A season of frustratingly unfortunate events for USC had led here, to this nightmarish crescendo at the one-minute mark Saturday, in a must-win matchup.
Through a roller-coaster afternoon, the Trojans had navigated one wave after another, riding several hot streaks and surviving the cold ones, knowing full well that their NCAA tournament hopes hinged on a win over Oregon, one of the Big Ten’s worst teams.
All that stress seemed to subside as USC took a six-point lead with 70 seconds remaining. Any rational onlooker would assume that the Trojans had held on for good, dispatching of the Ducks.
But then Oregon scored on a layup. It stole the ball back. And it hit a three-pointer.
USC coach Eric Musselman reacts after a play during the Trojans’ loss to Oregon Saturday at the Galen Center.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
USC clung to a one-point lead as freshman Alijah Arenas stepped back for a jumper that clanged away. Kam Woods missed a tip. Then, Oregon got the ball back and drew a foul.
Two free throws from Oregon’s Nate Bittle dealt USC one final, unbelievable blow to their Saturday — and perhaps their season — handing the Trojans a devastating 71-70 loss.
Their hopes of making the NCAA tournament aren’t necessarily dead as of Saturday. Four games still remain for the Trojans to build their case before the Big Ten tournament. But two of those come against UCLA and another against Nebraska, one of the best teams in the Big Ten this season.
USC had hoped Chad Baker-Mazara‘s return from injury would help lift them to a victory Saturday. Baker-Mazara led all scorers with 21, but he also fouled out late, during that final possession.
Arenas struggled most of the afternoon, before scoring 11 in the second half. But it was his turnover in the final seconds that ultimately handed Oregon the win
Baker-Mazara hadn’t played since the beginning of February, and in back-to-back losses to Illinois and Ohio State, the Trojans undoubtedly missed his spark. If not for a late game winner in State College from Arenas, they would’ve dropped all three games played without Baker-Mazara.
The circumstances ultimately left USC in a must-win scenario Saturday, if it hoped to continue clinging to the edge of the NCAA tournament bubble. Oregon had, on the other hand, spent most of the season in the Big Ten cellar. It entered Saturday’s matinee with losses in 11 of its last 12 games.
There was no such urgency in Baker-Mazara upon his return. The sixth-year senior sang and danced his way through warm-ups, before opening the game on a stationary bike in the corner of the arena.
But upon checking in, he jolted the Trojans offense to life with 13 straight points.
The boost Baker-Mazara provided eventually ran out of gas. USC hit just three of its final 14 shots before halftime, and Oregon stormed out in front.
The Ducks did the same in the second half, albeit in much more devastating fashion, leaving USC with a much harder road ahead.
Furlong and the Ireland squad have turned their attention to Saturday’s trip to face England in Twickenham (14:10 GMT) where he will likely come into direct contact with Lions team-mate Ellis Genge who he acknowledges is “not a fella with a Lions hangover”.
While England lost their Calcutta Cup match against Scotland, Furlong felt Steve Borthwick’s side were strong in the scrum and this is an area Ireland are seeking to improve after some struggles in their win over Italy.
“We were negative three in the penalty count so that was a disappointing result,” Furlong acknowledged.
“Italy do have a good scrum and we saw what they did to South Africa in November.
“The fixes are the simple stuff – height, entry and angles, but they did a good job of isolating the two on ones in the scrum.”
Furlong won his 83rd cap as a replacement against the Italians and is now firmly in the veteran category in the squad.
Ireland have suffered a number of injuries for this Six Nations, especially in the forwards, which has resulted in a number of new faces promoted into starting line-ups and match-day squads.
Despite a chastening defeat by France in their opener and struggles in victory against Italy, Furlong remains optimistic as to regards the trajectory of the team.
“There are players missing through injury or retirement and it changes the feel of the group,” he acknowledged.
“I remember travelling off to Portugal (pre-Six Nations training camp) and there were a load of new faces there and I was thinking ‘this feels a bit different, I feel a bit older’.
