A 44-year-old American visiting the Bahamas from Boston was killed in a shark attack while paddleboarding near a beach resort Monday, according to local authorities.

The woman had traveled to the Bahamas with a male relative, the Royal Bahamas Police Force said in a news release.

“Preliminary reports indicate that the victim, along with a male relative, was paddle boarding away from the shoreline in waters at the rear of a resort in western New Providence when she was bitten by a shark,” the release said.

A lifeguard at the resort noticed the attack and went into the water on a boat to try and rescue the victim along with the relative.

The lifeguard administered CPR to the woman, police said.

“The victim suffered significant trauma to the right side of her body. She was examined on scene by emergency medical technicians, who concluded that she showed no vital signs of life,” the police said in a release.

Authorities haven’t released the woman’s identity.

The incident comes days after a woman was killed in an apparent shark attack at a Mexican resort. The woman was found dead by emergency services at the scene in Melaque Bay in the Cihuatlán municipality.

Despite their rarity, the attacks still happen on occasion. Last year, a cruise ship passenger was killed by a shark while snorkeling in the Bahamas. And in 2019, an American woman was also killed while snorkeling in the Bahamas after three different sharks attacked her.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said relations with the United Arab Emirates were at an all-time high during his first visit to the Middle East since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.

Putin praised cooperation between the two countries as he met President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi Wednesday, describing the UAE as “Russia’s main trading partner in the Arab world.”

He is later scheduled to visit Riyadh to meet Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), as part of a whistlestop tour in which Moscow hopes to flaunt and continue to foster its close ties with Gulf states as wars rage in the Middle East and Europe.

The visit marked a rare foreign trip for Putin since the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest for alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have not ratified the ICC’s Rome Statute and so are not obliged to arrest the Russian president.

The ICC’s arrest warrant has placed significant restrictions on Putin’s ability to travel internationally. He did not attend in person the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August, since South Africa is a signatory to the Rome Statute.

Putin enjoys good relations with both Gulf states, which have remained neutral over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, despite Western pressure for them to join sanctions against Russia.

A cavalry escort accompanied Putin to the main entrance of the Qasr al-Watan Palace where he was received by his UAE counterpart, Russian state media TASS reported. The palace played the anthems of both countries before the presidents walked along a guard of honor.

Stressing the historical ties between Russia and the UAE, Putin said the Soviet Union was one of the first countries to recognize the UAE as a sovereign state in 1971.

The two leaders would use the visit to discuss issues ranging from oil and trade to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Israel-Hamas war, Putin said ahead of the talks.

After the Abu Dhabi delegation, Putin will travel to Riyadh, Moscow’s main partner in OPEC+, a group of the world’s major oil producers to whose ranks Russia was admitted in 2016.

The two Gulf states have also helped Russia to facilitate recent prisoner swaps.

Saudi Arabia’s MBS played a key role in brokering a deal last September that helped release nearly 300 people, including 10 foreigners and commanders who led the Ukrainian defense of Mariupol.

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE were also involved in the agreement which saw US basketball star Brittney Griner swapped for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout at Abu Dhabi airport almost exactly a year ago, the two countries said at the time.

Responding to the report on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti: “We do not discuss this topic publicly.”

Despite the Biden administration’s continuous efforts to bring home Whelan and Gershkovich, both of whom have been officially recognized as wrongfully detained by the State Department, there has been no success.

Monday marked the 250th day of Gershkovich’s imprisonment, while Whelan is entering his fifth year in Russian detention this month.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has attempted to apologize for the thousands of lives lost to Covid-19 while he was in power, but was interrupted by protesters as he tried to do so.

Johnson was giving evidence on Wednesday morning at the United Kingdom’s public Covid inquiry, which the former leader set up in May 2021.

During his opening statement, Johnson was heckled by demonstrators believed to be from a group of families who lost loved ones during the pandemic.

Four people stood up when Johnson began to say he was sorry, holding signs reading “the dead can’t hear your apologies,” the UK’s PA Media news agency reported. The protesters were then ejected from the hearing by the inquiry chair Heather Hallet.

One of them, 59-year-old Kathryn Butcher, later told the agency: “We didn’t want his apology. When he tried to apologize we stood up. We didn’t block anybody. We were told to sit down.”

