David Raven, who was better known as Maisie Trollette and was believed to be the oldest drag performer in Britain, died on Wednesday in Brighton, England. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by a friend, Scott St. Martyn, who said that Mr. Raven had been living in a nursing home.

Mr. Raven performed as Maisie Trollette for over half a century, wearing a blonde wig, a thick layer of makeup and long sequined dresses while singing old show tunes and cracking naughty jokes. He became a mainstay of the British drag circuit, a regular presence at the Brighton and Hove Pride event and a mentor to younger drag queens.

He came out as gay in his 20s, at a time when “homosexual acts” were still illegal in Britain. (The law changed in 1967 in England.) Mr. Raven began performing in drag as the form became popular with the rise of Danny La Rue, a famous British drag performer (who was, according to Mr. St. Martyn, a big fan of Mr. Raven’s).

Early in his career, Mr. Raven described himself as a “pantomime dame,” Mr. St. Martyn, an actor who became friends with Mr. Raven in the 1980s, said in an interview. “He always tried to legitimize it by being a professional actor.”

Mr. Raven rose to fame in the 1960s as one half of the drag duo the Trollettes alongside Jimmy Court, who performed as Jimmy Trollette.

“They were kind of slapstick comedians,” said Dave Lynn, a longtime friend of Mr. Raven’s who performed with him in the 1980s and ’90s. “You never knew what was going to come from them, most of it was ad-lib.”

Eventually, Mr. Raven branched out as a solo act, performing as Maisie in charity shows and venues across Britain, and appearing in the inaugural parade for Brighton and Hove Pride, the largest Pride festival in Britain, in 1973.

“Maisie was such a staple,” said Christopher Dennis, better known as his drag alter ego, La Voix, who met Mr. Raven in the early 2000s. “Everyone knew of him even if you hadn’t seen him. You just knew the name.”

Though Mr. Raven was well-known on the drag circuit and in Brighton, where he lived, little was known about his early life and childhood. Even friends who knew him for decades said he never spoke about his past.

David Raven was born Aug. 15, 1933, in Cornwall, England, and was raised by adoptive parents in Norfolk. He had no immediate survivors; his partner, Don Coull, whom he referred to as his “idol” and his “other half” in “Maisie,” a 2021 documentary, died from complications of AIDS about two decades ago.

While Mr. Raven was an undisputed pillar of British drag, he was serious about separating his alter ego from his day-to-day identity, reprimanding anyone who called him Maisie when he was not in character.

“He came from a very cold background,” Mr. Lynn said. “He couldn’t be a queen full time.”

Mr. Raven continued to perform well into his 80s, eventually using a walking stick onstage. “I can’t believe that I’ve been doing this for 50 years,” he said in the 2021 documentary.

While Mr. Raven was a singular figure in Britain, he did have an American counterpart: Walter Cole, also known as Darcelle XV, an American drag queen who earned a Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest drag performer. (Mr. Cole died at 92 in 2023.)

In the documentary “Maisie,” the two octogenarian performers have a meal together and prepare for a performance in Brighton. Standing next to each other, they pose for photos and exchange quips and (sometimes dirty) jokes.

Mr. Raven had a wicked sense of humor, and his friends described him as “naughty” and a “prankster.” On trips with friends, he would hide in closets or under beds to scare them. In his free time, he loved betting, especially on race horses. Even later in life, when he was too unwell to leave the house, Mr. Raven would ask people to place bets for him, Mr. St. Martyn said.

His longevity inspired younger performers, and he offered deep encouragement to younger acts in an effort to help Britain’s drag scene flourish, Mr. Lynn said.

“There’s a feeling in the arts that there’s an expiry date,” Mr. Dennis said. “And David showed us there’s no expiry date on being fabulous.”

President Trump’s cabinet has been busy rolling back regulations that will make it far easier to extract and produce fossil fuels. But who will buy them?

Nearly everyone, it turns out, particularly under the threat of tariffs.

At an annual energy-industry conference in Houston, executives spoke openly about how companies from around the world are seeking to buy American liquefied natural gas as a way of placating Mr. Trump’s demands to either balance trade or face punitive measures.

