stones

Michael Archer Jr., the son of R&B stars D’Angelo and Angie Stone, has been dealing with grief for months — long before the death of his father on Tuesday.

The 28-year-old musician, whose stage name is Swayvo Twain, penned a heartbreaking Instagram post reflecting on the deaths of his parents and the final moments he shared with his Grammy-winning dad. His mother, Grammy-nominated singer Angie Stone, died in March in a traffic accident in Alabama. She was 63. D’Angelo died Tuesday after a private battle with cancer. He was 51.

“I just sat here watchin my daddy die after feeling like it was the first time he and I were truly building,” Archer wrote in an Instagram story shared Tuesday. “He was there when I needed him most after the passing of my momma.”

Archer added: “Unfortunately, time ran out.”

D’Angelo’s family announced Tuesday that the neo-soul pioneer had “been called home” after a “prolonged and courageous battle with cancer.” Additional details about his cancer fight were not revealed.

D’Angelo was a four-time Grammy winner known for his sensual albums “Brown Sugar” and “Voodoo.” Though he was immeasurably influential on generations of R&B, the singer had a fraught relationship with fame that led to stints of years out of the spotlight. Stone, on the other hand, was a singer who found success in the neo-soul movement in the 1990s after after nearly two decades in the music business. Her work included the solo album “Black Diamond” and the singles “No More Rain (In This Cloud)” and “Wish I Didn’t Miss You.”

Before his parents’ deaths, the rapper-singer spoke about D’Angelo and Stone’s careers and their influence on his music for an episode of MTV’s “Family Legacy.” As he recalled bonding with his father over music and shared a tender — at times awkward — confessional with his mother, he joked that the pair’s best work was himself.

Archer reflected on the “Family Legacy” episode weeks after his mother’s death, writing on Instagram that he wanted to pave his own path and “separate myself from my parents cause it always felt like I was fated to be in their shadows forever.”

“Thankfully, long before, momma left I learned to embrace them and their legacy full on,” he wrote at the time. “I’m blessed and happy to have had this moment with my momma man.”

Joining Archer on social media in mouring D’Angelo’s death were Lauryn Hill, Jaime Foxx, Missy Elliott and Jill Scott. Beyoncé honored the R&B star with a tribute on the homepage of her website.

“We thank you for your beautiful music, your voice, your proficiency on the piano, your artistry,” the memorial reads. “You were the pioneer of neo-soul and that changed and transformed rhythm & blues forever. We will never forget you.”

A few metres away from the piles of stones that were once the first homes as you entered their small village, three men sat on a traditional woven bed.

One of them was Hayat’s cousin, Mehboob.

“When the earthquake happened, my 13-year-old son Nasib Ullah was sleeping next to me. I woke up, got out of bed, and started looking for the torch. Then, suddenly, the whole room moved from the falling rocks. When I tried to reach my son, the wall and the floor slid down, and I couldn’t catch him,” the 36-year-old explained.

“[It was] worse than the day of judgement.”

“Houses collapsed, boulders from the mountain came crumbling down; you couldn’t see anything, we couldn’t see each other.”

Everyone was injured, he explained. Some had broken ribs and broken legs.

“In the dark, we took our kids who were still alive to the farmland below, where it was safer from the boulders.”

That night, he counted more than 250 tremors, he said: aftershocks that continue to shake the valley even weeks after the earthquake.

When daylight came, he tried to dig through the rubble to find his loved ones. “But my body didn’t want to work,” he said.

“I could see my son’s foot, but the rest of his body had disappeared under the rubble.”

His 10-year-old daughter, Aisha, had also been killed.

“It was the worst moment of my life,” he said.

It took two days for villagers and volunteers to recover the bodies.

When Hayat’s brother, Rahmat Gul, received a message from his brother telling him that the entire village was gone, he immediately rushed there from his home in Parwan province, some 300km (185 miles) away.

When he finally reached Aurak Dandila, the surviving villagers asked him to wrap Mehboob’s dead son in a blanket.

“Mehboob asked me to show him the face of his son, but I could not do it,” Rahmat Gul explained as Mehboob, sitting beside him, looked out over the farmland in the valley below.

Nearby, Hayat stood up and began pacing.

“God has taken my sons from me, and now I feel like I have left this world as well,” he said.

In Aurak Dandila, a small cornfield has become a graveyard. “Here is where we buried our loved ones,” Hayat said. The graves are marked by stones.

