The U.S. will soon require all non-citizens, including Canadians, entering and leaving the country

to be photographed

as part of new Department of Homeland Security regulations.

The security initiative is intended to build a comprehensive biometric data collection aimed at improving identity verification, combatting visa overstays and reducing passport fraud. It will involve the use of facial recognition technology matching live images of travellers with government records at all entry and exit points, including airports, seaports, and land borders.

The new regulations state that “the best tool to combat passport fraud is to utilize the digital photos contained in e-passports to biometrically verify that a person who presents a travel document is the true bearer of that document.”

And, further, that U.S. Customs and Border Protection biometric tests using facial comparison technology “support this conclusion.”

The DHS has been mandated by various federal statutes, notes the new regulations, “to create an integrated, automated biometric entry and exit system that records the arrival and departure of aliens, compares the biometric data of aliens to verify their identity, and authenticates travel documents.”

A reference to 9/11 and the continued threat of global terrorism is cited in the regulations, as well as “a

United Nations Security Council resolution

adopted in 2017, calling on member nations to increase aviation security and implement systems to collect biometric data to identify terrorists.

Biometric data collection can involve use of an advance passenger information system (APIS), common to airline security, for example. The CBP intends on building galleries of an individual’s photographs using such systems. But for crossings on foot or in privately owned vehicles that may not be possible, so it may build galleries using photographs of non-citizens who “frequently cross” a specific entry point, taken there to “become part of a localized photographic gallery.”

Biometric data collected at land borders will be retained for future verifications.

Under the regulation, set to take effect on Dec. 26, U.S. authorities could also require the submission of other biometrics, such as fingerprints or DNA.

The new regulations will apply to all non-citizens, including minors under 14 and seniors over 79, who were previously exempt from some biometric requirements.

The CBP has been collecting biometric data from certain non-citizens upon arrival in the U.S. since 2004, says

Bloomberg

, but the new rule marks a significant expansion of that data collection. New advances in facial comparison technology allow the agency to roll out broader inspections for entry and departure, the CBP told Bloomberg.

The new regulation will eventually apply to Canadian travellers entering and exiting the U.S., including at vehicle border crossings. However, DHS is still working out the technical challenges involved in doing so, as

noted in the regulations

. “CBP has not analyzed the costs and benefits for implementing a facial comparison-based biometric entry-exit program for vehicles at land ports and private aircraft, or for exit at sea ports and pedestrians at land ports because CBP is still in the process of determining the best way to implement biometric entry-exit within each of these unique environments.”

Canadians staying in the U.S. for over 30 days, including snowbirds, must already comply with

fingerprinting and registration

requirements.

Most public comments submitted in response to the 2021 proposed regulations opposed them, with many people citing privacy concerns. However, the final rule released today by DHS doesn’t make substantive changes to that proposal.

DHS will open a new public comment period for 30 days after the regulation is published in the U.S. Federal Register on Oct. 27.

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It’s an incident that tells you a lot about John Candy. He was hard at work on Only the Lonely, the 1991 film that would help affirm his credibility as a dramatic actor. But it also marked an occasion when the famously affable Candy lost his cool when he realized that his legendary co-star, Maureen O’Hara, was not receiving the respect she deserved.

His top billing and seven-figure salary ensured luxury treatment for Candy during the shoot. That included the provision of an opulent trailer on location. Such was not the case for O’Hara: despite her status as a reigning queen of Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s, she had been assigned something insultingly basic.

Thanks to a meticulously researched biography of the revered Canadian comic, we now have the straight goods on what happened.

An angry Candy demanded the producers find a better trailer for O’Hara who had been coaxed out of retirement to play his mother. Otherwise, he warned, he would turn over his own celebrity trailer to her.

Shortly afterwards, a huge trailer “magically” arrived for the 71-year-old O’Hara.

The incident may show Candy exercising a hard-edged display of star power, but he was no prima donna. That’s the judgment of veteran entertainment writer Paul Myers, whose new biography of the Canadian superstar arrives this month. Indeed, Candy was greatly loved by those who knew and worked with him, and it was entirely characteristic of him that he should distribute some 200 free Thanksgiving turkeys to cast and crew members during the Only the Lonely shoot.

