Darius Randell scored in his Minnesota United debut as the Loons beat Louisville City 1-0 on Wednesday in the round of 32 of the U.S. Open Cup.

Randell was one of nine players signed to short-term agreements from MNUFC2 earlier in the day. Goalkeeper Wessel Speel; defenders Kieran Chandler, Britton Fischer, Kisa Kiingi; midfielders Curt Calov, Babacar Niang; and forwards Luke Hille and Muba Nour were also signed.

Randell scored in the 65th minute after Sang Bin Jeong passed across the front of the goal to the far side, where Randell was able to put the ball past Louisville City’s goaltender.

Speel played all 90 minutes in goal for Minnesota, which advances to play in the next round with a game to be determined.

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Stephen Curry will miss at least a week with a hamstring strain suffered in the second quarter of Golden State’s Game 1 victory over the Timberwolves on Tuesday in Minneapolis, putting the superstar guard on the shelf at least until Game 5.

Realistically, the Warriors’ target return date for Curry is likely Game 6, which would give Curry the full 10 days often required to return from such a Grade 1 hamstring strain. That means Minnesota could end the series before the Warriors’ superstar guard ever returns to action.

That’s why sportsbooks have the Timberwolves as a larger favorite to win the series now than they were even prior to dropping Game 1. Golden State sans its star guard — the axis for entire offense — is likely a .500 team, or worse.

Yes, the Warriors have Jimmy Butler, still a brilliant basketball player. But he’s not capable of physically carrying a team to the degree he could even two years ago. Sure, Golden State is elite defensively, but you do have to score to win basketball games. The Warriors are quickly running short on guys capable of doing so.

Golden State is in big trouble, and Minnesota is the beneficiary.

Hey, it’s part of the game. There’s a reason Timberwolves general manager Tim Connelly has always said the goal is just to be a top-four seed in the playoffs. Because if you can position yourself to win in the first round, anything can happen from there with injuries and matchups.

Connelly has lived it first hand. There’s a fair chance he would have won a ring in Denver had the Nuggets not been without Jamal Murray in consecutive postseasons. Minnesota may have a 2004 NBA championship banner hanging had Sam Cassell not gotten injured in 2004.

Mike Conley’s 2021 playoff run with top-seeded Utah was derailed by, yes, a hamstring injury.

Kawhi Leonard had the Spurs up by 23 points in the third quarter of Game 1 in the West Finals against the Warriors in 2017 before a severe ankle sprain sidelined him for the rest of the series. Golden State went on to sweep San Antonio and win the NBA championship.

Two years later, Leonard and the Raptors beat Golden State for the championship after Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson went down with major injuries in the NBA Finals.

Curry’s injury sets up the Timberwolves for advancement to their second consecutive Western Conference Final. If Minnesota doesn’t get there now, it has only itself to blame.

This isn’t a random night in February in which Minnesota lets its guard down against a team missing a couple key players. This is the playoffs. Talent always wins out over the course of a best-of-seven series. The Wolves’ roster now laps the lineups Golden State can trot out without Curry.

Buddy Hield has been great for Golden State, but he’ll now be a focal point of Minnesota’s defensive gameplan. That’s a different ballgame. Jaden McDaniels noted Wednesday he’ll now guard Hield in the same way he attempted to guard Curry, by removing all air space.

Good luck with that, Buddy.

There was a contest last season against a severely undermanned Dallas team in which Minnesota face-guarded Tim Hardaway Jr. — who had scored 36 points in a game two days prior — because he was the Mavericks’ only legitimate shooting threat that evening.

Hardaway Jr. went 2 for 10 from distance, and Minnesota won by 34.

Golden State gutted out a win Tuesday in which it was spotted a 10-point advantage when Curry exited. Winning future games in the series from Square 1, with Minnesota positioned to specifically stop the Warriors’ available personnel, will likely prove to be the steepest of uphill battles.

Understandably, local supporters will view the current situation with their guard up. They’ll brace for the worst, citing Minnesota’s struggles against short-handed teams in recent seasons.

But if the Timberwolves can’t muster up the necessary discipline and purpose to come out on a nightly basis and execute at the level required to win games against a team at a significant talent disadvantage — with a spot in the NBA’s final four on the line — then everything will need to be re-evaluated this offseason.

The Wolves caught a massive break on Tuesday, not the type of one any team wishes to receive, but it certainly should take advantage of. A failure to do should be viewed as nothing less than a catastrophic failure.

 

By OLIVIA DIAZ

A federal judge has ruled that a Georgetown scholar’s petition challenging the constitutionality of his arrest should be heard in Virginia, denying the Trump administration’s request to move the case to Texas.

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U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said she would hear arguments in mid-May on whether Badar Khan Suri should be returned to Virginia while his deportation case proceeds in Texas, where he’s now detained. His next hearing in the immigration case is in June.

The judge’s late Tuesday memo says that by swiftly moving Khan Suri from Virginia to Louisiana and then Texas within days of his arrest, the government appeared to be trying to thwart his lawyers’ efforts to challenge his detention in the jurisdiction where it happened.

Khan Suri’s lawyers went to court the day after masked, plain-clothed officers arrested him on the evening of March 17 outside his apartment complex in Arlington, Virginia. Officials said his visa was revoked because of his social media posts and his wife’s connection to Gaza as a Palestinian American. They accused him of supporting Hamas, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.

