Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has accused Israel of carrying out “collective genocide” in Gaza, in some of his strongest criticism of the country since the war began last year.

During a gathering of leaders of Islamic nations hosted by Saudi Arabia in Riyadh on Monday, the country’s de facto leader said: “The Kingdom reiterates its condemnation and absolute refusal of the collective genocide committed by Israel against the brotherly Palestinian people.”

The crown prince, widely known by his initials MBS, also defended Iran, in stark contrast to his comments in 2017 comparing the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Adolf Hitler.

MBS urged the international community to “compel Israel to respect Iran’s sovereignty and not to attack (Iranian) territories.”

Saudi Arabia has recently signaled more political involvement and policy shifts in support of the Palestinians.

Last year the kingdom was in the process of negotiating a historic normalization agreement with Israel but recently said that was “off the table” without Palestinian statehood, a demand rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Iran sent its First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref to the Riyadh conference, who in his speech mourned the deaths of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar. Saudi Arabia strongly opposes Iran-backed militias such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Riyadh and Tehran repaired ties last year after decades of animosity over regional influence.

Those attending the high-level meeting included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who were also at the meeting, remain embroiled in an ongoing conflict over Turkey’s military operations in northern Syria and its support for rebel groups.

The stated goal of Monday’s meeting was “unifying positions” and “exerting pressure” on the international community to take steps to end the “ongoing attacks and establish lasting peace,” in the region, Saudi’s governmental state agency said.

Over the last decade, Afrobeats has become a global phenomenon, bringing African music into the Western mainstream. There’s now an Afrobeats category at the MTV Video Music Awards, and performers like Burna Boy and Wizkid can sell out major venues in the US and Europe.

While many African artists have been able to ride the wave of the genre’s international popularity, some musicians are now pushing for global recognition beyond its confines.

In recent years, popular music coming out of Africa has widely been classified as Afrobeats in the global soundscape, despite encompassing styles such as hip-hop, R&B, amapiano, dancehall, highlife, and more.

King Promise, whose sound blends R&B, highlife, and hip-hop, began releasing music in 2017 and rose to international fame in 2023 with his TikTok viral dance track “Terminator.” But the 29-year-old singer and songwriter doesn’t want to be boxed into a single sound.

“Afrobeats kind of serves as the umbrella which all of our music comes together (under),” he says. But he adds that the label has a crossover feel “to make it sound appealing not to just to people back home but to the rest of the world as well.”

“I don’t think that’s the best thing,” he argues.

“I make music that I love,” he explained. “If I feel like making R&B today, I make it. If I feel like making highlife I can make it. If I feel like making Afrobeats I can make it. It’s really about my direction.”

The roots of the Afrobeats genre can be traced back to Nigeria and music icon Fela Kuti, who is widely considered the architect of the similarly named genre, Afrobeat. Popularized in the 1970s, Afrobeat merged American jazz and funk with traditional Yoruba music. More recently, Afrobeat morphed into Afrobeats a looser label and catch all for all African music that took inspiration from the original Afrobeat sound.

Although King Promise understands the label from a marketing perspective in Western countries, he and other artists believe it robs them of their authenticity.

At the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, South African Afropop and amapiano singer Tyla described her win for Best Afrobeats song “Water” as “bittersweet” in her acceptance speech.

“The global impact that ‘Water’ had on the world just proves that African music can be pop music too,” she said.

She added, “There’s a tendency to group all African artists under Afrobeats; it’s a thing, and even though Afrobeats has run things and has opened so many doors for us, African music is so diverse. It’s more than just Afrobeats.”

Nigerian superstars including Davido, Tems, Wizkid, and Burna Boy, have publicly distanced their music from the term Afrobeats.

Wizkid even took to social media in March to say that labeling his music Afrobeats was “ like saying every American artist makes rap.”

“It’s almost like artists are being stifled”

“Here you will get put into the same crowd (Afrobeats), so the more street type of song is in the same crowd with someone that sings Afrosoul.”

She added the Afrobeats label makes no distinction between genres or sounds, leading to audiences to expect everyone to sound the same.

“It’s almost like artists are being stifled,” Simi explained.

“You have to be a certain kind of artist before people respect you or give you the kind of accolades that you know you deserve.

“Someone like Adele is not having this kind of struggle.”

King Promise argues that although the Afrobeats sound has evolved over the years with the fusion of new sounds, the foundational element of the music remains the same: African tradition music. He says that will remain a mainstay in popular music.

“Just like we have hip-hop that stood the test of time, Afrobeats as a representation of our music as Africans on a global scale, it’s locking horns with the biggest, standing its ground, and it’s only getting better,” he said.

Germany is set to hold a snap election on February 23 after an agreement was reached among parties in the country’s fractured parliament on Tuesday, according to reports from public broadcaster ARD.

Last week, Germany’s governing coalition collapsed after disagreements over the country’s weak economy led Chancellor Olaf Scholz to sack his finance minister, leaving him in a minority government with the Green Party.

The exact date for an election needs to be confirmed by the president, but only following a vote of confidence that Scholz must call.

The confidence vote will be held on December 16 following an agreement from all parliamentary parties, according to ARD.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier needs to rubber-stamp the date of the election, but reports suggest this is a formality. Steinmeier said at an unrelated event in Berlin on Tuesday that “our country needs a government that is capable of taking action.”

“That is why we must not lose any time now. We must find answers to the question of how we can make our state better able to act,” Steinmeier added.