“But he did have issues whenever he saw injustice,” Myers tells Postmedia. “I’m not equating him with Mother Teresa but he was certainly very high-minded over how he was treated and how people around him were treated.”

So coming to Maureen O’Hara’s defence was part of Candy’s nature. He was similarly protective of crew members: if he saw one of them subjected to unfair abuse by a producer or director, he would intervene. “If he saw that someone was being paid less than they should have been he would speak to a producer. Whenever he had issues with anybody, it was because of some perceived core of injustice. There have not been that many people in the industry who were as personally caring as John Candy.”

As for Candy’s artistry, both with his defining work in comedy, going back to his early triumphs with Second City Toronto and television’s SCTV, and his later emergence as a dramatic actor: “He was very intelligent, very intuitive, very creative.”

John Candy: A Life In Comedy

Paul Myers

Anansi

But above all Candy liked people. “He loved his family, but he also loved the teamwork. He was in his happiest place interchanging with others.”

More than three decades have passed since John Candy died in his sleep at the age of 43 in Durango, Mexico. He had been filming Wagons East, the last of a dreary list of carelessly chosen projects redeemed only by his formidable comic presence. It was an unhappy coda to a career cruelly cut short.

Yet, he had an acute awareness of his own mortality, and he would express surprise when he turned 40 that he was still alive. The warning signals were always there: a father who had died at the age of 35; a lifelong struggle with his weight that at one point saw it balloon to 375 pounds; anxiety attacks that often forced him to summon up all his willpower to overcome them; an innate fear of loneliness.

He was never self-destructive in the reckless vein of a Charlie Sheen or Chris Farley. He was too dedicated to his craft for that but he was also dangerously careless about his health — and that troubled Steve Martin, his co-star in the hugely popular Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Martin, who admired Candy greatly, worried that he was on an “uncontrollable spiral of damaging his health … that he was betraying himself for some reason that I don’t know.”

Some earlier writings about Candy have suggested that he was imprisoned in a very dark place psychologically and that the refusal of friends and colleagues to talk about him following his death is indicative of a coverup. Myers encountered no such stonewalling in researching the present book. He wanted to create a “narrative of truth” and there was no shortage of people willing to help in an outpouring of affection.

“I got close to people like Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Chevy Chase, Tom Hanks — and they were all eager to tell me their memories of John Candy Yes, they were candid at times, yes they were alarmed about him at times, but the ‘darkness’ some people talk about has been overplayed.”

For sure, however, there were struggles to keep personal demons at bay.

“I don’t think I realized at first how much he had to endure as a large person,” Myers says. ‘There were so many fat-shaming jokes. Even the press and other people would talk to him about being a large guy — and how painful that was for him. Yet he was expected to laugh along with it, especially since he was a comedian. A comedian doesn’t get angry — you go along with it … you don’t want to be labelled as difficult.”

Myers is not only celebrating the Candy legacy here. He’s also celebrating the remarkable explosion of creative comic talent that occurred more than half a century ago in Toronto. It was a flowering that had its roots in such disparate events as a local production of the musical, Godspell, and the decision to transplant Chicago’s famed Second City culture north of the border. It was productive soil for people as prodigiously gifted as Candy and his friends.

“Second City Toronto was uniquely different from Second City Chicago,” Myers says. “Their creativity was uniquely Canadian but also exportable. They ran in a different direction and created a very Canadian form of improv. Something amazing happened — and it would play well to the world. This is something I’ve always been interested in, especially now when we’re wondering what makes us different from the Americans.”

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A Canadian man is one of two hikers who was struck by lightning on Humphreys Peak near the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, reports Northern Arizona radio news network,

Great Circle Media

(GMC).

The

Coconino County Sheriff’s Office

said two people were struck by lightning on Wednesday morning. The sheriff’s office told several local media outlets, including GMC,

AZ Central

(

USA Today Network

), as well as the local

FOX

and

ABC

affiliates that one of the hikers was from Flagstaff and the other was from Canada.

They were traveling separately and did not know each other, reports GMC.