He remembers how he had urged Abdul Haq to stay in the village. “The next day, everything was gone, and he lost his life.”

Now, Hayat believes, “there is nothing left to live here for”.

“How can I continue living here?” he asked, pointing at the debris of what was once his home.

“The stones are coming from above; how can anyone live in this village?”

“We will settle somewhere else, and we will look for the mercy of God. If he has no mercy on us, then we will also die.”

There are stone bunkers shrouded in the mist on the hillside to my right, just shy of the ridgeline marking the Albanian-Kosovo border. To my left, the view is not just clear but startlingly beautiful.

I’m able to see back down to the tiny mountain hamlet of Gacaferi, where I’d slept the previous night, to look across the deep greenery of Deçan Gorge beyond, over dense pine forests and grasslands that pop with pink and yellow wildflowers, and gaze all the way to the 2,461m summit of Çfërla and the rugged peaks of western Kosovo’s Accursed mountains.

We are on stage nine of the Via Dinarica Kosovo, a 75-mile, 13-stage hiking trail through this storied country. The route links up to the Via Dinarica, a Balkan trail that runs from Slovenia through to Albania. The Kosovo section opened in 2015, but was recently remapped and relaunched as part of a three-year, £1.2m project funded by the Italian agency AICS.

There was a Yugoslav barracks in Gacaferi during the Kosovo war – the brutal conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (known locally as the UÇK) and Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslavia, which ended with an aerial Nato bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. UÇK fighters used to launch surprise attacks over the border ridge here, and arms were smuggled into Kosovo for use by liberation fighters.

The barracks is long gone. Today, the handful of locals in Gacaferi fly red Albanian flags outside their houses alongside Kosovo blue. They tend to their sheep and warmly welcome hikers, who trade travel stories while feasting on burek and Rugova cheese in the scenic guesthouse.

“I wish the stones here could talk,” says Uta Ibrahimi, my mountain guide. Uta is the founder of Butterfly Outdoor Adventure, and was an integral part of the Via Dinarica Kosovo project. She also happens to be the first person from Kosovo to have climbed Mount Everest, having done so in 2017. And on 10 May 2025, when she stood on the 8,586-metre summit of Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, Ibrahimi became the first woman from the Balkans to have climbed all 14 of the world’s 8,000-metre mountains. Uta returned to a hero’s welcome at Pristina airport. “I did it for myself, but also for my country,” Uta says. “Not just for the Himalayan views.”

I had arrived in the capital of Pristina some days earlier. I walked past statues of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole; past new cathedrals and centuries-old mosques. Brilliant, bizarre brutalist architecture draws the gaze here – most notably the National Library of Kosovo, formed of a cluster of exposed concrete blocks, caged in metal and topped by domes.

The Via Dinarica connects the municipalities of Peja, Deçan and Junik in western Kosovo. To start our adventure – hiking a 40-mile stint of the Via Dinarica – we drove to the city of Peja, behind which the Accursed mountains rise like fortress walls.

We began on stage three, with sunny alpine views and green slopes rising to prominent peaks. Red and white waymarkers guided us up narrow trails to the 2,403-metre Hajla peak, on the border of Kosovo and Montenegro. On one side, the ridgeline slopes sharply down to the Balkan pines of Kosovo and across green valleys to the mountains of Albania. On the other side, there is a near vertical drop down to Montenegro, via rugged, exposed limestone cliff.

I ate spinach burek for lunch on the summit of Hajla, sitting next to fuzzy, star-shaped edelweiss flowers, while alpine choughs circled above. We slept at ERA Lodge, a homely wooden mountain cabin run by Fatos Lajçi, a passionate conservationist. “Everything that’s in Europe, we have here,” he said; brown bears, wild boars, wolves and even the endangered Balkan lynx. This lynx is at serious risk of extinction, but has on occasion wandered by Lajçi’s camera traps.

As we left the next morning, a shepherd sang songs of love and lost heroes to his flock, and we rejoined the Via Dinarica on a freshly built section of trail. Descending into a meadow, we were engulfed in blueberry bushes; our boots brushing against wild strawberries and carrots.

It was not until a few days later, when we reached Kulla Guesthouse in Milishevc, a building styled like an old stone tower, that we met another hiker. Here, we gorged on köfte, washed down with rakı, “for digestion”.