“If you’re a nation who has a trade imbalance with the U.S., they’re all asking themselves, ‘What can we do to try to level the playing field?’” said Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Woodside Energy, Australia’s biggest oil and gas company.

They are cutting deals now, she said, in large part “so their government can say, ‘We’re taking action. We hear you, Mr. President.’” Her characterization was echoed by Ryan Lance, chief executive at ConocoPhillips, one of the largest U.S. oil and gas producers, and other speakers at the conference.

Since President Trump took office, oil and gas companies from nearly every continent have dangled the possibility of investing billions of dollars in the United States.

This month Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean companies revived a $44 billion idea — long considered all but financially impossible — to build pipelines and a giant terminal in Alaska that would export natural gas to Asia. Ukraine, eager to preserve its weapons supply from Washington, has signaled it will buy more American gas. South Africa, its aid frozen by Mr. Trump, is trying to cut a deal to expand U.S. companies’ drilling rights in its waters.

Whether all this will translate into firm deals is not yet clear. But the potential deals would lock in decades of investment in fossil fuels at a time when the global energy transition to cleaner energy sources is faltering. The burning of fossil fuels is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the planet.

South Africa, which had its U.S. aid frozen by an executive order that accused it of discriminating against its white citizens, is trying to negotiate a new trade deal with Washington. In that deal, the United States would get more access to gas exploration in the region, and South Africa would buy more of its gas from America, according to a government spokesman.

Ukraine, which is desperately trying to gain Mr. Trump’s support as negotiations for a peace deal with Vladimir Putin develop, is signaling to Washington that it will buy U.S. gas in addition to trying to cut a deal on mineral revenues.

Ukraine’s moves mirror a wider push in Europe to buy more gas from the U.S. as Mr. Trump engages the European Union in tit-for-tat tariffs.

The state-owned gas company in India, one of the world’s fastest growing markets for gas, said it would either buy a stake in an American L.N.G. plant or enter into a new contract for long-term supply.

Speaking at the conference in Houston, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Sultan al Jaber, who just a year and a half ago presided over the annual climate-change negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, said his company would also soon announce a major investment in U.S. gas production. “Make energy great again,” he told a room full of oil and gas executives.

The negotiations Mr. al Jaber shepherded in 2023 were the first in which all nations agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels by midcentury. But a key clause in the agreement noted that “transitional fuels” — widely acknowledged as a euphemism for gas — would be key to making the transition “orderly.”

The potential deals pit climate concerns against foreign-policy strategy. Expanding gas consumption — purchasing contracts are usually for decades worth of fuel — would in many cases complicate carbon-neutrality pledges that companies and countries have made.

Gas emits less carbon dioxide than oil and coal when burned, but is nearly entirely made up of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas. U.S. methane emissions have been steadily rising as its gas industry has grown to dominate the world’s trade in the fuel.

The new U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive. In an interview in Houston he said the Biden administration’s temporary pause in early 2024 on federal approvals for new export terminals had made countries wary of investing in U.S. gas, despite the fact that L.N.G. exports soared under President Biden.

Mr. Wright said he had been meeting with prospective buyers in Europe and Asia and they had all been asking him, “Can you assure me that the United States is going to be a long-term reliable supplier?”

Xi Nan, who heads Rystad Energy’s L.N.G. research team, said that because of the long timelines for developing any gas project, announcements shouldn’t be taken as inevitabilities.

“Fundamentally, our forecasts haven’t changed in terms of long-term L.N.G. demand,” Ms. Xi said. “What’s changed is that the forecast for renewable energy demand is lower.”

As a result, the energy transition “is going to take longer than we thought,” she said.

In the weeks after President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election last summer that resulted in a deeply divided French Parliament, if his name came up it was often to call for his resignation.

The unpopular president, long derided by critics as aloof, all-controlling and arrogant, looked certain to ride out the final three years of his term as a lame duck atop an unstable government of his own creation, with a rotating cast of prime ministers, and little to show for it.

But President Trump has changed that. The American leader has abruptly reversed 80 years of friendly policy toward Europe, withdrawing support for Ukraine and siding with Russia, leaving European leaders panicked and lost. In doing so, he has made this Mr. Macron’s moment.