By the time Khan Suri’s petition was filed, authorities had already put him on a plane to Louisiana without allowing him to update his family or lawyer, Khan Suri’s attorneys said. A few days later, he was moved again to Texas.

“This atypical movement would make it difficult for any diligent lawyer’s filings to ’catch up’ to their client’s location,” and followed a pattern now evident in multiple efforts to deport students based on their speech, Giles wrote.

 

A supporter of Badar Khan Suri holds a sign saying “It’s the 1984 George Orwell Warned Us About!,” while attending a rally in opposition to the Georgetown University scholar’s arrest and detention, outside of the courthouse, at the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, Va., Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The judge noted that Columbia University scholar Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident with no criminal record who was detained in March over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations was moved within 48 hours of his arrest in Manhattan through lockups in New York, New Jersey, Texas and, then, Louisiana.

She also cited the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was arrested in a Boston suburb, driven New Hampshire and then Vermont, and then flown to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered ICE to return Ozturk to Vermont.

Each scholar “was arrested on different days and in different regions,” Giles wrote. “What is similar? … the Government attempted to move each outside of their jurisdictions to Louisiana or Texas.”

Unlike the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, the courts in Texas and western Louisiana are dominated by Republican-appointed judges, and any appeals go to the reliably conservative 5th Circuit, where 12 of the 17 full-time appellate judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including six by President Donald Trump.

Khan Suri came from India to the U.S. in 2022 on a J-1 visa. A visiting scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown, he taught a course on majority and minority human rights in South Asia, and lived with his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and three children.

U.S. attorneys argued that Khan Suri was quickly moved because a facility in Farmville, Virginia, was overcrowded and a nearby detention center in Caroline County had “no available beds and only had limited emergency bedspace.”

But the judge observed that for weeks thereafter, Khan Suri had to sleep on a plastic cot on the floor of an overcrowded detention center in Texas, and that according to his attorneys, he now sleeps on a bed in an overcrowded dormitory with about 50 other people. The government’s representations, she wrote, “are plainly inconsistent and are further undermined by the fact that Prairieland Detention Center, where Petitioner (Khan Suri) is currently held, is overcrowded.”

By LISA MASCARO and AMANDA SEITZ

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans appear to be backing off some, but not all, of the steep reductions to the Medicaid program as part of their big tax breaks bill, as they run into resistance from more centrist GOP lawmakers opposed to ending nearly-free health care coverage for their constituents back home.

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This is as a new report out Wednesday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that millions of Americans would lose Medicaid coverage under the various proposals being circulated by Republicans as cost-saving measures. House Republicans are scrounging to come up with as much as $1.5 trillion in cuts across federal government health, food stamp and other programs, to offset the revenue lost for some $4.5 trillion in tax breaks.

“Under each of those options, Medicaid enrollment would decrease and the number of people without health insurance would increase,” the CBO report said.

The findings touched off fresh uncertainty over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s ability to pass what President Donald Trump calls his “big, beautiful bill” by a self-made Memorial Day deadline.

Lawmakers are increasingly uneasy, particularly amid growing economic anxiety over Trump’s own policies, including the trade war that is sparking risks of higher prices, empty shelves and job losses in communities nationwide. Central to the package is the GOP priority of extending tax breaks, first enacted in 2017, that are expiring later this year. But they want to impose program cuts elsewhere to help pay for them and limit the continued climb in the nation’s debt and deficits.

Johnson has been huddling privately all week in the speaker’s office at the Capitol with groups of Republicans, particularly the more moderate GOP lawmakers in some of the most contested seats in the nation, who are warning off steep cuts that would slash through their districts.

Democrats, who had requested the CBO report, pounced on the findings.

“This non-partisan Congressional Budget Office analysis confirms what we’ve been saying all along: Republicans’ Medicaid proposals result in millions of people losing their health care,” said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who sought the review with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

House Republican lawmakers exiting a meeting late Tuesday evening indicated that Johnson and the GOP leadership were walking away from some of the most debated Medicaid changes to the federal matching fund rates provided to the states.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., said those Medicaid changes “are dead.”

Republican Rep. Nick LaLota of New York, reminded that Trump himself has said he would oppose Medicaid cuts. Instead, he said the growing consensus within the Republican ranks is to focus the Medicaid cuts on other provisions.

Among the other ideas, LaLota said, are imposing work requirements for those receiving Medicaid coverage, requiring recipients to verify their eligibility twice a year instead of just once and ensuring no immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal standing are receiving aid.

But the more conservative Republicans, including members of the House Freedom Caucus, are insisting on steeper cuts as they fight to prevent skyrocketing deficits from the tax breaks.

Medicaid is a joint program run by states and the federal government, covering 71 million adults.

Republicans are considering a menu of options to cut federal spending on the program, including reducing the share that the federal government pays for enrollees health care — in some cases it is as much as 90%.

They are also considering and setting a cap on how much the federal government spends on each person enrolled in Medicaid, though that idea also appears to be losing support among lawmakers.

While those changes would bring in billions of dollars in cost savings, they would also result in roughly 10 million people losing Medicaid coverage, the CBO said.

They appear to be off the table.

But other proposed Medicaid changes are still in the mix for Republicans, including imposing new limits on a state’s tax on health care providers that generate larger payments from the federal government. That would bring in billions in savings, but could also result in some 8 million people losing coverage, the report said.