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Anthony Edwards poured in a game-high 36 points, Julius Randle had 24 as part of a triple-double, and the Minnesota Timberwolves wrested back home-court advantage in their second-round playoff series against the Golden State Warriors with a 102-97 triumph in San Francisco, California.

Game 4 in the Western Conference best-of-seven series is scheduled for Monday night in San Francisco, with the sixth-seeded Timberwolves leading 2-1.

Jimmy Butler III had a team-high 33 points on Saturday for seventh-seeded Golden State, which played without star guard Stephen Curry, out with a strained left hamstring.

The tightly contested game saw the Warriors clinging within 84-82 before two game-disqualifying fouls on defensive ace Draymond Green within 18 seconds inside the final five minutes.

The Timberwolves took control from there, getting a triple from Jaden McDaniels and a three-point play from Rudy Gobert, the latter creating a six-point cushion for the visitors with 2:05 to play.

“We’re making some shots, for sure,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “We’re getting stops. We were getting stops throughout the regular season. We’re just winning the possession battle in clutch time now. We’re just not — we’re not giving the ball back on cheap turnovers. We’re not giving up as many or any second-chance opportunities.”

A 3-pointer by Edwards, his fifth of the game, all but clinched Minnesota’s second consecutive win with 1:19 to go.

Edwards’s 36 points were his second-most this postseason, topped only by a 43-point explosion in Game 4 against the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round. He hit 13 of his 28 shots on Saturday.

“The team defence was really good,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “Held them to 102. That’s a pretty good number. But Randle and Edwards really both got going in the second half, and that was the key. We couldn’t quite contain them, especially in the fourth, and that was the difference.”

Randle complemented his 24 points with 10 rebounds, a game-high 12 assists and three steals for the Timberwolves, who outshot the hosts 43.9 percent to 43.2 percent in a defensive struggle.

“He’s playing with so much force and determination,” Finch said of Randle. “He’s going out there early and aggressive, and he’s exerting a tonne of energy on the defensive end with his body and his rebounding. He’s playing a complete game for us, no doubt.”

McDaniels added 15 points and Gobert had a game-high 13 rebounds for Minnesota, which went 2-1 on the road in its 4-1 first-round series win against the Lakers.

Butler’s 33 points on 12-for-26 shooting were his most since he had 35 for the Miami Heat in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals at Boston in 2023. He also found time for seven rebounds and a team-high seven assists.

“Man, Jimmy was incredible,” Kerr said. “He really controlled the game for us and put us in a position to win, and we just couldn’t close it out. But he was brilliant all night.”

Jonathan Kuminga, pressed into increased playing time as the Warriors looked to fill the void of Curry’s regular scoring, backed Butler with a postseason career-high 30 points. He had totalled just 43 in Golden State’s first nine playoff games.

“JK [Jonathan Kuminga] played one of the best games of his life,” Kerr said. “It was fantastic to see. You can see how necessary he is in this matchup, especially without Steph [Curry].”

Buddy Hield shot 4-for-8 on 3-pointers to account for a majority of his 14 points for the Warriors, while Brandin Podziemski collected a team-high eight rebounds on a night when he shot 1-for-10.

Celtics bury Knicks in Game 3

In an earlier playoff game on Saturday, Jayson Tatum finished with 22 points, nine rebounds and seven assists, and the Boston Celtics pulled away for a 115-93 win over the host New York Knicks in Game 3 of their second-round Eastern Conference series.

Payton Pritchard scored a team-high 23 points off the bench for Boston, which cut the Knicks’ lead to 2-1 in the best-of-seven series. Jaylen Brown added 19 points, and Derrick White had 17.

Jalen Brunson scored 27 points on 9-for-21 shooting to lead the Knicks. Karl-Anthony Towns finished with 21 points and 15 rebounds.

After struggling to score in the first two games of the series, the Celtics found their rhythm on offence. Boston shot 48.2 percent (40 of 83) overall and 50 percent (20 of 40) from 3-point range, and New York shot 40 percent (32 of 80) from the field and 20 percent (5 of 25) from beyond the arc.

“They got some clean looks early, and they see it go in; that gives them confidence. Then it’s hard to shut them off,” said Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau. “We have to have greater awareness. We can’t allow missed shots to take away from [our] defensive tenacity. We’ve got to bounce back.”

Tatum made a basket to put Boston on top 112-89 with 2:40 remaining. He assisted on a 3-pointer by Al Horford on the next possession, and Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla rested his starters for the remainder of the game with the score out of reach.

“This is the fun part. You don’t get into the journey for it to be easy,” said Mazzulla. “It’s been dark, but in a good way. You’ve just got to tap into your darkness, and that’s it.”