The French president, who once seemed on the verge of disappearing, is now in the headlines daily. Mr. Macron has gathered European leaders repeatedly in Paris, rushed to Washington and later to London, and generally become the focal point of Europe’s struggling effort to stand on its own feet.

After years of warning of the “imminent brain death” of NATO, Mr. Macron’s admonition now seems prescient as Mr. Trump threatens to turn his back on the alliance.

Mr. Macron’s talk of European boots on the ground to help keep the peace in Ukraine, rejected not long ago as impossible by incredulous allies, is now a plan being worked through as a plausible way to stem the fighting.

Similarly, Mr. Macron’s vision of a Europe with “strategic autonomy” from the United States was once largely dismissed as a distant idea from a man more prone to sweeping statements than follow through. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has since caused him to put more emphasis on a “European pillar” within NATO. But other European leaders seem ready to follow him toward the goal of allowing Europeans to better defend themselves.

“Crises are very good for a president. They put them back in the center,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur.

In addition, he said, “Macron is the only one who can be the leader.”

Germany’s next likely chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has yet to form a government. Though the crisis has pushed Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain closer to the European Union, his country is no longer an E.U. member. And it is not clear that the efforts by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy to mediate tensions with European allies particularly interest Mr. Trump.

So Mr. Macron has stepped into the leadership vacuum.

After Vice President JD Vance castigated European leaders during his speech at the Munich Security Conference last month, signaling the American president’s radical shift in foreign alliances, the French president and his office sprang into action.

Mr. Macron called a first meeting of European leaders in Paris almost immediately after the conference ended, followed by a second one the next day. He was the first European leader to go to Washington to speak directly to Mr. Trump, briefing his fellow European Union colleagues on the meeting afterward.

A few days after a disastrous visit to the White House by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, both Mr. Macron and Mr. Starmer coached their ally on how to repair the situation.

According to a French diplomat close to Mr. Macron, the French president speaks to Mr. Trump every second day, on average, and to Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Starmer even more regularly.

The path forward for Europe now appears to follow much the course Mr. Macron has pointed to for years.

In recent days, his once distant-seeming plan for European troops to enforce any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine has begun to take more solid form. Britain and France have already committed troops, and, the Danish foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said on Monday that his country was also prepared to take part.

On Tuesday, Mr. Macron welcomed military leaders from some 30 countries who gathered in Paris for a defense and security conference, to solicit further commitments.

One of Mr. Macron’s boldest gestures has been to open discussions with European leaders about sharing the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal with them. Besides Russia, France and Britain are the only two countries in Europe with nuclear weapons.

The suggestion spoke to the leadership status Mr. Macron wants for France, a country that has long prided itself on the independence of its nuclear arsenal.

But it also reflects the new distrust of the American commitment to European allies, and Mr. Macron’s conviction that Russia’s aggression would expand farther if left unchecked without the promise of nuclear protection.

“We are entering a new era,” he said during a televised speech at the top of the French news last week. “Peace is no longer guaranteed on our continent.”

He added, “I want to believe the United States will remain by our side, but we must be ready if that doesn’t happen.”

Yet it remains far from certain whether any of Mr. Macron’s frantic action will prove successful. Ukraine has said it would be open to a cease-fire with Russia, and Moscow responded on Thursday by saying that it, too, was open, though more discussion was needed.

Mr. Trump’s own position has been mercurial, both badgering Europe to spend on its own defense and, on Thursday, threatening it with a 200 percent tariff on wine and alcohol.

Mr. Macron’s presumption of European leadership has also at times irritated some allies. During a call to debrief his fellow European leaders about his trip to Washington, Ms. Meloni of Italy challenged Mr. Macron about in what capacity he had gone to the White House, according to people familiar with the call.

Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, accused Mr. Macron of offering European troops to Ukraine without having “the decency” to consult other E.U. countries.

“You don’t send troops like you send a fax,” Mr. Crosetto, whose government has opposed deploying troops to Ukraine, wrote on X, the social media platform.

Then there are all the practical issues, of how Mr. Macron will fund such a spending increase while France is facing a budgetary crisis.