According to the website,

Live Science

, 90 per cent of people survive lightning strikes without a mark, but are often left with nerve damage, neurologic symptoms akin to post-concussion injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hiking conditions in the area had worsened quickly due to storms throughout the morning.

According to the local

ABC News

affiliate search and rescue crews were deployed on foot to the area where the men were located. Helicopter rescue operations were grounded because of weather conditions.

First responders made contact with the men round mid-afternoon on Wednesday.

The man from Flagstaff was extracted, treated by medical personnel and released.

Later in the afternoon, the Canadian hiker was extracted by search and rescue teams.

According to the Sheriff’s office, the Canadian’s injuries made it more difficult for them to descend, says

GMC

. The rescue team had to get the man to a utility terrain vehicle with a stokes basket, which is a stretcher designed for use where there are physical obstacles that impair movement.

Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jon Paxton told

AZ Central

confirmed late in the day that both hikers had been rescued and were being treated at a Flagstaff hospital.

At more than 12,600 feet, Humphreys Peak is the highest point in Arizona. It is a part of the San Francisco Peaks.

It’s not the first time someone has been struck by lightning on Humphreys Peak, reports the Arizona

FOX News

affiliate.

In July 2016, a 17-year-old hiker died and two other teens were injured after being struck by lightning on Humphreys Peak.

NP has reached out to the Sheriff’s Office for comment but did not hear back before publication.

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Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.

Air Canada has cut around 400 management positions, or 1 per cent of its workforce, according to reports.

The airline said Thursday that it had made the cuts, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson confirmed the cuts to

CTV News

and

CBC News

. “As a global company, Air Canada regularly reviews its resources and processes to ensure they are optimized to efficiently support business operations and its customers,” said spokesperson Christophe Hennebelle to CTV.

He told CBC that the flights would not impact day-to-day operations and said the “difficult decision” was made after an extensive review.

The airline will be presenting its

earnings on Nov. 5.

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A Muslim Pakistani-Canadian activist journalist who is critical of Islamic fundamentalism fears for her life after fielding two warnings recently that she’s in the digital crosshairs of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Raheel Raza, a 75-year-old Toronto grandmother, had just lost a friend and fellow journalist in Pakistan to sectarian violence. Then she learned from Iranian dissidents in California and an analyst in New York that her email had been infiltrated by IRGC hackers — known as APT35, or Charming Kitten — who produced a report detailing her work.

“You are on Iran’s radar,” wrote one of the dissidents who warned Raza about the leak.

That warning, she said, came with a description of the Iranian hacking group’s activities. “They hire hundreds of people who do nothing else but track people (like me) and they’re paid very well for it,” Raza said.

Knowing she was being monitored was chilling for Raza, as she’d just learned her friend, Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir, was attacked this past September by gunmen in the Malir area and later died from his injuries.

“In September 2022, Imtiaz was part of a delegation that visited Israel to know and learn with the goal of fostering interfaith dialogue and people-to-people understanding. Last year, he bagged the Ambassador of Peace Award for his work,” said a statement from the International Religious Freedom Roundtable. “Unfortunately, on September 17, this year Imtiaz was ambushed by armed assailants for voicing his opinions. He couldn’t survive the assault and tragically died on September 24, 2025. The terrorist group Lashkar e TharAllah (Al-Hosseini Resistance) claimed responsibility, explicitly citing his interfaith work and participation in the Israel peace mission. This act was not an act of random violence — it was a calculated attempt to silence a voice that wanted dialogue and bridge-building.”

Mir “was an excellent journalist,” Raza said in a recent interview.

“How it connects to me, is that the murderers of Imtiaz Mir were a terrorist outfit, closely linked with the Iranian regime. And the day after Imtiaz Mir’s assassination, my family and friends received phone calls asking for my whereabouts,” she said. “Is this a coincidence? I think not.”

Anyone who suspects Raza’s surveillance at the hands of the IRGC is an empty threat would do well to recall this past March, when two men were convicted in a plot to kill Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights activist living in New York. PBS reported at the time that Alinejad’s “attempted assassination was orchestrated by the Iranian government, part of more than a decade of violent plots targeting its critics abroad.”