Butcher, who is from London, told PA Media that her 56-year-old sister-in-law, Myrna Saunders, died from Covid-19 in March 2020, adding that Johnson saw the demonstrators’ signs during the protest.

More than 200,000 people were killed by the coronavirus during the pandemic in the UK, one of the highest death tolls in Europe, and Johnson’s government was widely criticized for its response.

“I understand the feelings of these victims and their families, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and suffering of those victims and their families,” Johnson said.

“I do hope that this inquiry will help to get the answers to the very difficult questions that those victims in those families are rightly asking,” the former prime minister continued in his opening remarks.

Despite opening with an apology, Johnson would not be drawn on specific errors that he considered himself or his government to have made.

He went on to defend his actions during the pandemic by saying: “I think we were doing our best at the time, given what we knew, given the information I had available to me at the time.” He continued: “Were there things that we should have done differently? Unquestionably.”

Johnson’s conduct during this period has been under intense scrutiny due to the evidence given by others to the inquiry, suggesting that his government permitted a culture that prohibited the right decisions being made.

The inquiry is currently examining how Johnson and his senior team reached decisions such as implementing lockdowns and why specific choices were taken at specific times. Johnson’s evidence to the inquiry has already attracted negative headlines as WhatsApp messages requested from his personal phone could not be given to the inquiry due to what he claims is a technical issue.

Some of Johnson’s most senior former aides have suggested that Johnson was “bamboozled” by the science as it was presented to him, while his former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has been vocally critical of Johnson’s management style, comparing him to an out-of-control shopping trolley.

When asked if he thought it was unusual for advisers and officials to be as critical of a leader as they were of Johnson during the pandemic – including on the question of his own competence – the former PM replied: “No I think this is wholly to be expected”

While still in office, Johnson became the first sitting prime minister to receive a fine from the police, for breaking his own Covid lockdown rules. The “Partygate” scandal, during which members of his team – and the then-prime minister himself – attended events that breached the national Covid rules played a large part in Johnson losing the support of his governing Conservative Party and ending his time in office.

Editor’s Note: The following story includes graphic material. Audience discretion is advised.

Simchat Greyman had to pause several times when describing the evidence of sexual violence he saw when recovering bodies of victims of the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.

One body was so severely brutalized that he and his colleagues from ZAKA, the ultra-orthodox Jewish human remains recovery organization, couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman.

Greyman described finding a woman who was shot in the back of her head, lying on her bed, naked from her waist down. A live grenade was planted in her hand.

And then there was the body with the nails.

“I was called into a house, I was told there are few bodies over there. I saw in front of my eyes a woman, laying (down). She was naked and she had nails …,” Greyman managed to say before pausing for a long time, struggling to get the words out.

“She had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we could not identify her,” he added, the trauma clearly visible on his face.

Greyman was testifying at a United Nations session on sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 Hamas terror attack, hosted by Israel at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday.

He was one of several eyewitnesses invited to address the meeting, providing evidence that sexual violence and rape occurred and were weaponized by Hamas during the attacks.

Mounting evidence

The evidence of sexual violence presented during the session at the UN was ample and overwhelming and came from different sources.

While Greyman spoke about his experience from the search and rescue operations, Yael Richert, a superintendent with the Israel Police, shared information gathered during the investigation so far.

She said survivors of the terror attack told investigators they witnessed Hamas terrorists perpetrating sexual violence against the victims. She quoted testimonies of several individuals all of whom either directly witnessed sexual violence or saw clear evidence of it.

“There were girls with broken pelvis due to repetitive rapes, their legs were split wide apart in a split,” Richert quoted one survivor of the Nova music festival massacre as saying.

We heard girls that were pulled out from the shelters. Girls that shouted. They raped girls. Burnt them just after that. All the bodies outside were burnt

Yael Richert, superintendent, Israel Police

“We heard girls that were pulled out from the shelters. Girls that shouted. They raped girls. Burnt them just after that. All the bodies outside were burnt,” Richert said, reading from another testimony.

Shari Mendes, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservist who looked after the bodies of female soldiers killed during the attack, also described the evidence she saw, saying many of the bodies arrived in “bloody shredded rags or just an underwear and their underwear was often very bloody.”

“Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in their crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast. There seem to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims,” she added.

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, held a separate session on sexual violence last week. One Knesset member, Yulia Malinovsky, accused Hamas of “raping women in order to humiliate” Israel as a nation.

