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CSIS says a former parliamentarian may have worked on behalf of a foreign government

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OTTAWA – A former parliamentarian is suspected of “having worked to influence parliamentary business” on behalf of an unnamed foreign government, Canada’s spy service told a federal inquiry Friday.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service also cited indications that an unspecified foreign government engaged in meddling to reduce the likelihood of a specific Liberal candidate of being elected federally.

“It is suspected that the foreign government sought to thwart the candidate’s bid given their support for issues perceived to be contrary to the foreign government’s interests,” says a written summary presented to the inquiry.

CSIS described the two cases as previously unknown to the ongoing commission of inquiry.

However, the spy service provided no additional details about the countries or people involved in the allegations.

The CSIS summary was presented to the inquiry as it heard testimony from interim director Vanessa Lloyd, former director David Vigneault and other current and former spy service officials.

The suspicions about a former parliamentarian are the latest suggestion a Canadian politician may have engaged in meddling.

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians raised eyebrows in June with a public version of a classified report that said some parliamentarians were “semi-witting or witting” participants in the efforts of foreign states to meddle in Canadian politics.

The stark, yet vague, assertion by NSICOP, an intelligence watchdog made up of MPs and senators who are sworn to secrecy, prompted a flurry of concern that individuals knowingly involved in interference might still be active in politics.

The Green Party’s Elizabeth May, who possesses a top secret-level security clearance, has seen the full version of the NSICOP report.

She said in June it does not contain a “list of MPs who have shown disloyalty to Canada.”

May said one unnamed former MP accused in the report of proactively sharing privileged information with a foreign operative should be fully investigated by authorities.

The commission of inquiry’s latest hearings are looking at the ability of federal agencies to identify and counter foreign interference. A final report is due by the end of the year.

Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue and her staff have identified and reviewed the intelligence reports referred to in both the classified and public versions of the NSICOP report.

The inquiry has also examined senior government officials and intelligence agencies behind closed doors about the sensitive findings.

However, Hogue has said she will not be publicly identifying parliamentarians suspected by NSICOP of meddling.

She recently cautioned that the NSICOP report’s specific allegations are based on classified information, which means the inquiry can neither make them public nor even disclose them to the people in question.

As a result, the inquiry won’t be able to provide the individuals with a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves, she said.

Lloyd told the inquiry Friday that the spy service’s engagement with parliamentarians had indicated there was a “sliding scale” of awareness of foreign interference among politicians.

On one hand, a parliamentarian might know little and therefore be surprised that they could be targeted by a foreign actor, she said. Some might have a better understanding of foreign meddling and be grateful to know more about making informed decisions.

On the other hand, “a very small subset of individuals” understand that the activity is foreign interference and by nature of their engagement with a threat actor, they are either knowingly benefiting from that activity or taking part in it themselves, Lloyd said.

A March 2024 intelligence assessment tabled Friday at the inquiry said foreign interference had become a normal pattern of behaviour for certain foreign states and their proxies. “It allows them to exert their will on Canada in a manner that is difficult to detect and does not reach thresholds that would result in military conflict.”

The assessment said the main perpetrators in Canada continued to be China, India, Russia and Pakistan.

Chinese foreign interference actors “are largely pragmatic and tend to pursue paths of least resistance” by supporting whichever party or individual is believed to be friendliest to Beijing’s interests, the document added.

The assessment said the government of India remained interested in supporting Canadian politicians who endorse pro-India views and countering politicians deemed detrimental to India’s interests.

A November 2021 document tabled Friday said CSIS had begun taking measures to reduce the threat posed by India’s activities directed at Canadian democratic institutions and elections.

The initiative involved classified and unclassified interviews and briefings with current and former MPs about India’s alleged foreign interference efforts.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 27, 2024.

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At NY’s beloved Fall for Dance, highlights come from as far as Ukraine and as close as a few blocks

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NEW YORK (AP) — The eclectic annual Fall for Dance festival is a beloved tradition among dance fans, not least for its $30 tickets — still quite a deal in New York, even if they began at $10 two decades ago.

But the best thing about it is still the variety it brings to the stage, with 15 acts over 11 days this year from artists around the world. This year’s highlights have come from as far as the Kyiv Opera House in Ukraine, and as close as a few blocks away.

