From the divine sensuality of Higher to the scabrous social commentary of The Charade, we explore the highlights of the late neo-soul star’s slim but stunning catalogue

D’Angelo burst on to the scene in 1995 with a debut album (Brown Sugar) that effectively reordered our musical palette, awakening memories of our parents’ living rooms where the stereo was always cued up to Stevie, Marvin, Smokey and company. What made Brown Sugar such a seismic jolt in the 1990s R&B landscape though was its smouldering sensuality laced with undercurrents of hip-hop’s don’t-give-a-damnedness; studious, devoted instrumentality; and an infectious commitment to the art of the infinite jam. Lady is the sister, so to speak, to the title track of D’Angelo’s audacious debut album. And whereas the latter introduced listeners to a hood Romeo on the make, Lady revels in the pleasures of a lover who’s already won the chase and whose twinned passion for intimacy and privacy takes the form of a thick, bass heavy, groove recitation. Behold the birth of neo-soul.

Experts are enforcing emergency measures to prevent the spread of the highly contagious neurodegenerative disease

Wildlife officials in Florida have discovered only the second case in the state of a deadly infection known colloquially as “zombie deer disease”, and are enforcing emergency measures to try to prevent a spread.

The highly contagious chronic wasting disease (CWD) was found during routine screening in the carcass of a young white-tailed doe that was struck by a vehicle in Holmes county, close to the Alabama border, early last month. The only previous recorded instance in Florida was in a four-year-old doe killed about a mile away in June 2023.

Odinga, who ran five times for presidency and had profound influence on Kenyan politics, has died in India

The veteran Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, who ran five times for the presidency and had a profound influence on the country’s politics, has died aged 80 in India.

An Indian police source told Agence France-Presse he was walking with his sister, daughter, a personal doctor and two security officers “when he suddenly collapsed” and was taken to hospital where he was declared dead.

Education department staff say they can’t access work emails amid the shutdown to check for layoff notices

Federal workers are scrambling to figure out if they still have a job after the Trump administration launched a fresh wave of layoffs amid a federal government shutdown, prompting widespread confusion and panic.

A hearing is scheduled to take place today after labor unions sued to block the latest firings, setting the stage for another legal battle over Donald Trump’s efforts to drastically cut back the federal workforce.

Hegseth wants journalists to only publish ‘explicitly authorized’ information. That is not how the free press works

Tom Bowman of National Public Radio recalls one of the many times in his decades covering the Pentagon when the real story wasn’t the officially approved story.

Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “ecstatic” after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, insisting publicly that it showed the resounding success of the US invasion of Iraq, Bowman wrote in an NPR opinion piece this week. But through informal conversations with officers, Bowman soon found out that the truth was much more complicated – that more American troops would have to be deployed to Iraq to guard the supply lines that were under attack from Saddam Hussein’s supporters.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

Cummins’ absence is not quite cause for unfettered English celebration – Boland has ripped them apart before

Have you heard about Big Pat’s back? You must have by now. The eyes and ears of the cricketing world are zeroed in on a locus of around 10 inches of Pat Cummins’ lumbar region. Hushed whispers about the Australia Test captain’s “stress injury” after his side’s tour of West Indies in July became a rumbling concern as the weeks passed and there was no reassuring statement from the Cummins camp. Ideally it would have been delivered by the man himself with a megawatt smile, just letting everyone know that he was locked in for full part in the Ashes series.

By contrast, earlier this week a more circumspect Cummins put his chances of playing at Perth in the first Test on 21 November as “probably less likely than likely”.

Today’s rightwingers want their message to go mainstream, so it’s coming to a store near you

Fascism is back in style. Forget the old symbols: swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags, skinheads’ shaved heads and combat boots. Extremism has a new look, and it is as fashionable as ever.

Today’s extremist styles are more diverse and more subtle. Beyond T-shirts that advertise blatant racism, polo shirts with coded symbols create a shared in-group identity and signal support of violence to other believers. Tradwife-style prairie dresses and beauty regimens promote conservative visions of family. Clothing is a powerful tool to spread fascist ideas to promote authoritarianism and recruit new members to this cause.

In video, the two-time Oscar winner also invoked the pledge of allegiance to say ‘we’re all in this together’

A new video from Robert De Niro implores people in the US “to stand up and be counted” in coming protests against Donald Trump’s second presidency that are being planned across the country for Saturday.

In the clip, the two-time Oscar winner characterizes Trump as an aspiring tyrant who aims to end American democracy, which – among other major historical events – has survived the first and second world wars.

Kristen Wiig goes all Cruella as the evil cat lady pitted against Gabby and her grandma, Gloria Estefan, desperate as she is to get her hands on that doll’s house

If you have children of the appropriate age you will be familiar with the cat-obsessed Netflix show Gabby’s Dollhouse. It’s sunny, sweet and wholesome; a crafting bonanza packed with kitty catchphrases like “pawesome!” and “ab-so-cat-a-loutely”. The series’ super-likable star Laila Lockhart Kraner plays Gabby, a girl who shrinks down to become a tiny cartoon version of herself to play in her doll’s house.