The greater clarity on a date for elections, originally due to be held in September 2025, comes just a week after Scholz’s government coalition fell apart as he fired his finance minister, Christian Lindner, following a major disagreement on Germany’s economic future.

Scholz initially announced that he planned to hold a confidence vote on January 15, but he came under immediate pressure from the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) opposition party to hold them earlier.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU, said last week, “there is absolutely no reason to wait until January” to call the confidence vote.

Scholz’s position on the date seemed to shift over the weekend. On Friday, he tweeted that he would “like to facilitate new elections as soon as possible.” Then, on Sunday evening, he told German TV that he would be willing to call the confidence vote before Christmas.

Scholz is currently leading a minority government with the Greens. His government has grown increasingly unpopular in Germany, with Scholz also one of the least popular chancellors ever, according to a September opinion poll.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the most senior leader in the Church of England, has resigned over his handling of a child abuse case, according to his official account.

“Having sought the gracious permission of His Majesty The King, I have decided to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury,” Welby said in a statement on Tuesday.

Pressure had been mounting on Welby in recent days, following an independent review into “sickening abuse” committed by John Smyth, a deceased British lawyer considered the worst serial abuser linked to the Church of England.

The incriminating report, commissioned by the church and released November 7, tracked a “worrying pattern of deference” to Smyth, concluding that “a serious crime was covered up.”

In Welby’s resignation statement, he said the review “has exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth.”

“When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow,” Welby added. “It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.”

It is unclear when Welby will leave his post. In his resignation statement, he said: “exact timings will be decided once a review of necessary obligations has been completed, including those in England and in the Anglican Communion.”

Summer camps

Smyth perpetrated “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks” on as many as 130 boys and young men, with abuse spanning from the 1970s up until his death, in 2018 – according to the Makin Review.

He was accused of abusing his own family members, as well as attendees of evangelical Christian summer camps he helped run for students from Britain’s prestigious private colleges in the 1970s and 1980s.

From 1984 to 2001, when Smyth relocated to Zimbabwe and then South Africa, church officers “knew of the abuse and failed to take the steps necessary to prevent further abuse occurring,” the report added. Welby worked at the summer camps that Smyth helped run. The pair exchanged Christmas cards and Welby donated small sums of money to his “missions” in Zimbabwe.

In 2017, Channel 4 News reported on Smyth’s abuse. After the publication of the independent review earlier this month, Welby told the network he “did not” ensure the allegations were pursued as “energetically” and “remorselessly” as they should have been, when he rose to the highest rank in the church, in 2013. He was first ordained as a priest in 1993.

The church’s review found that there was a “missed opportunity” in 2012 and 2013 by the highest levels of the church to “properly” report him to law enforcement.

The review said that “it is not possible to establish whether Justin Welby knew of the severity of the abuses in the UK prior to 2013,” adding: “It is most probable that he would have had at least a level of knowledge that John Smyth was of some concern.”

The Bishop of Newcastle was the most high-ranking church official to call for Welby’s resignation. On Monday, Helen-Ann Hartley told the BBC that it would be untenable for members of the clergy to “have a moral voice… when we cannot get our own house in order.”

Throughout his tenure, Welby has demanded accountability from those accused of mishandling abuse, including his predecessor, George Carey, and the former Bishop of Lincoln. Until now, there’s been no historical precedent for an Archbishop of Canterbury resigning over child abuse.

A doctor accused of criticizing the war in Ukraine in front of a patient was convicted Tuesday of spreading false information about the Russian military and sentenced to 5 and a half years in prison, part of an unrelenting Kremlin crackdown on dissent.

Dr. Nadezhda Buyanova, 68, was arrested in February after Anastasia Akinshina, the mother of one of her patients, reported the pediatrician to authorities. Akinshina alleged that Buyanova told her and her son that his father, a Russian soldier who apparently was killed in Ukraine, was a legitimate target for Kyiv’s troops and had blamed Moscow for the war.

A video of the outraged Akinshina complaining about Buyanova was widely publicized, and chief of Russia’s Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin personally demanded a criminal case be brought against the doctor.

Buyanova, who was born in western Ukraine, denied the accusation, insisting she never said what she was accused of saying. In a tearful closing statement to the court last week, she had urged it to acquit her.

Her defense argued the prosecution failed to present evidence that the purported conversation took place, including any recordings of it, and alleged that her accuser fabricated the story out of animosity toward Ukrainians, according to the independent news site Mediazona, which reported all of the hearings in the trial.

In her closing statement to the court, Buyanova said it was “painful” to read the accusations in the indictment, and broke down.

“A doctor, especially a pediatrician, is not capable of wishing harm to a child, his mother, or traumatizing the child’s psyche. Only a monster is capable of this – and of the words that I allegedly said to them,” Mediazona quoted her as saying.

Buyanova’s case drew national attention, with more than 6,500 people signing an online petition demanding her freedom and supporters regularly attending court hearings. As the judge read out the verdict, they shouted, “Disgrace!” before bailiffs escorted everyone from the courtroom.

Her lawyer, Oscar Cherdzhyev, told reporters afterward that the verdict was “unexpectedly harsh” and “monstrously cruel.”

“We didn’t expect this,” he said.

“Spreading false information” about the army has been a criminal offense since March 2022, when Russia adopted a series of laws prohibiting any public expression about the invasion that deviated from the official narrative. Authorities started actively using them against critics and protesters.

According to OVD-Info, one of Russia’s leading rights groups that tracks political arrests, more than 1,000 people have been implicated in criminal cases on charges related to speaking or acting out against the war.