Hamas has repeatedly denied allegations that its fighters committed sexual violence during the attack — despite the evidence.

Israeli and US officials believe that Hamas continues to hold hostage a number of civilian women in their twenties and thirties, despite agreeing it would release all women and children as part of the truce agreement last week. US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that Hamas’ refusal to release them was “what broke this deal and ended the pause in the fighting.”

Difficult investigations

The Israel Police said previously that they had been interrogating suspects, compiling evidence from the scenes of the terror attack and interviewing witnesses as part of their investigation into sexual crimes and other atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7.

While the evidence of sexual violence found on victims’ bodies appeared overwhelming, the police said last month that its investigators did not have firsthand testimony from survivors and that it was not even clear whether any victims survived.

Since then, dozens of hostages have been released from Gaza as part of a truce between Israel and Hamas and some have also mentioned sexual abuse during their testimonies.

Speaking after a private meeting with some of the released hostages and relatives of those still being held in Gaza on Tuesday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had heard stories of sexual abuse.

“I heard, and you also heard, about sexual abuse and incidents of brutal rape like nothing else,” he told a news conference.

Israeli’s public broadcaster, Channel 11, has obtained and released an audio from the meeting on Tuesday, in which former hostages described their time in captivity.

“They’re touching the girls and everyone knows it,” one of them said.

As well as Israel, several international organizations have vowed to investigate the sexual crimes committed by Hamas. Last week, the chair of a UN commission of inquiry investigating potential war crimes on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war said it will probe accounts of sexual violence allegedly carried out on October 7.

International response

Israel has accused international organizations and the media of ignoring the issue.

Netanyahu called out the UN for what he said was a delay in acknowledging the allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas.

“I heard stories which broke my heart on the torture, both mental and physical,” Netanyahu said at a news conference following his Tuesday meeting with former hostages in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli prime minister added that until a “few days ago” he had not heard the UN or human rights organizations decry the claims of sexual violence.

The UN agency UN Women found itself the primary target of the criticism, with activists calling it out for remaining silent on the issue of Hamas sex crimes and choosing instead to focus on the plight of women in Gaza. UN Women put out a statement on Monday condemning the attacks and saying it was “alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.”

“I say to the women’s rights organizations. I say to the human rights organizations, you have heard of the rape of Israeli women. Horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation. Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu said.

Biden also addressed the issue at a fundraiser in Boston on Tuesday, calling “on all of us — government, international organizations, civil society and businesses — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation. Without equivocation, without exception.”

He said that testimonies and reports that have been shared over the past few weeks showed “unimaginable cruelty.”

“Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women’s corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling,” Biden said.

The thorniest issue at the global climate summit in Dubai is clear: Fossil fuels. More precisely, the role they should play in our rapidly warming future.

As negotiators thrash out the terms of core agreements that will emerge from COP28, the big question is whether countries will ultimately agree to a phase-out of oil, gas and coal, a phase-down — or neither.

The difference between phase-out and phase-down sounds like semantics, but the ability of the world to hold back catastrophic climate change may hinge on it.

While concrete definitions are hard to pin down, a phase-out generally means the world will at some point stop burning oil, gas and coal altogether and bring levels of planet-heating pollution down to zero.

A phase-down, however, leaves the door open for countries to continue burning fossil fuels.

Tensions around the terms were heightened this week in the wake of newly surfaced comments made by COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, in which he claimed there was “no science” saying a phase-out of fossil fuels is necessary to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

He told reporters Monday that his comments were misinterpreted, and a fossil fuel phase-out was “inevitable” and “essential,” but the comments sent shockwaves through the summit.

More than 100 countries have pushed for the phase-out language, and dozens of scientists signed an open letter Wednesday stating that “the link between climate science and fossil fuel phase out is unequivocal.”

So, if the agreement lands on phase down, will that make it even harder to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius?

“In isolation, yes,” Rogelj said, “but words and context matter and it’s not black or white.” A text that agreed on a phase-down of all fossil fuels by 2050, for example, with specific targets for the decline of coal, oil and gas could be very positive, he said.

The devil will be in the detail, and even if the more ambitious phase down terminology is agreed, there’s another important word to account for: “unabated.”

The EU and the US, for example, have both called for a phase-out of “unabated fossil fuels.” This would mean an end to burning oil, gas or coal without capturing the planet-heating pollution before it escapes into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming.

