UC SANA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) - Nate Vargas slugged two of the Gauchos season-high 4 home runs and ace Jackson Flora stayed undefeated on the mound in an 8-3 UCSB win over Cal State Fullerton.

Vargas launched a solo home run in the third inning and a two-run blast in the eighth inning for his first multi-homer game of his career. Vargas, who knocked in four runs, leads UCSB with six home runs this year.

Xavier Esquer smacked a 2-run shot in the third inning while William Vasseur ripped a solo home run in the fifth.

Flora is now 8-0 on the season after allowing just one run in six inning as he lowered his ERA to 0.78 which leads the nation. He scattered 7 hits and struck out 8.

"(Flora's sweeper) has always been good," began UCSB head coach Andrew Checketts. "They were heavy right-handed today, they had one left-hander in there; he didn't look like he had as good of a feel for the changeup today, so we were pretty heavy with that sweeper to get ahead. He did a good job of landing it, finishing guys off with it. He throws a little bit of a harder slider/cutter, which was good."

"I've always been pretty good at supinating and spinning the ball, so it's pretty easy for me to manipulate the ball going to my glove side," Flora said. "With some work last year, it's gotten better this year, just being able to separate it into two different pitches and work it. When hitters see spin, if they see the big breaker first and they see spin again they might think it's the big breaker again and then all of the sudden it's the short one, or they have to be geared up for a hard fastball and a hard slider, that doesn't allow them to be comfortable guessing pitches or guessing speeds. So, somewhere between the heater and the sweeper, that's been pretty effective and it's probably my favorite pitch — the hard slider — to throw, so I like it."

UCSB improves to 27-12 on the year and 13-6 in the Big West. The Gauchos are in a 3-way tie for first place with Cal Poly and UC San Diego.

(UCSB Athletics supplied the quotes).

The post Power and pitching leads UCSB past Fullerton appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (KEYT) - Freshman Gavin Spiridonoff had three hits and knocked in three runs as Cal Poly defeated Cal State Northridge 8-5. The Mustangs remain tied for first place in the Big West with UCSB and UC San Diego at 13-6.

Tied at 4 with two outs in the sixth inning, Spiridonoff lifted a fly ball to center field that the Matadors lost in the lights and it landed for a gift RBI triple. Nate Castellon followed with an RBI single to put Cal Poly up 6-4.

They added another two runs in the seventh inning with Spiridonoff knocking in a run on an infield single.

Both teams are now 22-18 on the year.

The post Cal Poly keeps a piece of first place in Big West with home win versus CSUN appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Ben Church, CNN

(CNN) — Even as one of the best athletes in the world, Hellen Obiri says she’ll still be nervous lining up at the start of this weekend’s London Marathon. It’s incredible, though, that the Kenyan would have any doubts at all.

After all, the 36-year-old is a double world champion in the 5000m, a three-time Olympic medalist and a winner of four major marathons since transitioning to the longer distance.

But the weight of expectation clearly impacts even those who appear superhuman from the outside.

“I do get nervous because sometimes you get to the start and see that this runner is here and that runner is there,” she told CNN Sports.

“Millions of people are also going to watch you and you have all your fans. If you see social media before the race, there’s sometimes a lot of people … saying she’s tired, she needs to retire.

“So things like that get you nervous, like, ‘How am I gonna do?’”

However, after years of experience on the global stage, Obiri has learned how to handle the pressure. The 36-year-old simply waits for that starting gun. Once racing, she’s back in her happy place.

“You have done a lot of work. You already know how your body is and you are prepared,” she said, reflecting on how she stays calm during races.

“I just need to concentrate on what I’m going to do, and I need to focus.”

Humble beginnings

Obiri’s journey to becoming a marathon champion is a compelling one, and one that saw her move from Kenya to the US in 2022 in the pursuit of greatness.

And, since setting her sights on the marathon distance, the Kenyan has won twice in Boston and twice in New York, with another victory in London now firmly on her agenda.

But while her career has taken her to the other side of the world in search of glory, her story has its roots firmly planted in her home nation.

Obiri started running back in elementary school, falling in love with the way it made her feel. At the time, the community she grew up in didn’t really cater to sports, and she initially struggled to find a mentor or a coach who could match her running ambitions.

Those frustrations were eased when she went to high school in the nearby capital city of Nairobi, where a young Obiri began experimenting with track and field.

“It opened the door to know much about sports,” she said.

At first, the youngster ran shorter distances, mainly 200m and 400m, while also dipping her toe into the triple jump (disciplines that now look a million miles away from her current distance).

But while her talent was clear, she laughs when looking back at how her love for running became a bone of contention in her family, with her parents initially split in their support.

At first, her mom didn’t fully understand the doors that track and field could open, so it was Obiri’s father who gave his backing first, urging her to train before doing any of her other household tasks.

It wasn’t until Obiri started winning races and appearing in the local newspaper that both her parents started encouraging her to pursue a running career.

Both her parents watched her win gold at last year’s New York marathon, hugging their daughter as she crossed the finish line.

“My dad used to wake me up at around 5:30 in the morning and tell me to go outside and run,” she said, when asked about how her childhood shaped her career.

Marathon ambitions

Then, in 2011, when she was over 20, Obiri started experimenting wi

By Zoe Sottile, Sara Smart, Sarah Hutter, CNN

(CNN) — It took just 30 minutes for Brytney Quinn to lose everything.

On Tuesday, the mother was going through the motions of a normal day in southeast Georgia’s Brantley County: getting her children ready for school as her husband prepared for work.