You could call it a veritable United Nations of dance — which is exactly how the president of New York City Center, Michael Rosenberg, described it this week, introducing the third of five programs. He didn’t explicitly refer to the ongoing U.N General Assembly happening a bit further east, wreaking its usual traffic chaos.

There was a happier chaos happening onstage, a mishmash of extremely different styles of dance. As usual, the audience seemed to love it all — especially the more out-there elements, like dancers stalking the stage on stilts in the first program, courtesy of choreographer Andrea Miller and her Brooklyn-based Gallim company.

Fall for Dance has always lured a mix of known names — some of them trying out something new – with names unknown to most of the crowd. Among the familiar faces this year so far have been much-loved ballet stars Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet and Herman Cornejo of American Ballet Theatre, both choreographing this time (with Cornejo dancing, too).

The emotional highlight, though, was the two-night appearance of the National Ballet of Ukraine, a troupe that has managed to remain operating in Kyiv despite huge hardship. In its first New York performance in decades, the company opened the festival with “Wartime Elegy,” an evocative piece by one of the world’s leading choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky.

Currently an artist in residence at New York City Ballet, Ratmansky has a deep connection to the material. Born in St. Petersburg to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, he grew up in Kyiv. When he premiered “Wartime Elegy” at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle in 2022, he unfurled and held aloft a Ukrainian flag during curtain calls. In program notes for Fall for Dance, he joins the dancers in honoring their colleagues who have fallen in warfare.

The piece, featuring four male and four female dancers, both began and ended on somber tones. But in the middle, men who’d been dressed in black suddenly appeared in folk costumes. The moody (and gorgeous) piano and strings music by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov shifted to spirited tunes, and the men leaped into folk-style dancing with abandon.

The audience laughed along. But soon the dancers’ bodies seemed to be collapsing, as the choreography again reflected pain, not joy. The curtain closed with one woman standing in arabesque, leg raised behind her, as if to say, quite like the troupe itself, that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Peck, who has been starting to build an impressive choreographic resume as she continues to lead NYCB as one of its top ballerinas, presented one of three pieces commissioned by the festival: “Piano Songs,” a spirited solo for ABT dancer Aaron Bell, to the music of Meredith Monk. The 81-year-old composer delighted the crowd by appearing for a curtain call.

The highlight of another program was “The Specter of the Rose, by Cornejo, the Argentine dancer who recently celebrated his 25th anniversary with ABT. It was a reimagining of the short Fokine ballet about a young girl who returns from a ball in her gown and dreams of the spirit of the rose, who materializes to dance with her. Here, it was modernized, with Cornejo bare-chested and in jeans, and his partner, sprite-like ABT ballerina Skylar Brandt, in little jean shorts.

The dancing was everything you’d hope from two classical dancers at the top of their game, with Cornejo showing that the years have not diminished his high-flying leaps and turns — even in denim.

The festival continues through Sunday.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Maggie Smith, scene-stealing actor famed for Harry Potter and ‘Downton Abbey,’ dies at 89

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LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “ Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She made her film debut in the 1950s, won Oscars for work in the 60s and 70s and had memorable roles in each subsequent decade, including an older Wendy in Peter Pan story “Hook” (1991) and a mother superior of a convent in Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy “Sister Act” (1992).

A commanding stage actor, she played Shakespearean tragedy — 1965 adaptation “Othello” — and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & Juliet” (2011).

She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith drily summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well.

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for lead actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986 and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

From 2010, she was the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in hit TV period drama “ Downton Abbey,” a role that won her legions of fans, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a host of other awards nominations.

But she chafed at television fame. When the show’s run ended in 2016, Smith said she was relieved. “It’s freedom,” she told The Associated Press.

“Not until ‘Downton Abbey’ was I well-known or stopped in the street and asked for one of those terrible photographs,” she said.

She continued acting well into her 80s, in films including the big-screen spinoff to “Downton Abbey” in 2019, its 2022 sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes upstaging others.

Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t just take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the director Peter Hall found that Smith wasn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people, too.”

Smith conceded that she could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Smith famously drew laughs from a prosaic line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

She repeated the gift for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet witheringly asked, “What is a weekend?”