The “abatement” refers to carbon capture and removal — a set of techniques that are being developed to remove carbon pollution from the air and to capture what’s being produced from power plants and other polluting facilities, then storing it or reusing it. Many scientists have expressed concern that carbon capture is expensive, unproven at scale and a distraction from policies to cut fossil fuel use.

The world has taken so long to cut emissions that scientific bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say a limited amount of carbon capture will be needed. It is likely to be required for certain sectors, such as agriculture and aviation, for which “zero emissions does not seem possible in the coming decades,” said Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate professor at the University of Exeter in the UK.

The question is, how much would be used and how effective would it need to be: If a fossil fuel plant captured 51% of its emissions, for example, would that be considered abatement?

The word “is meaningless without clear quality standards,” said Lisa Fischer, a program lead at climate think tank E3G.

The summit’s final agreement is expected around December 12, and experts are pushing for language to be precise, given the stakes.

Clarity is essential, Fischer said. “Ambiguity now doesn’t help anyone but the fossil fuel industry.”

Venezuela’s president ordered the creation of a new state called “Guayana Esequiba” on Tuesday, following a controversial Sunday referendum which saw Venezuelan voters approving the annexation of land from neighboring Guyana.

The area in question, the densely forested and oil-rich Essequibo region, amounts to about two-thirds of Guyana’s national territory. Venezuela has long claimed the land and dismisses an 1899 ruling by international arbitrators that set the current boundaries.

Guyana has called the move a step towards annexation and an “existential threat.”

Talking to legislators on Tuesday, President Nicolás Maduro showed a “new map” of Venezuela including the disputed territory and said all residents from the area would be granted Venezuelan nationality. He said the map would be distributed throughout all schools and public buildings in the country.

Maduro also signed a “presidential decree” creating the “High Commission for the Defense of Guayana Esequiba.

The measures announced include the approval of oil, gas and mining exploration licences. Maduro ordered the state oil company PDVSA to create a special department, “PDVSA-Esequibo,” to manage the activities in the region which are to start immediately.

The president also asked legislators to draw up a law banning the hiring of any companies that have worked with Guyana in areas of disputed water, and giving companies currently in the region three months to leave the area.

The measures also include a census among residents of that territory in order to facilitate the attribution of the Venezuelan nationality.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Washington continues to “a peaceful resolution of the border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana”.

“The 1899 award determined the land boundary between Venezuela and Guyana should be respected unless or until the parties come to a new agreement or a competent legal body decides otherwise. So we would urge Venezuela and Guyana to continue to seek a peaceful resolution of their dispute. This is not something that will be settled by a referendum,” he said.

Sparsely-populated and with high rates of poverty, Guyana has seen rapid transformation since the 2015 discovery of oil off the coast of the Essequibo region by ExxonMobil, with over $1 billion in annual government oil revenue fueling massive infrastructure projects. The country is set to surpass the oil production of Venezuela, long dependent on its own oil reserves, and is on track to become the world’s highest per capita oil producer.

Writing for Foreign Policy last year, ahead of the announcement of the referendum, Paul J. Angelo of the Council on Foreign Relations and Wazim Mowla, the assistant director for the Caribbean Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, called the border dispute a “powder keg,” arguing that Russian President Vladmir Putin’s “defiance of international norms” with the invasion of Ukraine “could give new wings to Maduro’s territorial ambitions.”

Guyanese Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo echoed the comparison at a recent news conference.

“I don’t know if they are miscalculating based on what happened in Crimea and other places, but it would be a grave miscalculation on their part,” Jagdeo said.

“We can’t just think that this is internal politics (in Venezuela) without taking all possible measures to protect our country, including working with others,” he added, citing a visit in late November by US military officials to discuss ongoing joint training exercises.

Maduro stands to gain politically from Sunday’s referendum amid a challenging re-election campaign. In October, the Venezuelan opposition showed rare momentum after rallying around Maria Corina Machado, a center-right former legislator who has attacked Maduro for overseeing soaring inflation and food shortages, in the country’s first primary in 11 years.

“An authoritarian government facing a difficult political situation is always tempted to look around for a patriotic issue so it can wrap itself in the flag and rally support, and I think that’s a large part of what Maduro is doing,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.

