Latest news with #cancellation
CBC
a day ago
- Politics
- CBC
Organizers pull the plug on Montreal's Canada Day parade for 2nd straight year
With less than two weeks' notice, organizers of the Montreal Canada Day Parade are pulling the plug on the celebrations. In a news release, organizers said the event, which attracts over 100,000 spectators annually, was cancelled due to "ongoing planning disruptions, strained relations with city departments and unresolved challenges stemming from municipal worker strikes." The parade's main organizer, Nicholas Cowen, said while he understands why municipal workers are striking, disruptions raise safety concerns for parade-goers, as well as create possible logistical challenges. "If something was planned, are they going to do their jobs to the best of their abilities? This is a concern," he said. This is the second consecutive year the event is cancelled. Last year, Cohen said red tape and roadwork on Ste-Catherine Street were to blame and that he hadn't applied for a permit. At the time, he told CBC the parade route would have been changed and he would have been forced to apply for new permits without a guarantee of getting them. By cancelling the parade, he was hoping to highlight some of the challenges faced by organizers. The first Montreal Canada Day Parade was organized by now retired Dr. Roopnarine Singh nearly 50 years ago. Cowen has been involved since the 90s and has been the organizer for more than two decades. He's hopeful the event will make a comeback. "This event is for the people, not for profit. I truly hope we can one day return to the streets of Montreal with a parade that unites us, not divides us," Cowen said. In an email to CBC, City of Montreal spokesperson Nicky Cayer said that as was the case last year, Cohen failed to submit a project application "despite the city inviting him to do so on several occasions." Cayer confirmed, however, that Canada Day celebrations will be held in Montreal. "A land-use permit was issued this year to Production EGP for the Le Canada en Marche event to be held on July 1," he wrote in French, in addition to the city's official annual event at Quai de l'Horloge in the Old Port. WATCH | Meaning behind Australian flag at Quebec parade: Why an Australian flag was at this Journée Nationale des Patriotes parade 1 month ago Duration 2:04 The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste invited a group of Americans, Australians and New Zealanders to the festivities. They are the direct descendants of one of the men celebrated on La Journée nationale des patriotes, Joseph Marceau.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The novelist ‘cancelled' by Oprah: ‘I'm here to be the most divisive author alive'
'I don't know whether I've ever said this publicly.' James Frey is leaning back in his chair, but his look is intent. 'I keep my f------ sword hand strong… That is born of battle. That is born of decades of having people come for me, decades of people f------ trying to finish me off. I have weathered storms, and I'm still here.' You'll know, at least in part, what those storms have been. Most famously, there was the furore over A Million Little Pieces, Frey's immersive account of drug addiction and rehabilitation, which he published in 2003. Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club – still a big deal today, but 20 years ago absolutely as big as publishing got. When it was revealed that many of the events recounted in what was billed as a 'memoir' weren't factually true – the authenticity of Frey's purported criminal career, for instance, the time he had spent in jail, and much else – Oprah hit the roof. Readers were offered refunds; Frey's agent dropped him. He was in the vanguard of what we now call 'cancellation'. But he was not cancelled. 'I've got over 39 million books out the door,' he says. 'We had to provide the numbers to The New York Times. And that's just the books with my name on them.' There are many others, penned with Full Fathom Five, the 'fiction collective' he founded in 2009 and has now sold to a French 'media-tech' company. During that time, he tells me, the collective produced over 40 New York Times bestsellers and a hit film, I Am Number Four. 'I don't look at Oprah as a bad thing. I'm here to be the most influential, most controversial, most divisive, most widely read literary author of my time. Put me up against anybody: I'll stand the test of time. The media still hates me. Academia will always despise me – but the record speaks for itself.' Before we move on, let's acknowledge just how obnoxious this all might sound, set down in black and white. And yet, in the course of our conversation, it doesn't come across that way. I commend an artist who will not be defeated, who sticks to his last no matter what. Frey is not troubled by the distinction between 'memoir' and 'novel'; his books are books. For the record, neither am I, insofar as I truly believe that as soon as you choose to tell a story – well, you're telling a story. A memoir is not the same as a scientific paper. It would be eccentric, to say the least, to hold them to the same standard. (I've read that A Million Little Pieces has since been 'reclassified' as a novel; rather brilliantly, on the Waterstones website, it is tagged as both 'fiction' and 'biography & true stories'. Marvellous.) Since that controversy, Frey has continued to publish steadily: the last time he and I met was in 2011, when his novel The Final Testament of the Holy Bible was published – by John Murray Press in the UK, but by the Gagosian art gallery in the US, in order to circumvent the publishing industry over there. ('I'm the only writer,' Frey says, 'that any major art gallery in the world has ever published as an 'artist'.') Katerina was released in 2018; there have been a slew of successful co-authored YA sci-fi books published under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore. Frey's new novel, Next to Heaven, is a page-turning satire of the super-rich set in the Connecticut town of 'New Bethlehem', a place which bears more than a passing resemblance to New Canaan, where Frey now lives. (He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, which he calls 'the Leeds of America', for its post-industrial toughness.) 'The accumulation of wealth in the United States, and globally over the past decade, has been unlike anything we've ever seen,' he says. It's a tale of glittering hoards and adultery and sex-swapping parties and murder. It's filled to the brim with brand-names and anomie (spoiler alert: money doesn't buy you happiness.) And it arrives at a time when our thirst for such tales seems insatiable: Big Little Lies was ahead of the game, but look, now, at how obsessed we've become with The White Lotus. To Frey, I draw a parallel to the new Apple TV series Your Friends and Neighbours, which stars Jon Hamm as a hedge fund guy who is fired from his job and starts to steal things from his, yes, friends and neighbours in his ultra-wealthy enclave. Frey guffaws. 