But around noon, multiple firetrucks and police cars swarmed their neighborhood, urging them to evacuate. A massive wildfire – believed to have been sparked by a children’s party balloon landing on a power line – was fast approaching, primed to destroy more homes than any wildfire in the state’s history.

She grabbed her daughter and her pets and left the house around 12:20 p.m.

Around half an hour later, she checked her surveillance cameras and saw her home in flames.

“My house is gone,” Quinn said tearfully in a video she shared with CNN showing the burned remnants of her house.

The Highway 82 Fire that engulfed Quinn’s home has devoured thousands of acres in south Georgia, destroying dozens of buildings and forcing hundreds to evacuate from their homes. It’s just one of several dangerous wildfires burning across Georgia and Florida, fostered by the worst spring drought conditions on record.

And Quinn isn’t the only one facing huge losses from the massive blazes. The Highway 82 Fire and the larger Pineland Road Fire have together destroyed more than 120 homes, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday, when around 4,000 homes were still in the evacuation zone.

“We got the two most dangerous, biggest problematic fires anywhere in the United States within really just a very small area that we’re having to fight,” he said.

Glowing red flames raced through the dry vegetation of southern Georgia, whipping up massive clouds of dark smoke that hung heavily over the region. The fires left behind the desiccated husks of vehicles and homes and blanketed neighborhoods with ash.

Residents found themselves clutching medications and family heirlooms before racing away from their homes, unsure if there’ll be anything left to come back to.

Across the state line, a volunteer firefighter died after a “medical emergency” while fighting the Old Dixie Highway Fire in Hilliard, Florida, according to the sheriff’s office.

For Quinn, the losses are devastating.

“My babies lost their home and the only place they felt safe,” she said. “Now we have nothing to go to but rubbish … how are we going to recover from this?”

‘We’ve just got to start over’

Like Quinn, grandparents Elizabeth and Tony Spear had just minutes to evacuate from their Brantley County home Tuesday.

“Firetrucks came down the road and said we had to leave immediately,” Elizabeth Spear recalled. “I threw a few things in a bag — our medicine, cellphone, charger, just very minimum — and went flying out the door, jumped in our little car and just left.”

Originally thinking they were safe, the Spears didn’t plan to evacuate.

It wasn’t until Thursday that they returned to the site where their house of 17 years once stood. Instead of seeing their family home, they were faced with ashen land, a destroyed shed and two burned-out vehicles.

“All of my grandma’s jewelry was lost and things from her mom who passed,” their granddaughter Ashleigh Anderson said. “All of their possessions were burned. They were only able to bring about two pairs of clothes.”

The couple also lost three pets in the blaze: two chihuahuas and a black lab.

“We lost everything,” Elizabeth Spear said. “It’s just total ashes.”

The Spears are striving to center their faith and love as they look to rebuild what they lost.

“It’s just stuff. You can re

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN

(CNN) — Just looking at the raw numbers, less than 1% of filers have been audited by the IRS in recent tax years. Based on the latest data available, for example, in tax year 2021 the IRS pursued a mere 0.3% of filers overall.

The audit rate has been higher for select groups of taxpayers based on certain characteristics – like the amount or types of income they report or specific tax breaks they claim. But even there, with very few exceptions, audits typically affect less than 10% of any given group and often a far smaller share – smaller as in, again, less than 1%.

But a lot has changed for the IRS in the past year.

A large percentage of employees were laid off or resigned, including many highly experienced in areas of enforcement and complex audits. Just over a quarter of both tax examiners and revenue agents were among them, according to a July 2025 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

And a majority of funding for enforcement promised under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was rescinded and the Trump administration is seeking to cut IRS funding further next year.

At the same time, the agency has been modernizing its antiquated systems and increasing its use of AI in a number of areas, including enforcement. “The IRS is using artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to identify high-risk areas of non-compliance and fraud with greater accuracy,” IRS CEO Frank Bisignano said in written testimony before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month. Among his stated goals for the agency: “Advancing a strong compliance agenda while improving collections beyond historical norms.”

How will the combination of these big changes affect any filer’s chance of being audited in the coming years?

It’s not clear, for several reasons, not least of which are a) whether the technology will be used responsibly and strategically, as former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel put it; and b) whether there will be a sufficient number of experienced IRS employees to successfully select and audit returns that AI identifies as potentially suspect.

AI’s promise of better-targeted audits

Ideally, AI will help keep the IRS off the back of perfectly compliant tax filers – thereby reducing the rate of so-called “no change” audits. Those are audits undertaken by the IRS which result in no revenue raised because, well, it found nothing wrong.

And it can help better identify anyone underreporting their income or otherwise violating tax rules.

“It will make the IRS more efficient in finding noncompliance,” said Barry Johnson, former chief data and analytics officer at the IRS who, among other things, oversaw how the agency used AI.

AI has the capacity to search and identify patterns in tax returns that would take humans and the IRS’ older statistical models a lot longer to unearth, if ever. It can identify returns with anomalies, which might indicate anything from a filer mistakenly underreporting income to committing outright fraud.

“AI gives us a forensic edge to select the right returns for audit,” Werfel said. “It’s almost like purchasing night-vision goggles. They help figure out which returns to select, and where the tax evasion is.”

How AI may raise audit rates

If used responsibly, he added, AI could lead to more taxpayers with unpaid balances being contacted.

By responsibly, he means that the IRS will have to balance “the use of AI with a human review – double checking and