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The European Union is backing away from the idea of making Canada an associate member of the 27-nation bloc, sources tell CBC News.

A joint statement expected to be released at the 21st Canada-EU summit in Montreal on Friday will instead use softer language promising closer ties, according to sources who have seen the latest draft of the statement.

Wes Streeting has said Britain must be ready for war in 1,000 days as Russia intensifies its hybrid warfare against Nato.

The Defence Secretary warned that Britain’s enemies could be in a position to attack the country by 2030 and it must “be ready with our allies to fight and win”.

Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Streeting said: “My defining priority… is to make sure that this country is ready to fight and win a war.

Could it happen here? I suppose that’s the underlying thought many of us have had as we watch France burn. And the immediate response is, why wouldn’t it? I am old enough to remember in the early 2000s when people used to say France was a model of integration. Then in 2005 the suburbs went up in flames, followed by parts of the centre of Paris and other major cities. The Citroën flambé became a national dish and suddenly talk of ‘the French model of integration’ disappeared. That same year, eight home-grown terrorists of foreign origin attempted to blow up the London transport network, four succeeded and a little bit of that blasé British attitude that we know better than the French disappeared too. In 2011 our own cities started burning, but we learned nothing from that.

French mother runs home to give her kids new school clothes ready for tomorrow’s class assembly. This is what the riots are really about. Mums and their kids. Viva la Revolution. https://t.co/dwtbZkjmZm

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) October 19, 2026

U.S. Vice President JD Vance blamed the nationwide riots in France on mass immigration and the inability to integrate large swaths of people from the “third world”, while warning American citizens from following the same destructive path.

You’ve probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That’s not what we stand for."

Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it."

I won’t. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It’s a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy.

The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us.

Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat.

Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces.

Where does it come from? Four layers.

First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country.

Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else.

Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do.

Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night.

The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad’s conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct.

Now the part I’ll add myself, and that few people dare to say.

On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It’s one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It’s a strength.

But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration.

This is where men have a responsibility.

Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves.

Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends.

That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It’s surrender. And the first to pay for it are women.

Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street.

A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left.

Look at that young woman again. She isn’t the enemy. She’s what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough.

Our job is to make sure she’s the last generation that has to learn it this way.

— Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) October 18, 2026

A transgender New York Times executive was shot dead by his 76-year-old in-laws in a California car park, police said.

Jonathan McKinsey, 40, the newspaper’s director of engineering for its games department, was found with gunshot wounds in Dublin, a suburb in the Bay Area, and pronounced dead at the scene.

This keeps getting weirder.

Our latest national tracking survey was conducted from September 18 to 23, following one of the busiest and most consequential stretches of federal politics in some time.

Since our previous survey left the field on September 9, Prime Minister Mark Carney met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Calgary, where the two countries signed a 100-year partnership declaration focused on defence, security, trade, reconstruction and technology. Carney then convened his cabinet in Banff for a two-day planning retreat focused on the fall agenda, the economy and the intensifying trade dispute with the United States.

I think a lot of delusional Elbow types imagine they’ll be working from their Tuscan villa this time next year.

A UN report has concluded that recent US airstrikes on vessels allegedly trafficking drugs breached international law and could constitute crimes against humanity.

The report by Special Rapporteur Ben Saul said since September last year there had been at least 68 US strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, outside US territorial waters, which killed more than 220 people.

Saul said that even if targets could be identified as members of designated terrorist groups, they had not staged an armed attack on the US which would trigger a right to self-defence under international law.

🇺🇸 U.S. forces unleashed a lethal strike on a suspected drug-running speedboat in the Caribbean

SOUTHCOM says the vessel was racing along a known trafficking route when Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere struck it, killing four people the military described as…

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 20, 2026

Who cares what the UN says?

A 31-year-old Calgary man has been charged after he allegedly made a threat on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s life.

The federal RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) launched an investigation after receiving a tip about a YouTube account that posted a death threat aimed at Carney.

INSET, with the assistance of the Calgary Police Service, arrested and charged Jamie Da Costa with uttering a threat against the prime minister of Canada

Mayor Olivia Chow also spoke at Tuesday’s news conference and addressed what she said has been a “despicable” rise in antisemitism in Toronto.

“Jewish Torontonians should not need police presence to go to a synagogue or a community centre, or simply to live proudly Jewish in our city but they do. In this moment of emboldened antisemitism, Jews, Jewish institutions and even Jewish neighbourhoods are being targeted,” she said.

What a despicable bitch.

Donald Trump’s threat to ban Bombardier aircraft sales unless the Canadian company builds them in the U.S. is sparking resistance from politicians, including members within his own party.

As Canada’s $27.6-billion counter-tariffs take effect Tuesday, a Truth Social post from Trump sent shock waves through Bombardier’s U.S. workforce — particularly in Wichita, Kan., where the Canadian plane maker has its U.S. headquarters and employs more than 1,200 people.