'Jonathan Tropper' – the series' creator – 'is a super-old buddy of mine. We didn't know we were each working on those things, and the announcements for them both came out at the same time. And we were both like, Oh, you f-----!' But it's more than the zeitgeist of course: it's the story of America. Frey and I discuss the centenary of The Great Gatsby, another novel about 'extraordinary wealth and lawlessness', as he puts it. I'm making a link to Fitzgerald's world; Frey, never one for modesty, is ready for straight comparison. 'Fitzgerald held up a mirror to the society he lived in, and I hold up a mirror to mine, and they're not different. People will blast me but frankly I think Next to Heaven is close to as good as Gatsby. One hundred years from now, if we're all still around, I'd take that bet.' I really like James Frey, and I love talking to him. A conversation with him is energising, invigorating. No, I don't think his new opus stands up to The Great Gatsby. That said, I'm only a critic, and plenty of critics thought that Gatsby was, as one reviewer put it, 'a dud'. We'll only know, as Frey himself remarks, a century or so from now. But one way (at least) in which Fitzgerald and Frey differ is in their attitudes to the way they make their work. The former was famously meticulous, revising drafts to the moment of publication. But Frey tells me that since A Million Little Pieces, 'all my books are first drafts. I've never read a book I've written. They're not edited by anybody. I turn them into the publishers, that's that. Contractually I have total control of the text and the book. We did a little bit of work on this one, but that was simply because I had so much respect for my editor' (Robin Desser, at just-launched US publisher Authors Equity). He's also unlike many in his field in his enthusiasm for AI. 'It's the greatest research tool ever. It doesn't write my books, but it helps me with a lot of things. So, there's a history of New Bethlehem in the book. All I did was say, 'AI, can you give me a concise and complete history of New Canaan, Connecticut' – and I got all the facts I needed. Of course, it's not written in my style, not anything remotely like it, but the information is all there.' In 2023 Frey was the keynote speaker at a conference in Paris about literature and AI: 'I'm basically the only person who acknowledges using it.' When I ask him what his answer is to all those who would say – and I'm one of them – that these language models are all based, essentially, on the theft of authors' work, his answer is a shrug. 'Nothing I can do about it. All I can do is to take advantage of the tools that are available to me at any given time.' But then he's a businessman as much as he's a writer. When he launched Full Fathom Five – which took on a slew of writers to produce what is now called 'content' – he was seen to be taking advantage of clients, offering contracts for not much money and almost no control. 'I never got sued,' he says evenly. 'There was one article' – a big piece in New York magazine – 'at the beginning of that company by a writer who had tried to get a job with me. When I rejected them, they came after me, and I just shrugged. All that article did was help business.' You will not take down James Frey. He has known hardship, real hardship. He and his ex-wife lost a child to a rare genetic condition in 2008; he understands that everything is relative. Of the turmoil over Pieces and Oprah: 'Sure, it was a bad day, but I've had vastly worse. I've had hundreds of days worse than that one, right?' There's a lot of talk these days about resilience; how we cultivate it, how we instil it in the young. I may not agree with everything James Frey says or stands for, but I admire his resilience. I'm glad he keeps his sword arm strong.
Wall Street Journal
2 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
A Town That Pioneered the Juneteenth Holiday Is Now Calling Off the Party
Plano, Ill., made national news in 2021 when it designated Juneteenth a holiday before the state or federal government. But this year, Plano's fifth annual celebration is canceled. Organizer Jamal Williams said he called off the event after local business sponsors in the 13,000-person town declined to commit, saying they feared losing customers. A downsized version is being planned at a church in the town next door.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kate Middleton Unexpectedly Cancels Major Public Appearance Hours Before It Begins
Kate Middleton Unexpectedly Cancels Major Public Appearance Hours Before It Begins originally appeared on Parade. Just before one of the biggest royal events of the year was set to begin, has pulled out of the Royal Ascot — even though she was previously confirmed to attend. The Princess of Wales was set to make her return to the annual horse race on Wednesday, June 18 after missing out on last year's event while she was undergoing chemotherapy. But as reported by PEOPLE, she canceled her appearance at the last minute, even after her mother, Carole Middleton, was already spotted arriving at the race course. Previously, Middleton was part of the carriage lineup that the official Royal Ascot social media account shared on Wednesday, but they later shared an updated carriage list without the princess included. The Royal Procession carriage list for Wednesday 18th June, the second day of #RoyalAscot 2025. — Ascot Racecourse (@Ascot) June 18, 2025 The original lineup showed Middleton and husband Prince William riding in the second carriage, but the revised version has him joining and Queen Camilla in the first one. While Kensington Palace has not given a specific reason for Middleton's absence, she is said to be "disappointed not to be able to join." However, it sounds like this might be her way of pumping the breaks on her busy schedule to give herself a bit of a rest after her return to work following her battle with cancer. According to PEOPLE, those close to her have said she's still "trying to find the right balance."It has been a rather busy week for Middleton, so it makes sense that she'd want to lay low. After Trooping the Colour over the weekend and Monday's Order of the Garter service, it's no surprise she'd want to take this opportunity to rest. 🎬SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox🎬 Kate Middleton Unexpectedly Cancels Major Public Appearance Hours Before It Begins first appeared on Parade on Jun 18, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 18, 2025, where it first appeared.
CBC
6 days ago
- Business
- CBC
Airbnb bookings in B.C. at risk of cancellations amid short-term rental registration woes
Short-term rental platform Airbnb says thousands of reservations in B.C. are at risk of cancellation due to delays with the province's short-term rental registration process. But as Tanushi Bhatnagar reports, the government says it has given the hosting platform enough time to comply.
