© Jose Cabezas/Reuters
© Ian Willms for The New York Times
The first pick of the 2025 NFL draft went much as expected as the Tennessee Titans selected the talented Miami quarterback Cam Ward No 1 overall. It was at No 2 – and who wasn’t picked later – where things got a little more interesting on Thursday night in Green Bay.
Jacksonville, who had been sitting at No 5, traded up to take the Cleveland Browns’ spot at No 2, where the Jaguars selected Travis Hunter. Hunter is one of the most fascinating players to enter the NFL in years: a superbly talented athlete who can play both offense, at wide receiver, and defense, at cornerback. In return, the Browns received four picks, including the Jags’ second- and fourth-rounders this year and their 2026 first-rounder. Jacksonville also received a fourth-rounder and a sixth-rounder in return from the Browns.
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© Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP
© Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP
Tens of thousands of mourners have queued for hours to pay their last respects to pontiff, whose coffin will be closed on Friday evening
The Vatican will make final preparations on Friday for Pope Francis’s funeral as the last of the huge crowds of mourners file through St Peter’s Basilica to view his open coffin.
Many of the 50 heads of state and 10 monarchs attending Saturday’s ceremony in St Peter’s Square, who include US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, are expected to arrive in Rome on Friday.
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© Photograph: Grzegorz Gałązka/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Grzegorz Gałązka/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock
Transforming a former industrial area in Sweden will bring psychological benefits for future residents and reduce construction’s climate impact
Although activity is high, it is surprisingly quiet inside the construction site of a high school extension in Sickla, a former industrial area in south Stockholm that is set to become part of the “largest mass timber project in the world” according to the Swedish urban property developer Atrium Ljungberg.
Just a few months remain until students enter the premises, but there is no sound of drilling or pounding against concrete walls. The scent of wood is unmistakable, and signs of the material can be spotted everywhere – from glulam (glued laminated timber) columns and beams in the building’s frame to cross-laminated timber (CLT) slabs in the floors, ceilings and staircases. CLT, made by gluing together layers of planed wood into panels, offers strength and rigidity comparable to concrete but is significantly lighter and quicker to build with.
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© Photograph: supplied
© Photograph: supplied
The Herds project from the team behind Little Amal will travel 20,000km taking its message on environmental crisis across the world
Hundreds of life-size animal puppets have begun a 20,000km (12,400 mile) journey from central Africa to the Arctic Circle as part of an ambitious project created by the team behind Little Amal, the giant puppet of a Syrian girl that travelled across the world.
The public art initiative called The Herds, which has already visited Kinshasa and Lagos, will travel to 20 cities over four months to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
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© Photograph: Kashope Faje/88 life studios
© Photograph: Kashope Faje/88 life studios
The story of the former cricket prodigy and car crash survivor Freddie Flintoff is fascinating … but this documentary shows he has such extreme PTSD that he keeps slamming the shutters down
Freddie Flintoff is numb. As the 98-minute Disney+ documentary Flintoff begins, we find its subject sitting in a hospital room. He can’t feel his lip, the one that was torn from his face in a nightmarish car accident on the Top Gear track in 2022. But more than that, he is mentally checked out. As one doctor after another tells him that he is recovering well and looking good, he stares at the ground dejectedly. He just wants everyone to stop sugarcoating everything and tell him the truth, he says. What he wants to hear is that he looks like “a fucking mess”.
Flintoff was designed as the big unveiling of the new, post-accident Freddie Flintoff. His days as a cricketing prodigy are over and so, it seems, are his days as a permanent light entertainment fixture. He is older, slower and more reflective. He is also plagued, night after night, by looping footage of the accident that ended Top Gear. Ostensibly this is where we’ll get to watch his comeback.
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© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Disney+
© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Disney+
Noah Musingku made a fortune with a Ponzi scheme and then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he still commands the loyalty of his Bougainville subjects
By Sean Williams. Read by Simon Darwen
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© Illustration: Daniel Liévano
© Illustration: Daniel Liévano
Exclusive: EU Transparency Register shows law firms also among lobbyists working for fossil fuel companies
A handful of “small but dirty” public affairs and law firms in Europe are enabling pollution by lobbying extensively for big oil, an analysis has found, with most major companies in the industry working for at least one fossil fuel client.
Several of the top spenders on activities to influence EU policymaking are on the payroll of oil and gas companies, according to an analysis of the EU Transparency Register by the Good Lobby nonprofit, but fossil fuel clients represent just 1% of the industry’s revenue.
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© Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters
© Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters
An orange blur obscured my vision. By morning it was even worse
It was a cool May afternoon in 2002. I was 19 and had driven to Westport beach in Washington with a few friends to enjoy a day by the ocean.
As a child, I’d been a keen gymnast, always doing backflips and energetic routines. As I got older, I still had a habit of doing cartwheels whenever I found an open space. That day on the beach, on the soft, flat sand, I couldn’t resist.
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© Photograph: Annabel Clark/The Guardian
© Photograph: Annabel Clark/The Guardian
The archbishop is traditionalists’ preferred candidate for a reason: his papacy would wind back the progress made under Pope Francis
Who might be the next pope? The question is famously difficult to answer. But we can be reasonably confident that if the successful contender comes from the traditionalist camp – as opposed to the reformists – then he is likely to be Hungary’s most senior bishop, Péter Erdő.
If you follow Hungarian politics then you will know of Erdő – a highly cultured man, respected for his broad learning well beyond his specialism in church law. His expertise has made him a valued consultant to Vatican bodies, while his sermons and interviews abound with historical and literary references. Yet he’s also a remote figure, lacking the common touch that defined Francis’s papacy; ascetic-looking, he’s rarely pictured smiling.
Alex Faludy is a British-Hungarian freelance journalist based in Budapest, specialising in religious affairs
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© Photograph: Attila Kovács/AP
© Photograph: Attila Kovács/AP
After being fast-tracked to stardom, the bad boys of Y2K pop butted heads and burned out. They explain how they faced their demons for an arena-sized reunion – and why Simon Cowell was ‘a proper winker’
In September 1998, amid a rocketing pop career that would end up with every one of their 11 singles reaching the UK Top 10, British boyband Five went missing. They were due to visit the US, where the lascivious When the Lights Go Out had got huge, but Five – Ritchie Neville (curtains), Scott Robinson (spiky hair), Abz Love (hats), Sean Conlon (baby-faced), and Jason “J” Brown (eyebrow ring) – had other ideas. “We decided we wanted a couple of days off,” says Scott, now without spikes and sporting a thick salt-and-pepper beard. “So we booked our own flights back to the UK.”
Rather than visit family like everyone else, J returned to the band’s shared house in Surrey. “There were fans camping outside, literally in tents on the little lawn,” he says, shaking his shaved head, now minus the eyebrow ring. “We needed to decompress – we were losing our minds. But all I had was people shouting through the letterbox at me for three days.” Whenever he wanted food he had to crawl from the living room to the kitchen on his stomach. “Then they started turning against me: ‘We know you’re in there! We bought your album! You owe us!’”
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© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian
© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian
The US justice department says it did not fire a former pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, after she refused to recommend reinstating Mel Gibson’s gun rights.
But Oyer tells Jonathan Freedland a different story, one she believes points to a wider crackdown by the Trump administration on the rule of law in America
Archive: ABC News, Face the Nation, CBS News, CNN, PBS, NBC News, Fox News, WHAS11
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© Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
© Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
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