delivery

MILWAUKEE — Left-hander Eric Lauer strode up the bullpen mound at Petco Park as the Dodgers-Padres series finale Wednesday transitioned into the late innings.

He had been available to provide length as a reliever, but the plan had been for him to throw either way, he said.

The Dodgers didn’t end up needing him to cover innings, so he tossed a side session. And now Lauer has the weekend to address the mechanical issues that plagued his bumpy first six weeks of the season with the Toronto Blue Jays before making his Dodgers debut Tuesday as a starter against the Rockies at Dodger Stadium.

“It’s nice having a little change of scenery, because it gives me a nice full-blown reset,” Lauer said. “I can get my feet back under me, I can get out of my head a little bit more, understand what makes me good and what’s got me to this point, and run with that.”

Lauer, who landed on waivers at a convenient time for the Dodgers, is their immediate answer to a sudden rotation depth problem.

They don’t expect him to save the day in the absence of Blake Snell (elbow surgery to remove loose bodies) and Tyler Glasnow (back spasms). But the Dodgers saw an opportunity to fill a hole in their roster and ideally help him reverse his early-season regression.

“We’ve had our guys take a look and we’ll sit down and talk through some stuff, see how much we can do on the fly, how much of it is not just subconscious,” general manager Brandon Gomes said. “But we know the makeup is really good, and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on him and helping him be as successful as he’s been in the past.”

As long as Lauer gradually improves, his presence allows the Dodgers to keep their starters on a six- to seven-day rotation, without taxing their relievers with regular bullpen days, at least while they wait for other pitchers to return to health and/or build up their workloads.

Lauer’s only months removed from success. He owned a career-best 3.18 ERA last season and was even better in the postseason, authoring 5 ⅔ scoreless innings against the Dodgers in the World Series.

Dodgers reliever Will Klein, who threw opposite Lauer in the 18-inning Game 3 of the World Series, was one of the first people he met when he joined the team in San Diego.

“He introduced himself, and I was like, ‘All right, I know you, I remember you,’” Lauer said.

Coming off of winning the pennant, Lauer’s ERA ballooned this year to 6.96 ERA. In mid-April, the Blue Jays tried using an opener in front of Lauer when he faced the Diamondbacks. And his reaction made headlines.

“To be real blunt, I hate it,” he told reporters then. “I can’t stand it. But you work with what you got.”

This week, surrounded by different set of reporters in the visitors dugout at Petco Park earlier this week after joining the Dodgers, Lauer gave a knowing smile when the topic of usage with Toronto came up.

“There was no ill will there, there was no hurt feelings,” he said of his comments on openers. “It was a very simple question, I thought, how do you feel about an opener? I think if you ask most starters in the league, they would probably have the same response, that they don’t like it. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to do it. It doesn’t mean that I’m not a team player.”

He said he cleared it up with Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker and manager John Schneider right away.

“I’m not going to have a problem if there is somebody in front of me,” he said. “It’s part of the game, it’s become part of the game. And we’re all here to win ballgames. It’s not about any individual player. So that was a lot more than I expected that to turn into.”

So far, Lauer has praised the Dodgers’ communication. And he’s been reunited with pitching coach Mark Prior, who was the Padres’ minor-league pitching coordinator when Lauer began his professional career in San Diego’s system.

When Lauer diagnoses his season, he sees two sets of issues working in concert.

“A couple things had compounded for me, and it was just kind of eating at me a little bit too much,” Lauer told The Times. “And I work with a mental skills coach and stuff, to where that shouldn’t happen. But I wasn’t mentally my best, which was making me not my best physically, which made me start to want to tinker.”

Lauer feels like he has a hold on the mental side. Now it’s working from the ground up to get his delivery back in sync. The goal, as Lauer explains it, is to find positions that create tension in his delivery, and pattern them until they feel like second nature.

Making mechanical adjustments during the season, however, tends to be two steps forward, one step back.

Lauer isn’t expected to have it all figured out for his start Tuesday. The Dodgers just want to see him compete with whatever he has that day.

“We compete, and then we go back to the process,” Lauer said. “…Then hopefully the process over time becomes more patterned, more grooved. And then it becomes less process, more just fine-tuning to compete.”

Airbnb unveiled a new set of services for guests on Wednesday, adding car rentals, airport pickup and grocery delivery to its online marketplace that connects travelers with local hosts.

Customers can now get groceries delivered to their Airbnb through a partnership with Instacart and have a driver meet them at the airport with Airbnb’s Welcome Pickups. The app is also offering luggage storage in partnership with Bounce and will add in-app car rentals later this summer.