“As the weeks went on with the younger players and come of the others came back into camp, the younger players have come out of themselves a bit from a rugby point of view.
“Where that leaves us? The rest of the championship will tell that story but I like where the group is going, there’s a lot of promise.”
The true human cost of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip has far exceeded previous official estimates, with independent research published in the world’s leading medical journals verifying more than 75,000 “violent deaths” by early 2025.
The findings, emerging from a landmark series of scientific papers, suggest that administrative records from the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) represent a conservative “floor” rather than an overcount, and provide a rigorous bedrock to the scale of Palestinian loss.
The Gaza Mortality Survey (GMS), a population-representative household study published in The Lancet Global Health, estimated 75,200 “violent deaths” between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025. This figure represents approximately 3.4 percent of Gaza’s pre-conflict 2.2 million population and sits 34.7 percent higher than the 49,090 “violent deaths” reported by the MoH for the same period.
The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that as of January 27 this year, at least 71,662 people have been killed since the start of the war. Of those, 488 people have been killed since the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2025.
Israel has consistently questioned the ministry’s figures, but an Israeli army official told journalists in the country in January that the army accepted that about 70,000 people had been killed in Gaza during the war.
Despite the higher figure, researchers noted that the demographic composition of casualties – where women, children, and the elderly comprise 56.2 percent of those killed – remains remarkably consistent with official Palestinian reporting.
(Al Jazeera)
Scientific validation of the toll
The GMS, which interviewed 2,000 households representing 9,729 individuals, provides a rigorous empirical foundation for a death toll.
Michael Spagat, a professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London and the study’s lead author, found that while MoH reporting remains reliable, it is inherently conservative due to the collapse of the very infrastructure required to document death.
Notably, this research advances upon findings published in The Lancet in January 2025, which used statistical “capture-recapture” modelling to estimate 64,260 deaths during the war’s first nine months.
While that earlier study relied on probability to flag undercounts, this report shifts from mathematical estimation to empirical verification through direct household interviews. It extends the timeline through January 2025, confirming a violent toll exceeding 75,000 and quantifying, for the first time, the burden of “non-violent excess mortality”.
According to a separate commentary in the same publication, the systematic destruction of hospitals and administrative centres has created a “central paradox” where the more devastating the harm to the health system, the more difficult it becomes to analyse the total death toll.
Verification is further hindered by thousands of bodies still buried under rubble or mutilated beyond recognition. Beyond direct violence, the survey estimated 16,300 “non-violent deaths”, including 8,540 “excess” deaths caused directly by the deterioration of living conditions and the blockade-induced collapse of the medical sector.
Researchers highlighted that the MoH figures appear to be conservative and reliable, dispelling misinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting Palestinian casualty data. “The validation of MoH reporting through multiple independent methodologies supports the reliability of its administrative casualty recording systems even under extreme conditions,” the study concluded.
A decade of reconstructive backlogs
While the death toll continues to mount, survivors face an unprecedented burden of complex injury that Gaza’s decimated healthcare system is no longer equipped to manage. A predictive, multi-source model published in eClinicalMedicine quantified 116,020 cumulative injuries as of April 30, 2025.
The study, led by researchers from Duke University and Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, estimated that between 29,000 and 46,000 of these injuries require complex reconstructive surgery. More than 80 percent of these injuries resulted from explosions, primarily air attacks and shelling in densely populated urban zones.
The scale of the backlog is staggering. Ash Patel, a surgeon and co-author of the study, noted that even if surgical capacity were miraculously restored to pre-war levels, it would take approximately another decade to work through the estimated backlog of predicted reconstructive cases. Before the escalation, Gaza had only eight board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeons for a population exceeding 2.2 million people.
The collapse of the health system
The disparity between reconstructive need and capacity is exacerbated by what researchers describe as the “systematic destruction” of medical infrastructure. By May 2025, only 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remained capable of providing care beyond basic emergency triage, with approximately 2,000 hospital beds available for the entire population, down from more than 3,000 beds before the war.