The decade between 2011 and 2020 was the hottest on record for the planet’s land and oceans as the rate of climate change “surged alarmingly,” according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization.

The report, released Tuesday at the COP28 conference in Dubai, found rising concentrations of planet-heating pollution in the atmosphere fueled record land and ocean temperatures and “turbo charged” dramatic glacier loss and sea-level rise during this period.

This year is also expected to be the hottest year, after six straight months of record global temperatures.

Scientists have said this year’s exceptional warmth is the result of the combined effects of El Niño and human-caused climate change, which is driven by planet-warming fossil fuel pollution. A separate analysis released Monday by the Global Carbon Project found that carbon pollution from fossil fuels is on track to set a new record in 2023 – 1.1% higher than 2022 levels.

WMO’s findings on the hottest decade continue a 30-year trend. “Each decade since the 1990s has been warmer than the one before it, and we see no immediate sign of this trend reversing,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “We have to cut greenhouse gas emissions as a top and overriding priority for the planet in order to prevent climate change spiralling out of control.”

While the concentration of all planet-heating gases grew over this decade, the UN agency highlighted the increase in methane as particularly concerning.

“The alarming trend here is that the rate of the growth of methane almost doubled during this decade,” Elena Manaenkova, WMO’s Deputy Secretary General, said in a news conference Tuesday.

Climate pollution from all fossil fuel types — coal, oil, and natural gas — increased around the world, the Global Carbon Project found, but some proved to be more dominant than others. Coal and oil emissions, for instance, have increased significantly in India and China, while the US and the EU showed strong declines in coal. Emissions from natural gas are increasing in the US, China and India, but decreasing in the EU.

At the rate at which emissions are rising, researchers estimate a 50% chance of global temperatures regularly breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius in about seven years. That temperature – the goal of the Paris climate agreement, and a threshold above which scientists warn it will be more difficult for humans and ecosystems to adapt – was crossed briefly this year as warming from El Niño merged with the climate crisis.

Climate shocks are threatening food security and displacing people around the world, the WMO report warned, and there is a “particularly profound transformation” taking place in the polar regions and high mountains. “We are losing the race to save our melting glaciers and ice sheets,” Taalas said.

There was one piece of good news: The report found the ozone layer is on track to recovery thanks to international efforts to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals.

The WMO report comes partway through the UN-backed COP28 climate summit, on the day focused on energy and industry. The future role of fossil fuels — the main driver of the climate crisis — is one of the main sticking points at COP28.

“The impacts of climate change are evident all around us, but action to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels remains painfully slow,” said Pierre Friedlingstein, a professor at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. “It now looks inevitable we will overshoot the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement, and leaders meeting at COP28 will have to agree rapid cuts in fossil fuel emissions even to keep the 2°C target alive.”

In just two short years, the DJ known as Uncle Waffles has transformed her entire life – from taking her first steps behind the turntables, to becoming an internationally acclaimed DJ and producer.

Leveraging social media, Uncle Waffles has quickly become a sought-after star in Amapiano – one of the fastest-growing music genres out of Africa, known for its deep house sound fusing kwaito, jazz, and percussive basslines. She garnered the nickname “Princess of Amapiano,” and although the performer is grateful for her title, the self-proclaimed “girl’s girl” doesn’t feel like she truly owns it.

“I always feel like, yes, I’m the princess of Amapiano, but so are you,” she explained.

“I don’t want it to ever make people feel like women have to always be up against each other. We can all coexist, and we can actually all shine together.”

An overly animated child-turned-superstar

Born Lungelihle Zwane in Eswatini, a small country formerly known as Swaziland, between South Africa and Mozambique, she was known to be overly animated as a child.

“My mom used to let me do plays, and she used to encourage me to do anything creative that I wanted,” she said. “I used to be that girl who wants to do the leading role in the play and be the most exaggerated.”

Noting influences from South African singers Lebo Mathosa and Chomee, that animated young girl was destined for the big stage.

“They were such great performers,” she said. “They were unapologetically themselves; I would see it, and I was like, ‘I want do this; I want be there.’”

The performer says that although she didn’t know how to sing, she knew she’d eventually make it to the stage.

She made her first steps on the music scene in 2021, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

She began learning to DJ, “eight hours a day for nine months, just sitting and practicing and falling in love.”

Once she gained confidence, she adopted a stage name, “Uncle Waffles.”