Game 4 in the best-of-seven series will be played in New York on Monday.

Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk has been released six weeks after plainclothes ICE agents bundled her into a van and held her in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana. The Trump administration had revoked her student visa over an article she co-authored criticising Tufts University’s ties to Israel.

New Delhi, India – Mukeet Shah had not slept for days, doomscrolling on his mobile phone as he remained hooked to news updates on the spiralling India-Pakistan conflict.

A phone call from his mother, Tanveera Bano, on Saturday made it worse. “Please, come back [home]. Why be apart when we can at least die together?” she urged her younger son, who studies at a university in New Delhi, the national capital.

Shah, 23, said her appeal shattered him. An hour or so later, another news flash popped up on his phone: “US President Donald Trump says India and Pakistan have agreed to a ‘full and immediate’ ceasefire.” Moments later, the South Asian rivals confirmed the ceasefire, mediated by dozens of countries besides the United States.

“It was such a relief,” Shah recalled. Happily, he called home. “Both countries have agreed to peace. We will spend more time soon, don’t be afraid, mother,” he told 48-year-old Bano, who asked him to focus on his studies and return home only after his annual exams.

However, barely three hours after that phone call, the sense of relief was blown away. A barrage of drones had hit Srinagar, the main city in Indian-administered Kashmir, forcing another electricity blackout. Similar reports of firings and drone sightings came from other cities in the region, including Jammu, Anantnag, as well as the border districts of Rajasthan and Gujarat states.

On the Pakistan side as well, several villages along the Line of Control (LoC) – the de facto border that divides Kashmir – reported alleged ceasefire violations by the Indian forces. As Pakistan and India denied each other’s allegations and reaffirmed their commitment to the ceasefire, questions were raised on whether the fragile agreement between the nuclear-powered neighbours would hold.

Bano called her son again, crying.

“In her intermittent pauses, I could hear sounds of blasts behind her as she broke down. The jets were loud as well,” Shah told Al Jazeera on Saturday night, sitting in a huddle with his Kashmiri friends in a New Delhi neighbourhood, 800km (about 500 miles) away from home.

Eighteen days after gunmen killed 26 civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir’s resort town of Pahalgam, nearly 1.6 billion people on either side of the border reeled under the fears of another India-Pakistan war over Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region claimed in full by both the nations that rule over parts of it.

An armed rebellion against New Delhi’s rule erupted on the Indian side in 1989. Since then, tens of thousands of people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the conflict. New Delhi accuses Islamabad of backing the rebellion, but Pakistan denies the allegation and claims to provide only diplomatic support to the Kashmiris’ struggle for an independent state or a likely merger with Pakistan.

‘Kashmiris stuck in the middle’

Abbas, a Srinagar resident who requested to be identified by his last name only, told Al Jazeera the loud explosions his family heard on Saturday night were terrifying.

“Each blast came out of nowhere and left us scared and confused. As a Kashmiri, I have lived through tough times before, but this [current conflict] feels different,” he said.

Abbas said he had been waking up to toddlers crying amid explosions at night.

“It feels like a psychological war has been waged on us. The fear isn’t just from the blasts; it is from the uncertainty and a lack of transparency,” he said. “Kashmiris are once again stuck in the middle, with no refuge, no escape.”

Yet, the ceasefire announcement on Saturday evening was met with jubilation in several frontier districts on the Indian side, especially among thousands of displaced residents since the cross-border tensions mounted earlier this month.

Deepak Singh, a 40-year-old resident of Poonch, one of the most affected border districts in Indian-administered Kashmir, said in a brief phone interview that his family of four looked forward to leaving their shelter and being home.

“We have known a life that gets disturbed by the border clashes, but I am hopeful to return to my home soon,” Singh told Al Jazeera.

But that was before the explosions were reported from Srinagar. As both sides accused each other of breaching the truce, Singh said he felt devastated.

“Not again,” he later said. “Till how long are we supposed to sleep in this shelter? Will this ceasefire hold at all?”

More than 1,000km (620 miles) away, Pradyot Verma was having similar feelings.

A resident of Jodhpur, a border town in India’s western state of Rajasthan, Verma said their joy and relief were short-lived as they witnessed another round of blackouts and siren alerts on Saturday night, keeping the residents in an anxious loop.

“The ceasefire announcement was met with cheers here,” said the 26-year-old law student as he sat in darkness in his rented room. “Indian defence system keeps on intercepting [Pakistan-origin missiles] and we are hoping that they keep doing it.”

‘Back from the brink of war’

After four days of military escalation, during which Indian and Pakistani forces attacked each other’s military installations, they agreed on a ceasefire, which Trump said was reached after “a long night of talks” mediated by the US and other countries. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the two nations have also agreed to “start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site”.