At the same time, Airbnb is ramping up its use of AI by adding AI-powered review summaries and lodging comparisons, the company said.

The company has been expanding beyond lodging since last year, when it introduced Airbnb Experiences & Services, giving guests the option to book private tours and chef-cooked meals through the app.

In an earnings call earlier this month, the company’s chief executive, Brian Chesky, said the company is at “the very, very beginning of how AI is going to change how we all do our jobs.”

The changes are coming in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will take place in 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The company said it is offering exclusive World Cup experiences, such as watch parties and access to stadiums.

“In terms of what we’ve seen in cumulative bookings heading into the event, the World Cup is slated to be the largest event in Airbnb’s history,” the company’s chief financial officer, Ellie Mertz, said on the earnings call.

Airbnb gained popularity for offering travelers unique and homey stays on other people’s property, but it added boutique hotel bookings to its platform late last year. The move had some customers questioning if the app was straying too far from its original purpose.

In its announcement this week, the company said it is partnering with more independent hotels in 20 top destinations, including New York, London and Singapore. On the earnings call, Chesky said hotels on Airbnb could become a multibillion-dollar revenue business.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2007 and gave homeowners the opportunity to earn money by renting out their space to travelers seeking something different from a hotel. Airbnb bookings can range from private bedrooms in a shared home to luxury mansions and yachts.

The company’s revenue grew 18% year over year to $2.7 billion in the first quarter, while net income increased slightly to $160 million. Airbnb’s new services and offerings could transform it from a home-sharing platform to a holistic travel marketplace, analysts said.

Shares of the company have increased by 14% over the last six months and fell by less than 1% on Thursday.

The United States Supreme Court has temporarily reinstated a rule allowing an abortion pill to be prescribed through telemedicine and dispensed through the mail, lifting a judicial ban that narrowed access to the medication nationwide.

Justice Samuel Alito issued an interim order on Monday, pausing for one week a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to reimpose an older federal rule requiring an in-person clinician visit to receive mifepristone.

The 5th Circuit acted in a challenge to the rule by the Republican-led state of Louisiana.

The Supreme Court’s action, called an “administrative stay”, gives the justices more time to review emergency requests by two manufacturers of mifepristone to ensure that the drug can be provided via telehealth and the mail while the legal challenge plays out.

Alito ordered Louisiana to respond to the drugmakers’ requests by Thursday and indicated that the administrative stay would expire on May 11. The court would be expected to extend the interim stay or formally decide the requests by that time.

Alito, one of the nine-member court’s six conservative justices, acted because he is designated by the court to oversee emergency matters that arise in a group of states that includes Louisiana.

The case puts the contentious issue of abortion back in front of the justices, who must confront another effort by abortion opponents to scale back access to mifepristone, with the November US congressional elections looming.

The court in 2024 unanimously rejected an initial bid by anti-abortion groups and doctors to roll back Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations that had eased access to the drug, ruling that these plaintiffs lacked the necessary legal standing to pursue the challenge.

Mifepristone, given FDA regulatory approval in 2000, is taken with another drug called misoprostol to perform medication abortions, a method that now accounts for more than 60 percent of all abortions in the US.

The ongoing battles over abortion rights follow the court’s 2022 ruling that overturned its 1973 Roe v Wade precedent that had legalised abortion nationwide.

That ruling has prompted 13 states to enact near-total bans on the procedure, while several others have sharply restricted access.

Louisiana sued the FDA last year, claiming that a rule adopted during the administration of former US President Joe Biden, a Democrat – a rule that eased access to mifepristone by eliminating the in-person dispensing requirement – is illegal and undermines the state’s abortion ban.

The pill’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, and GenBioPro, which makes a generic version, intervened in the litigation to defend the 2023 regulation. The administration of current US President Donald Trump, a Republican, cited an ongoing review of safety regulations concerning mifepristone and opposed the state’s challenge.

In April, US Judge David Joseph in Lafayette, Louisiana, declined to block the regulation but agreed with the administration to put the case on hold pending the review. The 5th Circuit blocked the rule on May 1.

The legal and political fight over access to mifepristone has dominated the debate over abortion in the US over the past few years.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the top court’s decision on Monday a “positive short-term development”.

“The Supreme Court needs to put an end to this baseless attack on our reproductive freedom, once and for all,” Julia Kaye, senior lawyer for the Reproductive Freedom Project of the ACLU, said in a statement.