“In high school, they used to call me Waffles because of a song from the [animated American TV series] ‘Teen Titans,’” she said. “It was an inside joke, and then it carried out throughout my entire life. So, when I got Instagram after high school, they were like, ‘it should be Uncle Waffles.’”

With her stage name locked in, at just 21 years old, she moved from Eswatini to South Africa and started advertising her DJ services.

“I knew that I needed to move to a space where they are more accommodating of creative skills, where creatives get paid, where creatives can live out of their creativity,” Uncle Waffles said.

Initially, she received a lot of small or unpaid gigs, but then a chance opportunity arose to fill in for another DJ at Soweto’s Zone Six Venue in 2021. No one had heard of Uncle Waffles at the time, so the DJ felt she needed to do something to stand out.

“I got off stage, started dancing with people, and realized that that made the performance,” she recalled.

The next day, she posted a video of herself dancing to South African singer Young Stunna’s song “Adiwele.” The post went viral after Canadian rapper Drake shared it on Instagram, and Uncle Waffles was catapulted into stardom.

“I didn’t expect it to completely change my life, because how does that happen?” the DJ said. “How do you go from doing free shows to being booked internationally in the next week?”

The international language of dance

Since her viral moment, Uncle Waffles has made dance a central part of her sets. Acknowledging language as one of the most significant barriers faced in popularizing Amapiano music around the globe, she started to understand how dance could be used to break it down.

“Even if you’re hearing the song for the very first time in the distance, there’s always something that compels you to dance,” said Uncle Waffles. “Very recently, I saw someone saying that (Amapiano music) gave them an ancestral feeling.

“People will understand dance, even if they don’t understand the lyrics.”

The new approach worked, and the trailblazing DJ made history this past April as the first Amapiano DJ to perform on the main stage at the Coachella music festival in the US. Then she earned a Best International Act nomination at the 2023 BET Awards. By September, Uncle Waffles was headlining and curating a sold-out show at the Avant Gardner in Brooklyn, New York.

The DJ has also added producer to her resume, after spending three months perfecting her debut single “Tanzania.” The track has more than 12 million streams on Spotify as of this writing, and was featured during a dance break on Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour. The producer has released three Eps in the last two years.

“It takes a lot of vulnerability to release music because it comes with so much criticism,” she said. “But it was the best decision I ever made because now I have multiplatinum music.”

Uncle Waffle’s success has helped to define a clear path for female DJs who aspire to become global stars.

“It’s very possible for your dream to be valid as a woman in male-dominated spaces,” Uncle Waffles said, while showing the world that a DJ can command the stage.

“Being a DJ doesn’t limit it,” she added. “If you want it to be on a big stage, (you’ll) accommodate that big stage.”

More than 2,400 people connected to the fossil fuel industry registered to attend the COP28 climate summit in Dubai — a massive representation that’s nearly four times the number that signed up for last year’s climate gathering, according to an analysis published Tuesday.

Fossil fuel employees and representatives outnumber every country’s delegation except for the United Arab Emirates, the host of COP28, and Brazil, according to the report from a coalition of corporate watchdog and climate advocacy groups, including Global Witness.

Overall attendance at the summit has also skyrocketed in recent years, with more than 80,000 people registered for the Dubai meeting — more than twice the number who registered for last year’s summit in Egypt. The report was not able to count how many fossil fuel representatives are actually in attendance, though it has shown registration numbers have been increasing over the years.

The findings are likely to fuel tensions at the already controversial climate summit, where the future role of fossil fuels, the main driver of the climate crisis, is shaping up to be one of the key sticking points.

COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, also an oil executive, has argued the fossil fuel industry should be involved in the summit.

The analysis from the coalition, which this year organized under the name Kick Big Polluters Out, looked at the provisional list of COP participants to identify registrants with self-declared ties to fossil fuel companies or organizations with fossil fuel interests or foundations owned or controlled by a fossil fuel company.

It found an “unprecedented” 2,456 fossil fuel employees and representatives registered to attend COP28, significantly more than the 636 who signed up for COP27 in Egypt in 2022.

This year’s analysis was made easier by the United Nations’ decision in June that for the first time it would require fossil fuel lobbyists to disclose their affiliations when registering for the summit.

Fossil fuel employees and representatives received more passes to COP28 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries combined, according to the research.