King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla paid tribute to Smith, who was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

“As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage,” they said in a statement.

Fellow actors paid tribute to her on Friday. Hugh Bonneville, who played the son of Smith’s character in “Downton Abbey,” said “anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent.”

“She was a true legend of her generation and thankfully will live on in so many magnificent screen performances,” he said in a statement.

Rob Lowe, who co-starred with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said the experience was “unforgettable … sharing a two-shot was like being paired with a lion.”

“She could eat anyone alive, and often did. But funny, and great company. And suffered no fools. We will never see another. God speed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote on X.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Smith “a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. … If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theatre company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theatre productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a redoubtable woman who lived for years in her vehicle on Bennett’s London driveway.

However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.

“She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear,” said Simon Callow, who performed with her in “A Room with a View.”

Smith married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby — who both grew up to be actors — and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

___

Hilary Fox and Pan Pylas in London contributed to this story. Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed biographical material to this obituary before his death in 2018.

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Bob Geldof hopes Live Aid musical inspires younger generation to take action

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TORONTO – Bob Geldof doesn’t think Live Aid — or a global benefit concert of its size — could have the same impact today that it once did, but he hopes a new musical attached to his name might inspire younger people to take his lead in making a difference.

While in Toronto to plug “Just For One Day,” a jukebox musical that revolves around the legendary 1985 multi-city concert he helped organize, the Irish singer-songwriter said times are changing for star-studded benefit concerts.

“I don’t think, because of new technology, that it has the meaning it had before,” he said of Live Aid, the televised event that broadcasted on MuchMusic, MTV and an array of other channels nearly 40 years ago.

“But what I’m desperate for,” he added, “is that the next generation says: ‘I can do something like this.'”

Geldof said future ideas probably won’t look anything like the massive concert stacked with superstar names. Those days are gone, especially at a time when Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and other stars regularly tour and play at massive music festivals.

Instead, Geldof said he hopes younger generations imagine a more contemporary way to support humanitarian causes and unite people for a single purpose.

That’s where he hopes the musical comes into the mix. It plays at the Ed Mirvish Theatre from Jan. 28 to March 16, 2025.

“Just For One Day” draws on a fictionalized version of the story behind Live Aid, a cultural moment that unfolded on July 13, 1985, when Madonna, Queen, Elton John and other major acts performed to help raise funds and fight famine in Ethiopia.

Forty years later, the event continues to hold meaning for people alive at the time, but not necessarily those who weren’t, suggested the musical’s director Luke Sheppard.

“Growing up, my mum always talked about this as one of the very best days of her life,” said the creator, who previously worked on “& Juliet.”

He said his goal was to recapture some of that passion while making it relevant to a younger generation.

“Just For One Day” centres on a fictionalized Geldof and several subplots drawn from real-life stories the creators unearthed from people involved with the original Live Aid production.

Sheppard said the idea took shape across four or five workshop sessions with other artists. They sang Live Aid songs together, experimented with different scenes and “unpacked it through a contemporary lens.”

It was a “cross-pollination of two different perspectives,” he said.

“What you see today is this amazing friction between (the character of) Bob, who has this extraordinary knowledge of what it meant to be there … and a generation who are coming along today saying, ‘Hey, I know nothing about this music.'”

For its Toronto version, the creators say they’re working on a few ways to introduce Canadian elements.

One proposal they’re considering is a nod to “Tears Are Not Enough,” the 1985 song co-written by David Foster and Bryan Adams around the time of Live Aid to raise more money for famine relief. The studio version was recorded by a supergroup of Canadian musicians, including Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, Corey Hart and Geddy Lee.

Geldof seemed less interested in putting that song into the show, noting that he suggested Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” instead.

And while he and the director often disagree, they emphasized that in their differences they’ve found a common purpose in making the world remember the power of holding court with a global audience.

“(The musical) tells you that you can do this stuff,” Geldof said.

“It doesn’t have to be pop. (But with collective effort) the needle moves, the globe tips a tiny little fraction on its axis.”

Adds Sheppard of keeping Live Aid in the conversation: “If you don’t talk about it, then how is a new generation meant to learn and move forward?

“We might not do it in the same way, but it is about learning how to do something.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 27, 2024.



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