Since the Supreme Court revoked the right to abortion in 2022, Democrats have been seizing on the unpopularity of bans on the procedure and emphasising the issue in their electoral platforms.

Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, welcomed the top court’s decision on Monday, but said, “This fight is just beginning.”

“We will stop at nothing to prevent the Republicans from putting a national abortion ban into effect,” Schumer wrote on X.

On Monday, Republican Senator Josh Hawley cited disputed findings on the health risks associated with mifepristone, urging lawmakers to act.

“Now it’s time for Congress to ban it completely for use in abortion,” he said in a social media post.

May 2 (UPI) — The United States has started warning allies that delivery of weapons systems are likely to be delayed because stockpiles have been drained during the war in Iran.

The Department of Defense has warned several allies in Europe — including the United Kingdom, Poland, Norway and Estonia — that there will be delivery delays for several missile systems, Breaking Defense and The Financial Times reported.

The delays, which may also spread to deliveries to Asian allies, have been linked to growing concerns about the numbers of U.S. weapons used since the war in Iran started.

Concerns have also come up as to whether lower stockpiles could affect the United States’ ability to defend itself and its allies.

The Department of Defense already has been relocating weapons from bases in other parts of the world both to the U.S. stockpile and for use in the Iran war, which President Donald Trump noted on Friday.

“All over the world, we have inventory,” he said. “And we can take that if we need it.”

Among the weapons systems that could be affected are the HIMARS and NASAMS missile systems, shortages of which were reported in Estonia and Norway in April.

The president of Finland also said in recent days that some U.S. weapons stockpiles normally stored in the country have been rerouted, which lines up with Trump’s comments yesterday.

In Asia, Japan and South Korea are reportedly bracing for delays beyond the ones it already has not received, including Patriot missile interceptors and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Delays that have already happened, and the potential for more, could affect foreign nations’ reliance on weapons manufactured by the United States, experts have said.

“Japan already was deeply frustrated with delivery delays for systems they have paid for,” former Pentagon official Christopher Johnstone told the Financial Times.

“This reality will drive Japan, South Korea and other allies to focus more heavily on indigenous and non-American options, even in areas where U.S. equipment is clearly superior,” he said.

The reports of delays come after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday told members of the Senate Arms Services Committee that he is aware of concerns about the stockpile after two months of an intense campaign in Iran.

In response to questions about the Pentagon’s request for a nearly 50% increase in its budget, Hegseth noted that some of the increase is because of weapons used during the war, and that it could take “months and years” to fully replenish the stockpile.

Trump has asked defense companies to “quadruple” their manufacturing pace, but there are limits to how much production can be sped up, according to industry experts.

April 19 (Asia Today) — North Korea launched multiple ballistic missiles on Saturday, just 11 days after its previous test, in what analysts describe as an effort to expand and demonstrate its nuclear delivery capabilities.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missiles were fired around 6:10 a.m. from the Sinpo area on the country’s east coast and flew about 140 kilometers over the East Sea.

The launch site, near a key submarine facility, has raised the possibility that the weapons could be linked to submarine-launched ballistic missile development, though officials said further analysis is needed.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff said it is assessing the missiles’ specifications and whether they were launched from land or underwater.

Sinpo is home to North Korea’s main submarine shipyard, where vessels such as the “Kim Gun-ok Hero” submarine have previously been unveiled.

Recent satellite imagery cited by the North Korea-focused outlet 38 North indicated that another submarine had been moved to dry dock, suggesting possible preparations for additional testing.

Yang Wook, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said the relatively short flight distance raises questions about whether a full submarine-based launch was conducted.

“Given the 140-kilometer range, it is unclear whether this was a full SLBM test, but the location suggests it could be part of efforts to verify repeated launch capability,” he said.

If confirmed as an underwater launch, the test would mark North Korea’s latest step in diversifying its nuclear delivery systems, following demonstrations involving land-based missiles and sea-based platforms in recent weeks.

Under its latest defense development plan, North Korea has been expanding a range of strategic capabilities, including short-range ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles and solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile engines.

Analysts say the timing may also reflect broader geopolitical considerations. With the United States focused on conflict in the Middle East, North Korea could be seeking to exploit a perceived security gap while reinforcing its deterrence posture.

Some experts also suggest the launch may be intended to strengthen Pyongyang’s bargaining position ahead of potential diplomatic engagement tied to an expected visit by President Donald Trump to China next month.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

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Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260420010005867