“There is little to no reconstructive surgery capacity left within Gaza,” the research concluded, warning that specialised expertise like microsurgery is almost absent. The clinical challenge is further compounded by Israel’s use of incendiary weapons, which produce severe burns alongside blast-related fractures.
The long-term effect of these injuries is often irreversible. Without prompt medical treatment, patients face high risks of wound infection, sepsis, and permanent disability. The data indicate that tens of thousands of Palestinians will remain with surgically addressable disabilities for life unless there is a huge international increase in reconstructive capacity and aid.
The ‘grey zone’ of mortality
Writing in The Lancet Global Health, authors Belal Aldabbour and Bilal Irfan observed a growing “grey zone” in mortality where the distinction between direct and indirect death becomes blurred. Patients who die of sepsis months after a blast, or from renal failure after a crushing injury because they cannot access clean water or surgery, occupy a space that risks understating the true lethality of military attacks.
Conditions have only deteriorated since the data collection periods. By late 2025, forced evacuations covered more than 80 percent of Gaza’s area, with northern Gaza and Rafah governorates facing full razing by Israeli forces. Famine was declared in northern Gaza in August 2025, further reducing the physiological reserve of injured survivors and complicating any surgical recovery.
This series of independent studies serves as an urgent call for accountability and an immediate cessation of hostilities. “The healthcare infrastructure in Gaza is being repeatedly decimated by attacks despite protection by international humanitarian law,” researchers stated. They underscored that the only way to prevent the reconstructive burden from growing further is an immediate end to attacks against civilians and vital infrastructure.
MILAN — Kings left wing Kevin Fiala sustained a leg injury and was taken off the ice on a stretcher late in Switzerland’s game against Canada at the Milan-Cortina Olympics on Friday.
Fiala went down when he collided with Tom Wilson with just less than three minutes left in Canada’s 5-1 victory.
Fiala backed into a hit on Wilson near the boards, their legs got tangled and both players fell to the ice. Fiala couldn’t get up and after a stoppage in play medical personnel attended to him.
Fiala was placed face down on a stretcher and his left leg appeared to be in an air cast as he was wheeled out.
“I haven’t seen him yet. I think he went to the hospital. Obviously it doesn’t look very good,” Swiss coach Patrick Fischer said. “Tough moment for Kevin and the whole team, obviously.”
No penalty was assessed on the play.
“It was an accident,” Fischer said.
The 29-year-old Fiala is in his 12th NHL season and fourth with the Kings. He has 40 points in 56 games this season.
HOUSTON — Kevin Durant scored 26 points and Alperen Sengun added 22 to help the Houston Rockets to a 102-95 victory over the Clippers on Tuesday night.
Bennedict Mathurin had nine points and seven rebounds in 26 minutes in his first game for the Clippers since being traded from Indiana last week. Darius Garland, acquired in the trade that sent James Harden to Cleveland, remains out with a toe injury.
Houston led by six points at the start the fourth period and scored the first seven points of the quarter to extend its lead to 85-72 with 10 ½ minutes remaining. Kawhi Leonard made two free throws, but the Rockets scored the next four points to extend the lead.
The Rockets were up by 12 later in the fourth when Durant stole the ball from Brook Lopez, and Reed Sheppard made an off-balance three-pointer to make it 92-77 with about 6 ½ minutes to go.
Houston remained up by 15 about a minute later when Clippers coach Tyronn Lue cleared his bench.
Leonard led the Clippers (25-28) with 24 points after scoring 41 in a blowout win in December in the last meeting between the teams. The Clippers made 20 three-pointers in that 128-108 victory, but were just eight for 30 from long range on Tuesday.
Jabari Smith Jr. had 13 points and 11 rebounds and Amen Thompson added 16 points for the Rockets in his return after sitting out of Saturday’s win over Oklahoma City because of an illness.
A three-pointer by Jordan Miller cut the lead to two points late in the third before Sengun scored the last two baskets of the quarter to put the Rockets up 78-72 entering the fourth.