He has prepared his country for the threat of war, announcing an increase of military spending over the next five years — with no additional taxes, he promised — and an expansion of weapons manufacturing. After the United States, France is the second biggest arms exporter in the world.

Other European countries, too, have announced that they will increase their military spending, potentially aided by proposals from the European Commission, including a €150 billion, about $164 billion, loan program to pay for more weapons and technology.

But the larger existential crisis has eclipsed all finnicky practicalities for the moment. In France, recent polls show the president’s approval rating is up from 4 to 7 points to the high 20s and low 30s — the biggest jump since the arrival of Covid in 2020, according to the monthly barometer by the French Institute of Public Opinion.

The French populace largely agree with him — that Europe must continue to support Ukraine and invest more in its own defense against a potential Russian threat, and that the United States can no longer been seen as a dependable ally.

Even many of the president’s political opponents have praised his diplomatic efforts and agreed with his analysis.

“I’m not a Macronist at all, but he was pretty good. The important thing is to try to unite people and convince them that the situation is pretty serious and that we obviously need a national mobilization,” said Cédric Perrin, a senator with France’s Republican Party who presides over the French Senate’s foreign affairs and armed forces committee.

Rather than the man meeting the moment, it seems the moment has arrived to what Macron has been saying since soon after he was first elected in 2017, when he delivered his first long speech at the Sorbonne extolling the urgent need for Europe to step from America’s shadow.

Back then, a Czech politician, Andrej Babis, who months later became the country’s prime minister, offered a back-handed slap: “He should really concentrate on France.”

Today, many in Europe concede Mr. Macron was right all along.

“In Czechia we strongly appreciate the leadership of the president of France,” said Czech Ambassador to France, Jaroslav Kurfürst. “Emmanuel Macron has earned a lot of credibility in our part of the world.”

Reporting was contributed by Emma Bubola in Rome, and Aurelien Breeden in Paris.

The Israel-Hamas negotiations to extend the cease-fire in Gaza were in limbo on Thursday as the Trump administration turned its attention to talks with Russian officials in Moscow over the Ukraine war.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, was expected to leave the latest round of Gaza talks in the Gulf emirate of Qatar for Russia on Thursday. Mr. Trump has effectively charged Mr. Witkoff with working to resolve two of the world’s most fraught conflicts — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

The latest round of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in the Qatari capital of Doha this week have borne little fruit amid entrenched disagreements over the deal’s next steps, according to an Israeli official familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In mid-January, the two sides agreed to a multiphase truce that would ultimately end Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza and free the Israeli and foreign hostages held by Palestinian militants there. The cease-fire began with a six-week pause in the fighting, during which Hamas released more than 30 hostages in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

During the initial phase of the truce, Israel and Hamas were meant to negotiate a second phase that envisioned an end to the war, the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the release of all of the surviving hostages still held in the territory.

But the two sides remain far apart on how to move ahead. Israel is still vowing to destroy Hamas and is insisting on the demilitarization of Gaza. Hamas has largely refused to disband its armed battalions or send its Gaza leaders.

The 42-day first phase elapsed in early March without a deal on the second phase, although the fragile truce has held up so far without it, at least for now.

Critics in Israel have accused Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, of dragging his feet on an agreement for fear it would loosen his grip on power. His far-right allies in the governing coalition are pressing to go on with the war against Hamas despite concerns from the families of the remaining hostages that their loved ones may not survive.

Up to 24 living hostages are still being held in Gaza along with the remains of more than 30 others who were taken captive, according to the Israeli government. Hamas seized about 250 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel and ignited the devastating 15-month-war in Gaza.

Earlier this month, Israel imposed harsh restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, barring the entry of food and other much-needed goods. The Israeli authorities later cut off electricity to a wastewater treatment center in Gaza.

That has prompted fears of a resurgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The widespread wartime deprivation had eased somewhat since the cease-fire and trucks of aid had begun to enter freely.

Qatar, which has been brokering the truce alongside Egypt and the United States, has criticized the Israeli decision to close crossings to aid as a violation of the cease-fire agreement.

Last week, Mr. Trump’s pick for special envoy on hostages, Adam Boehler, met with senior Hamas leaders in Qatar, sidestepping the moribund cease-fire talks. The talks broke with the United States’ yearslong precedent of generally refusing to negotiate directly with Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.