However, geopolitical and military experts argue the ceasefire is fragile and does not promise much.

“The Indian government has already signalled rebutting Rubio’s assertion that India and Pakistan have agreed to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site,” Sumantra Bose, a political scientist, told Al Jazeera. “It is something [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s government just can’t do, given its commitment to unilateralism on Kashmir and rejection of diplomatic engagement with Pakistan.”

Bose said the ceasefire was merely a “band-aid slapped on a profusely bleeding wound that was threatening to turn gangrenous if not fatal”.

While the escalation might have stopped due to intervention by foreign governments, “the problem is all the other parameters and vectors of the India-Pakistan relationship and the Kashmir conflict remain as before”, Bose said, adding, “in an even more bitter and toxic form than was the case earlier”.

However, Michael Kugelman, an expert on South Asia politics, stressed that the subcontinent was “back from the brink of war”.

“This ceasefire, so long as it holds, even with some violations, does bring an end to what had been the biggest regional security threat by far in decades,” he told Al Jazeera.

“This is going to be a very difficult ceasefire to uphold. It was very quickly put together at a moment when India-Pakistan tensions were soaring [and] this is also a ceasefire that appears to have been interpreted differently by India,” added Kugelman, referring to India’s historic position on Kashmir, which has been a consistent rejection of any attempt by Pakistan at internationalising the issue.

But for the people living along the tense borders between the South Asian rivals, a cautious optimism is their only recourse.

“We are holding this ceasefire very dear to us,” said a Kashmiri political analyst, who requested anonymity, fearing reprisal from the Indian authorities.

“Be it anyone’s war, India or Pakistan, people on the border, Kashmiris and Punjabis, have been losing their lives for generations. I hope this madness stops here.”

Jack Della Maddalena took away Belal Muhammad’s potent wrestling ability, allowing only one takedown en route to becoming the new welterweight champion in the main event of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 315 in Montreal, Canada.

He won the five-rounder by scores of 48-47, 48-47, 49-45 on Saturday night.

Della Maddalena used volume striking to frustrate the now-former welterweight champion, nearly finishing the fight on several occasions. Della Maddalena (18-2, Mixed Martial Arts) has now won 18 in a row. Muhammad (24-4, 1 No Contest) was making his first title defence and had won 11 consecutive fights.

Della Maddalena credited Muhammad’s toughness but said post-fight that he knew he was not going to let it slip away.

“It felt [expletive] good,” the Australian said with a smile.

He said he was intrigued by UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev’s possible move to welterweight, and was open to exacting revenge on the Russian. His fellow Australian, Alexander Volkanovski, lost both bouts to Makhachev.

It is the first loss for Muhammad, a Chicago native, since January 2019.

Valentina Shevchenko successfully defended her UFC women’s flyweight title in the co-main event over Manon Fiorot, winning by a unanimous 48-47, 48-47, 48-47 decision to hand Fiorot (12-2, MMA) her first UFC loss.

Despite a closely contested fight, Shevchenko (25-4, 1 NC MMA) pushed the pace in the fourth and fifth rounds to tire out Fiorot and give the Frenchwoman little room to work after signs of early success through three gruelling rounds.

“I expected a hard fight,” Shevchenko, a 125-pounder from Kyrgyzstan, said in the Octagon following the win.

The victory marked Shevchenko’s 14th in the UFC, including 10 title fights.

Initially scheduled as a bantamweight fight, Canadian featherweight Aiemann Zahabi earned a win by unanimous decision against former UFC featherweight champion Jose Aldo, taking the three scorecards by matching 29-28 scores.

Aldo nearly finished Zahabi in the third round with a head kick, followed by a flurry of strikes. However, Zahabi was able to survive Aldo’s attacks, gain the top position, and open a cut on Aldo.

The win for Zahabi (13-2, MMA) marked Brazilian Aldo’s (32-10) final MMA fight, announcing his retirement in the Octagon.

“I just don’t have it in my heart any more,” said Aldo, 38. “I think this is the last time you’re going to see me.”

Women’s flyweight Natalia Silva of Brazil knocked off former champion Alexa Grasso from her top-contender status with a unanimous decision win, all by 30-27 scores.

Silva (19-5-1, MMA) has won her first six UFC fights, while Mexico’s Grasso (16-5-1, MMA) has to return to the drawing board to remain in contention. Silva opened a noticeable cut above Grasso’s eyelid, swinging the momentum in the second round before a one-sided Round 3 followed suit with dominant kickboxing ability.

Lightweight Benoit Saint-Denis of France had no trouble beating Canadian Kyle Prepolec, a late replacement, with an arm triangle choke at 2:35 of the second round.