The border with Montenegro soon became the border with Albania. We walked by memorials to fallen UÇK soldiers. Hard rain and mist clouded the view, but limestone monoliths poked through and wildflowers defied the clouds with sprinkles of colour. By the time we arrived in Gacaferi, the sun was shining on the tractors and goats of this remote hamlet.

In the evenings there was time for me to bug Uta for stories. She is full of tales; of crampons received as Valentine’s gifts; of poles perilously dropped at 8,000 metres; of loved ones lost on mountain faces, or to war; of emotional summit days and ecstatic nights dancing at festivals.

Ibrahimi was 15 years old when war hit, but she speaks with a contagious positivity. “We had to stay inside for three months of bombing, and you never knew if it was the last day of your life,” she says. “We had to jump walls to run away from the police. That whole idea, of waiting for that moment they will come – and who knows what they will do to you – it just made us stronger and more willing to live. Then when you are free, you do not see any limits.”

From Gacaferi, we set our sights on the 2,656-metre Gjeravica. It is a hulking peak surrounded by heart-shaped mountain lakes and patches of snow. This side of the Accursed mountains is more dramatic than the border with Montenegro, the gentle green replaced by fierce grey. Above the 2,400-metre mark, we hike on limestone slabs bright with lichen. On the summit, a Kosovo flag flies above a trig point bearing the double-headed eagle of Albania. There is a metal marker with a UÇK head, and a view over Kosovo’s flatland. Our descent is remarkably pretty, running along the secluded Gjeravica Lake, through fields of blueberry bushes, on to grassland peppered with yellow flowers.

There is a soft beauty to this country; in the mint you smell in the meadows, in the sound of the whinchats on the hills, in the fluff of the edelweiss flowers on high ridges, and in the warmth of the guesthouses, where the burek is plentiful and the coffee strong.

“People want somewhere quiet, super-wild, without any roads,” says Uta. “It’s here to explore.”

The trip was provided by NaturKosovo. A five-day trip on the Via Dinarica Kosovo with Butterfly Outdoor Adventure costs €590, or a nine-day adventure from €990, including transfers, accommodation and meals. The Via Dinarica Kosovo project is being implemented by Volontari nel Mondo RTM and CELIM in collaboration with Utalaya Foundation, Club Alpino Italiano, AITR, CNSAS and AICS

The 51-year-old, from Scotland, was reported to Italian authorities after a guide spotted him “picking up pieces of Pompeii pavement” during an evening tour

A British tourist caught stuffing six forbidden fragments from Pompeii in his backpack faces a huge fine.

The 51-year-old, from Scotland, was reported to Italian authorities after a guide spotted him “picking up pieces of pavement” during an evening tour on Thursday. He had illegally collected the stones from the ancient Roman archaeological site.

He was caught outside the Pompeii excavation site near the Villa dei Misteri EAV station. Fortunately, the items were recovered and returned to the park.

“He said he had no idea it was forbidden to remove artefacts from Pompeii,” a police officer said. “He was trying to get out of trouble but it did not work. It is pretty easy to understand you cannot do that because if everyone wandered off with a piece of Pompeii there would be nothing left,” he added.

READ MORE: Fears grow for dolphin who joined family’s swim off UK coast and asked for cuddlesREAD MORE: Brother cut off his dead sibling’s ear and stored it in freezer in disturbing DNA row

The unnamed man now faces a fine of over £1,200 and could face up to six years in prison if he is summoned to court.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, said: “Congratulations and thanks to the attentive tour guide, to our excellent custodians and security staff, and to the Carabinieri for this collaborative effort to protect our heritage.”

Pompeii is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, with 2.5 million tourists visiting each year. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. hit Pompeii, burying it under volcanic ash.

It comes after a mosaic panel on travertine slabs, depicting an erotic theme from the Roman era, was returned to the archaeological park of Pompeii last month, after being stolen by a Nazi German captain during World War II.

The artwork was repatriated from Germany through diplomatic channels, arranged by the Italian Consulate in Stuttgart, Germany, after having been returned from the heirs of the last owner, a deceased German citizen.

The owner had received the mosaic as a gift from a Wehrmacht captain, assigned to the military supply chain in Italy during the war.

The mosaic — dating between mid- to last century B.C. and the first century — is considered a work of “extraordinary cultural interest,” experts said.

“It is the moment when the theme of domestic love becomes an artistic subject,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and co-author of an essay dedicated to the returned work. “While the Hellenistic period, from the fourth to the first century B.C., exulted the passion of mythological and heroic figures, now we see a new theme.”