But even those efforts — which focused on freeing Edan Alexander, the last remaining Israeli American captive believed to be alive, and securing the release of the bodies of four others — did not produce an agreement. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, later called the attempt a “one-off” that “hasn’t borne fruit.”

On a ship that caught tuna for American consumers, fishermen said they were fed so little that they resorted to eating the bait. On another, a worker said he was beaten repeatedly by the captain, sometimes with a metal hook. On a third, a man who experienced severe burns in a kitchen accident said he was denied medical care and survived only by treating himself with Vaseline.

All three boats offloaded their catch to other vessels, remaining at sea for months. For those who wanted to leave, there was little hope.

These accusations are central to a new lawsuit filed by four Indonesian fishermen. They say they want to right a wrong that, according to them, was tolerated by one of America’s oldest tuna brands, Bumble Bee Foods.

They are suing the company in federal court in California, accusing it of being aware of and benefiting from forced labor on ships operated by its suppliers. Bumble Bee, which is based in San Diego, said it would not comment on pending litigation.

“I want justice,” Muhammad Syafi’i, one of the plaintiffs, said in a Zoom interview from his home in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. “For myself, for my fate. And for my friends who are still out there.”

In 2021, he was employed as a cook on a boat that caught tuna that was sold to Bumble Bee (but also had to help with the fishing). He was forced to fork over nearly half of his $320 monthly salary for months. That July, he was severely burned when hot oil from his wok spilled onto the lower half of his body. He said the captain refused to get him medical care for days. Eventually, he was allowed to return home.

Rights groups say the growing global demand for tuna — an industry worth over $40 billion — is abetting human rights abuses. Much of that demand comes from the United States, the world’s largest seafood importer in terms of money. About 80 percent of the seafood eaten in America is imported.

The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, estimated in 2021 that there were roughly 128,000 people trapped in forced labor in the global fishing industry. The figure, it said, was most likely higher.

In 2022, the environmental group Greenpeace said that it had been able to track fish caught by a ship that U.S. authorities had flagged as using forced labor, using codes on a Bumble Bee can sold in a grocery store in Arlington, Va. That raised the possibility of more tainted products being on U.S. supermarket shelves.

Bumble Bee, which has been owned by the Taiwanese tuna trading company FCF since 2020, did not respond to those accusations. The next year, the company agreed to remove some claims about its fishing practices from its marketing materials, after it was accused by the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum of falsely claiming that its supply chain was fair and safe.

In a report last December, Greenpeace said it had found 10 Indonesian fishermen, who said they were lured by promises of good jobs but later were subjected to violence and hunger every day on the seas. When their ordeal was over, the men said that they often ended up with little or no money.

The accounts from Greenpeace helped form the basis of the lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in San Diego. The plaintiffs sued under a law that authorizes survivors of human trafficking, regardless of their citizenship, to sue companies that knew or should have known that they were benefiting from forced labor.

The lawsuit, filed by Mr. Syafi’i and three others, Akhmad, Angga — both of whom go by one name — and Muhammad Sahrudin, seeks unspecified monetary damages from Bumble Bee.

Many of the workers onboard such tuna ships are often poor Indonesians, who are lured by brokers with the promise of high pay. Enforcement of labor laws is often weak in Indonesia, especially in informal sectors like fishing. Rights groups say there is also a lack of official oversight, making it easy for companies to exploit workers.

Mr. Syafi’i said he was still shaken about his experience on a Chinese-flagged vessel called Lu Rong Yuan Yu 211. He returned to Indonesia in July 2022 and had the first of many surgeries. He says he still cannot lift heavy objects, and his genitals, which were severely burned, have not fully healed. He was given about $6,000 in compensation by the broker who found him the job.

He is now unemployed. “I no longer have the desire to work on a ship, ever again, even if they offer me a huge amount of money,” he said. He says he wants to share his experience with other fishermen before they head out to sea.

Before he took that job, he said a friend had told him, “that life on a boat is work, eat, sleep. Repeat. But in reality, no one dared to be truly open about the real conditions.”