.m. Sunday, Angel Stadium, Bally Sports West, 830 AM.

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​ Orange County Register 

Looted monastery manuscripts rediscovered during office renovation

• April 29, 2023

NEW YORK — In 2008, Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan sold three Greek-language manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries to an antiquities dealer who returned them two years later after concluding they might have been looted.

The dealer was reimbursed, but the auction house, its officials said, was unable to reach the person who had consigned the items. So, they sat on a shelf for more than a decade, all but lost in the shuffle of daily operations.

Three months ago, though, the manuscripts resurfaced when Swann’s chief financial officer went through his office before a renovation. There on a shelf in a long-forgotten plastic bag were the manuscripts, which are believed to have been stolen from a Greek monastery in the midst of World War I.

They are thought to have been lost in 1917 when Bulgarian combatants are said to have plundered nearly 900 items from the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery, often called Kosinitza, in northern Greece.

The manuscripts will be sent back to the monastery, and their return was commemorated Friday in a repatriation ceremony in lower Manhattan. After the ceremony, arranged by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America was planning to travel to Constantinople to deliver the manuscripts to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church. From there, the items will go back to Kosinitza.

“It is a blessing for the monastic sisterhood at the monastery of Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa to see the contents of their former library slowly being returned to them,” Elpidophoros said in a statement. He said the church hopes that other organizations with manuscripts stolen from the monastery would also return them.

The sweeping scale of systematic looting during World War II by Nazi forces tends to overshadow the fact that artworks were routinely plundered during other conflicts. Roman generals, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte were known to have looted artworks during military campaigns, said Leila Amineddoleh, a lawyer who specializes in art and cultural heritage law and who has been serving as a consultant for lawyers seeking the return of documents they say were taken from the monastery.

But although some looting efforts are carried out in an organized fashion on behalf of an empire and its aspirations, Amineddoleh said the turmoil of war also provides cover for thefts by fighters who act on their own, not on orders.

“Sometimes, looting is done nation to nation,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s done by individuals as a crime of opportunity.”

The plundering of Kosinitza would appear to fall into the second category. The monastery was founded in about the fifth century and, by the 18th century, was said to have a collection of about 1,300 volumes, an Eastern Orthodox Church official wrote in a letter in 2015. The official added that the monastery was attacked in 1917 by “marauding Bulgarian guerilla forces” who sacked its library.

Four days after the attack, a letter from a local official to the Greek Foreign Affairs Delegation of Sofia said about 60 bandits had entered the monastery, assaulted men there and used 24 mules to cart off their spoils.

After being rediscovered recently at Swann, the yellowed manuscripts made their way to the desk of Devon Eastland, a senior specialist in early printed books at the auction house.

One, titled “Commemoration List of the Venerable and Patriarchal Monastery of Our Most Glorious Lady and Mother of God, of Kosinitsa,” contains a list of former monks at the monastery and people who had donated to the monastery — names that would be included by a priest in a special prayer after a liturgy. Another document included signatures of monastery officials.

“I wanted to find out where the manuscripts should go,” Eastland said recently during a phone interview. “If they were stolen, they needed to go back to the people they were taken from.”

Her task was made easier, Eastland said, by research notes that the antiquities dealer had sent, saying that writing within the manuscripts identify their source as Kosinitza. After reading the notes, Eastland wrote to George Tsougarakis, general counsel for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, telling him about the manuscripts.

Tsougarakis, while in private practice, had sued Princeton University in 2018 on behalf of the monastery, saying a collection at the school included manuscripts plundered from Kosinitza. The university responded that it was confident that its provenance research had established the manuscripts were not looted. The lawsuit is ongoing.

Over the past several years, the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago have returned items that could be traced to the 1917 thefts from Kosinitza. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York said in 2021 that it had agreed to an extended loan to the monastery of a 12th-century manuscript that it had received through a donation in 1926 and that the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople said had been looted.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

​ Orange County Register