The movie comes just in time for Lockhart Kraner, who is 17 and won’t be able to pull off playing with doll’s houses for much longer. (The ending of the film gives a strong hint where the producers might be taking their franchise in the post-Lockhart Kraner future). It begins with Gabby visiting her grandma (Gloria Estefan), taking along her doll’s house and its inhabitants, including magical Kitty Fairy who cries sprinkles as tears.

Science tells us that foetuses develop in the uterus, rather than the placenta – but the US health secretary has a different take. Why are Republicans so clueless about women’s bodies?

Robert F Kennedy Jr is the father of six children. He’s also the US health secretary. Two facts that might lead a reasonable person to assume he possesses a basic understanding of how foetuses develop.

In a shocking development, however, it seems that Kennedy – an anti-vaxxer who says his brain was partly eaten by a parasitic worm – may not know what he’s talking about. During a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Kennedy reasserted unproven claims that taking the common painkiller acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol or paracetamol, while pregnant causes autism. Doubters of this theory, he said, were motivated by Trump derangement syndrome. To underscore his point, he referenced a TikTok video he’d seen of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta”.

Calls come as report shows number of health workers killed in conflicts has risen five-fold in less than a decade

War crimes targeting health workers, patients and facilities should be prioritised for international criminal prosecution, senior nursing and medical leaders have urged.

The number of health workers killed annually in conflicts has jumped five-fold in less than a decade, and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and British Medical Association (BMA) have called for action from the UK government to fully back international criminal court (ICC) prosecutions of perpetrators.

Astrophysicist proposes a ‘radically mundane’ theory for why humans have yet to encounter extraterrestrials

For centuries, great thinkers have pondered why, given the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy, we have seen no compelling signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Now, scientists are mulling an intriguing possibility: if aliens exist, their technology may be only marginally better than ours. And having explored their cosmic neighbourhood for a while, they simply got bored and stopped bothering, making it difficult to detect them.

The Oscar-winning actor and style icon was also a prolific photographer, collector and curator whose lifelong fascination with images revealed a sharp, singular way of seeing the world

It’s one of the most memorable scenes in Annie Hall: Diane Keaton’s eponymous protagonist chatting with Alvy on the balcony of her apartment. Alvy asks if she took the photographs displayed inside. “They’re wonderful,” he says. “They have a … quality.”

She dabbles, but would like to take a proper course, replies Annie. Alvy starts waffling about “the aesthetic criteria” of a “new art form” (photography has been around for 150 years at this point). Meanwhile, his inner monologue is presented in subtitles: I don’t know what I’m saying.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan picked up the phone to Menachem Begin to tell him to end a war. There are lessons from history and we need to learn them

So, which year are we in? A US president, after months of tacit encouragement, has finally intervened to end an Israeli military offensive that has reduced swaths of a Middle Eastern city to rubble, leaving thousands dead and prompting global outrage. For months, the UN has looked on, impotent, as Israeli air raids and artillery shelling has pummelled apartment blocks and refugee camps beside the Mediterranean. The Israeli offensive’s target, according to its architect, is a “kingdom of terror”.

The offensive has come after a series of attacks on Israel. Now, under pressure from the White House, the Israeli prime minister, a rightwinger with a gift for populist rhetoric and an intense sense of historic Zionist mission, has agreed to a ceasefire. So too have the Palestinian armed factions, which have faced the massive firepower of the Israeli military. These will now be forced to disarm and many will go into exile. A peacekeeping force is being organised by the US to stabilise the situation.

Jason Burke is the international security correspondent of the Guardian and author of The Revolutionists

• Italian banned for alleged false accounting at Juventus

• Johan Lange is promoted to work alongside Paratici

Tottenham have confirmed the full-time return of Fabio Paratici as part of a new leadership structure in their men’s football operation.

Paratici resigned in April 2023 as Spurs’ managing director of football after losing an appeal in Italy against a 30-month ban from the game, punishment for his role in alleged false accounting at his previous club, Juventus.

The uniquely irreverent artist, whose work includes everyone from Mozart to Sonic Youth, has a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art

On a recent Friday night in the vast atrium space of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, six string players took their place in a semi-circle and began performing the first movement of one of Mozart’s most sanctified sonatas. For the first five minutes or so, the musicians played his String Quartet No 15 in D Minor exactly as it was written until, suddenly, the conductor began acting like the host of a bingo game by throwing a six-sided die, with each side representing a particular player.

