Calgary Opera removes Tosca performer who displayed Palestinian flag during opening-night curtain call

Calgary·NewOn Friday, the bass singer Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega held up the flag at the end of Giacomo Puccini's drama about love and betrayal during political upheaval in Napoleonic Rome. Actor playing escaped political prisoner says he has 'no regrets'Alex Nino Gheciu · The Canadian Press · Posted: Oct 19, 2026 3:39 PM EDT | Last Updated: 6 minutes agoListen to this articleEstimated 2 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results. Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega, right, holds up a Palestinian flag during the curtain call of the political opera Tosca on Oct. 16, 2026. Sanchez-Ortega, who had been playing an escaped political prisoner, was removed from the production by Calgary Opera, which said individual political protest was a violation of company policy. (Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega/Instagram)The Calgary Opera has replaced a performer who unfurled a Palestinian flag during the curtain call of the political opera Tosca.

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TORONTO – The Toronto Raptors announced Tuesday they have exercised team options on the contracts of forward Collin Murray-Boyles and guard Ja’Kobe Walter, keeping them signed through the 2027-28 NBA season. The Raptors exercised the third-year team option on Murray-Boyles after he averaged 8.5 points, five rebounds and 1.9 assists in 57 games last season and was named to the NBA’s All-Rookie Second Team.

Montreal police are looking to identify a suspect and two witnesses after two individuals were pepper sprayed and allegedly subjected to homophobic slurs in the Village this summer. The SPVM says the assault happened on the night of July 9 at Sainte-Catherine Street East and Saint-Christophe Street. Two people, including a member of the LGBTQ2+ community, says a group of three people shouted homophobic slurs at them while they were at a restaurant.

Families of children with autism and other disabilities want voters to keep program and service funding in mind when they cast their ballot in the upcoming provincial election. In February, the BC NDP announced it was ending the B. C. Autism Funding Program and replacing it with the B. C. Children and Youth Disability Benefit. Those changes are due to take effect on April 1 and would remove funding for some families who have children with autism, but would help other families managing different conditions. Noah Kubiak-Gore is a two-year-old triplet who has cerebral palsy. The trio was born in June 2024 at just 25 weeks’ gestation. After undergoing multiple surgeries and lengthy hospital stays, doctors told Noah’s parents that he would never walk or talk. Story continues below advertisement

Within seconds, FaceAge posts the participant’s biological age — an estimate of how old their body appears. Participants can add new images to track how they age over time. Researchers are using the uploaded photos to investigate which lifestyle habits and diseases are associated with looking younger or older. They stressed that the prediction tool is for research, not diagnosis. More than 10,000 people have signed up since the portal launched quietly in March. As the database grows, it will help the team test and improve their algorithms across larger and more diverse groups. Until now, the tool was limited largely to hospital patients. They’re also collaborating with researchers outside Boston to expand FaceAge. The study, which tested whether the AI tool could read health signals from ordinary photographs, was published in The Lancet Digital Health on Monday. The researchers first trained a base model, FAHR-Face, on more than 40 million face images. They then fine-tuned it for two tasks: FaceAge estimates biological age and FaceSurvival predicts survival after cancer treatment.