“The hallways and negotiating rooms of this climate conference are flooded with the largest number of fossil fuel lobbyists ever,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil fuel energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law.

Some scientists and advocacy groups have expressed increasing concerns about the ambition levels of the summit after recently resurfaced comments made by Al Jaber in the run up to COP28. In a recorded panel session last month, he told participants there was “no science” that said phasing out fossil fuels was necessary to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.

After the remarks came to light on Sunday, Al Jaber fiercely defended his commitment to climate goals and science. At a news conference Monday, he told reporters his remarks had been misinterpreted and that a phase-down and phase-out of fossil fuels was “inevitable” and “essential.”

The number of fossil employees and representatives at COP summits has been increasing over the years, according to the annual report. Attendees connected to fossil fuel companies have attended COP summits at least 7,200 times over the last two decades, according to a KBPO report in November.

Popular Taiwanese rock band Mayday is being investigated by Chinese authorities over allegations of lip-synching during recent concerts, an accusation the band’s label has denied in a controversy that has dominated Chinese social media since the weekend.

The accusations centered on Mayday’s recent shows in Shanghai, where it performed eight times over 10 days in mid-November, to a combined audience of more than 360,000 fans.

The band, which has been going for more than two decades and is sometimes dubbed the “Asian Beatles,” boasts a huge fan base in China, where its shows often sell out quickly.

The Shanghai Culture and Tourism Bureau, a municipal government department overseeing commercial performances, said it attached great importance to the public backlash against the “lip-synching” claims and had required the concert organizer to cooperate with an investigation, state news agency Xinhua reported Monday.

In a statement on Monday evening, Mayday’s record company B’in Music dismissed the online accusations as “malicious attacks, rumors and slander,” saying they had seriously damaged the band’s image.

“Our company is actively cooperating with relevant law enforcement authorities to carry out investigations. We believe the relevant authorities will give us a fair result to set the record straight,” said the statement posted on Chinese social media site Weibo.

Live shows routinely use pre-recorded background vocals and music to bolster artists’ live singing performances, especially acts that involve vigorous choreography.

Chinese government regulations explicitly ban performers from “deceiving audiences with lip-synching,” and organizers from arranging for performers to lip synch. Violators can face a maximum fine of 100,000 yuan (about $14,000). A government guideline on how the regulations should be implemented defines lip synching as “using pre-recorded songs in place of live singing.”

The controversy started last Thursday when a music vlogger on Bilibili, one of China’s biggest video-sharing platforms, posted a video in which he used computer software to analyze the vocals of 12 songs recorded live by a fan at Mayday’s concert in Shanghai on November 16.

The vlogger claimed his analysis found the band’s lead singer, Ashin, lip synced at least five songs during the three-hour gig, saying the vocalist’s singing was precisely in tune for those numbers, while drifting in and out of pitch drastically in the other songs.

The vlogger’s allegations quickly gained traction on Weibo. By Sunday, the controversy had become the top trending topic, garnering more than 300 million views.

Some Mayday fans said they were disappointed, while others defended the band, including by posting snippets of their live performances where Ashin could be heard clearly singing out of tune.

State broadcaster CCTV reported Monday that video and audio recordings of Mayday’s concerts in Shanghai had been submitted to local authorities for “scientific evaluation and analysis,” and that the result would be announced.

Mayday primarily sings in Mandarin with some songs in the Hokkien dialect.

Their songs are catchy and addictive, happy-go-lucky, pop-infused anthemic rock, akin to U2 or One Direction. And with titles like “Party Animal,” “Cheers” and “Here, After Us,” they project the innocence of a younger generation, with all its accompanying hope and heartbreak.

The band is well known for hosting energetic marathons of music, with each show typically lasting two to three hours.

Since their debut in the late 1990s, the band has captured a following not only among millennials but also with a youthful fanbase of gen-Zs who are almost half its members’ age.

Other artists from Taiwan have encountered difficulties in China for being outspoken about the self-governing island, which Beijing views as its own territory. But Mayday has largely steered clear of politics and maintained huge popularity among mainland Chinese.

They were among the first Taiwanese musicians to hold large-scale concerts in China after the country lifted its stringent zero-Covid policy and travel restrictions.

In May, when Mayday’s concerts in Beijing went on sale, nearly 300,000 tickets for six shows were sold out within five seconds, Chinese state media reported at the time.