Ma Cong and Wang Yi, dancers from the Tulsa Ballet, sat in a West Des Moines dining room, watching Chinese soap operas on a laptop computer. Alexandra Bergman put her leg up on the kitchen table and iced the calf she'd pulled from dancing. Mowgli, an 8-year-old, 99-pound Great Pyrenees named after the character in "The Jungle Book," roamed from dancer to dancer, accepting any and all caresses.

On this recent night at the home of the artistic director of Ballet Des Moines - a red-brick house with two satellite dishes in a leafy, dense subdivision near a water tower - seven dancers from Tulsa Ballet sipped beer and wine as Serkan Usta prepared his famous barbecue chicken.

Usta, head of the fledgling ballet company that's trying to make ballet an essential part of Des Moines' cultural landscape, opened a tub of Turkish spices, brought back from his home country.

Ex-envoy Details Chinese Regime's Overseas Scheme

Gong in China ran up against this policy when it tried to place an ad for its international classical dance competition being held later this month.

Ming Pao and at least three other Toronto Chinese-language newspapers refused to print the paid advertisement. No Chinese-language newspaper, aside from the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times, would print the ad in Ottawa.

Chen described several methods that the Chinese regime uses to control the overseas media. One is to have media publish content from Mainland Chinese media. Another is to directly invest or set up fully controlled media.

Chen offered as an example the nine state-owned television channels from mainland China that were recently approved by the CRTC to broadcast in Canada.

"This is an infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party's ideology; the purpose is to legitimize its human rights violations," said Chen.

Dance company asks for "Nutcracker" alumni

Staunton- The Shenandoah Civic Dance Company will celebrate their 25 annual performance of the holiday classic ballet "The Nutcracker" on Dec. 8 and 9 at John Lewis Auditorium at R.E. Lee High School in Staunton. The companys yearly performance of the beloved Christmas-time ballet has become a tradition for many families in the area over the last two and a half decades.

The company is making plans for the 25th Anniversary celebration and is gathering contact information from the hundreds of Nutcracker alumni that have performed with them over the last quarter of a century. For more information contact the Shenandoah Civic Dance Company by emailing off2sab@hotmail.com or calling 886-9355 .

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To Die For: Rolls-Royce and 'green' Coffins at British Funerals

Coffins shaped like a Rolls-Royce, a guitar or a ballet shoe are booming in Britain, where the latest unusual trend in funerals is for "green" burials, kind to the environment. Since 2000, Vic Fearn and Company have been making offbeat caskets which it markets under the title "Crazy Coffins". .

Dancer hits the heights

MORE than 7000 punters turned up for Musselburgh's big day on Saturday and saw Aegean Dancer land a gamble in the East Lothian track's major event of the year.