“Two,” the conductor cried, before pointing at the second violinist, who immediately stopped what she was performing and began to play her part in the piece back from the start, while the others soldiered on through the score. “Four,” the conductor called after his next toss, pointing at the cellist who, likewise, went back to the beginning of his part, in the process establishing a pattern of calls and re-starts that continued for the next 25 minutes. Amid the unfolding drama, one of the world’s most well-worn classical works was twisted into something strangely fresh, resulting in not so much a deconstruction of Mozart’s work as a reformation of it, with each component treated like a separate piece in a bold new puzzle.

Garden getting you down? Tempted to just pave or concrete over the whole thing and put your feet up? There are more enjoyable and eco-friendly alternatives, from miniature meadows to giant borders

When faced with a muddy swamp, or a lawn that needs mowing (again), the most nihilistic among us may dream of concreting over the whole garden – and some turn that dream into reality. A recent report by the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA), which represents garden centres and suppliers, has warned that within the next five years, nearly a quarter of UK householders plan to pave or deck over at least part of their garden, and of those, nearly a third plan to cover more than half of the area. The HTA estimates this could mean a loss of about 8% of the UK’s total private green space, or 409 sq km.

“Paving over gardens with impermeable surfaces has and will continue to undermine urban resilience,” says Prof Alistair Griffiths, the director of science and collections at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). Water can’t get through concrete, asphalt and paving, which contributes to surface flooding and overwhelms the sewer system, leading to pollution runoff. Loss of vegetation also contributes to global heating. “We’ve got these increased extremes of heat and if you lose green space, you lose that cooling effect,” he adds. Then there’s the loss of biodiversity that comes from paving over green space – not to mention the impact of a dead, grey landscape on people’s mental health. One RHS study showed that people who nurtured a couple of containers of flowers and a small tree in an urban street lowered their stress hormones as much as if they’d attended eight weekly mindfulness sessions.

The Emmy-winning actor will work with psychologist Orly Klein to compile the letters into a book exploring masculinity and the challenges facing boys today

Stephen Graham, the Emmy-winning actor best known for Netflix hit Adolescence, has launched a new project asking fathers to write letters to their sons about what it means to be a man, to form a book about masculinity.

The project invites fathers around the world to write personal letters to their sons, reflecting on their experiences of fatherhood. Graham will work with psychology lecturer Orly Klein to compile Letters to Our Sons, a book due to be published by Bloomsbury next October.

To submit a letter, visit letterstooursons.co.uk

American officials have threatened supporters of measure to reduce emissions with tariffs and other retaliatory action

Donald Trump’s government is putting intense pressure on vulnerable countries to vote against measures that would force shipping companies to pay for their carbon emissions.

US officials have written to countries that support the measure and besieged them with phone calls threatening to impose tariffs, withdraw visa rights and take other retaliatory action.

Habit of rising early for livestreams growing rapidly, suggesting Brazil is testing ground for religious influencers

Psychologist Cláudia Rodrigues de Oliveira Barbosa, 54, needs to be at work by 7.40am, but she wakes up at 3.40am – not because she has a lengthy commute, but to watch a “dawn prayer” livestream on YouTube.

She is one of the millions of Brazilians who tune in to the 4am sermons of Catholic friar Gilson da Silva Pupo Azevedo, 38, known as Frei Gilson, who has recently averaged an impressive 2m daily views for each video.

Cars with human safety drivers will appear in coming weeks as permissions are sought for fully autonomous rides

Driverless taxis from Waymo will be available for hire on London’s roads next year, the US company has announced.

The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo’s technology.

One in four students say AI ‘makes it too easy’ for them to find answers

Pupils fear that using artificial intelligence is eroding their ability to study, with many complaining it makes schoolwork “too easy” and others saying it limits their creativity and stops them learning new skills, according to new research.

The report on the use of AI in UK schools, commissioned by Oxford University Press (OUP), found that just 2% of students aged between 13 and 18 said they did not use AI for their schoolwork, while 80% said they regularly used it.

Updates from the World Cup match in Colombo
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A bold leave by Beaumont, who flourishes bat aloft but hears the death rattle as the ball nips in beautifully and clocks the top of off stump.

1st over: England 8-0 (Jones 8, Beaumont 0) Captain Fatima Sana with the new ball – her second delivery is turned by Jones off her ankles for four, and her last driven past a couple of stationary fielders for four more. Sana is not impressed. The palm trees peak through the gaps in the stands, not too many watching yet

Israel previously said the flow of aid would be cut by half and Rafah crossing would not open as planned due to delay in returning bodies of hostages

• Israel limits aid into Gaza in dispute over hostages’ remains

The Israeli military said on Wednesday that one of the bodies handed over by Hamas the previous day as part of the ceasefire deal is not that of one of the hostages who was held in Gaza.

Four bodies were handed over by Hamas on Tuesday to ease pressure on the fragile ceasefire, after the first four on Monday – when the last 20 living hostages were released.

The military said that “following the completion of examinations at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the fourth body handed over to Israel by Hamas does not match any of the hostages”.

In the north of the territory, as Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza City, the Hamas government’s black-masked armed police resumed street patrols, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

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