The leaks that contained a profile of Raza were published on an anonymous account dubbed KittenBusters, according to Raaznet, a publication that promises to expose mass surveillance.

“The Charming Kitten leaks are more than a window into Iran’s cyber command, they are a rare glimpse into the bureaucratic soul of digital authoritarianism: structured, methodical, and quietly ruthless,” it reported on Oct. 17.

The IRGC profile of Raza doesn’t contain any threats “in terms of saying, ‘go out and kill her,’ or ‘we are going to kill her,’” she said.

“But what they do is they expose you,” Raza said.

“I’m a 75-year-old grandmother who’s just had a kidney transplant. Why would they want to have my photo out there?”

Raza answers her own question about IRGC exposure: “It’s the Salman Rushdie syndrome. They put it out there and then some young Islamist looks at it and thinks this woman is against Iran and against the regime. Ergo she is against Islam, so she’s a heretic, and I go to heaven if I kill her.”

Hadi Matar, a 27-year-old New Jersey man who stabbed and partially blinded Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in August 2022 was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison.

The novelist had been in hiding for years since his novel, The Satanic Verses, prompted Iran’s religious leader to issue a fatwa calling for the author’s death for writing the book, which was inspired by the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

“That’s definitely my fear,” Raza said.

“In countries like Pakistan and Iran, where you have religious fanatics, they just go hysterical crazy; they don’t think. They basically think that they’re doing their faith a favour by getting rid of so-called heretics like me.”

The report IRGC hackers produced on Raza contains her photo and, in Farsi, it explains it was prepared with information gleaned by infiltrating her emails from 2017 until 2021.

It notes that amongst the 23,938 emails she sent over that time frame, she’s corresponded with Iranians.

“She is an advocate for banning the Islamic hijab and burqa in public places,” according to a translation from the original Farsi.

“In 2012, Raza called on the Canadian government to block immigration from ‘terrorist’ countries like Iran. She is a supporter of Islamic reform and is the author of the book Their Jihad, Not My Jihad.”

The IRGC report also notes Raza’s involvement in a group called the Muslims Facing Tomorrow Association. “The motto of this association is to create reforms in Islam, confront violence and bigotry, and defend human rights,” it says. “She has introduced herself as a liberal Muslim and believes in gender equality, especially for Muslim women.”

Since learning she’d been hacked, Raza has changed all her passwords and beefed up her internet security.

Raza also reached out to a senior member of the Toronto Police Service to ask what she should do about the hack. He told her to check in with her local division about the security breach.

“They sent two officers over (on Oct. 9), but they couldn’t quite figure out what this ideology’s about,” Raza said.

“One of them asked me: ‘Have you reported this to the Iranian embassy?’ I just looked at her and said, ‘There is no Iranian embassy.’”

Canada severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2012, citing concerns over the safety of Canadian diplomats in Iran and the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorist organizations. Iran responded in kind by closing its Ottawa embassy and expelling Canadian diplomats.

Raza has also reached out to the RCMP through a lawyer about the IRGC hack, but she hasn’t heard back yet.

“This is absolutely consistent with a much broader pattern that we see systematically with Iran,” said Thomas Juneau, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, who is researching a book on Iran’s transnational repression activities.

“The idea of intimidation tactics to silence, tactics to smear, tactics to discredit journalists, activists, human rights militants and so on — this is something that Iran does on a very large scale.”

The attack on Rushdie “is an extreme case, in the sense that there was an actual fatwa from the ruler,” Juneau said. “It came from the very top.”

He’s not particularly worried Raza could experience the same fate.

But “the intensity of the tactics” Iran uses against journalists and activists “puts a massive toll on them, a physical toll, an emotional toll, a psychological toll,” Juneau said. “It slows down their work. It discredits them.”

Targeting Raza and others like her “sows fear,” he said.

“There’s no reason to try to find a specific logic in the sense that what matters is the message that is being sent, even if it’s not clear to you or me why is she targeted and not somebody else who is more prominent,” Juneau said. “That’s kind of the point.”

Raza was born in Pakistan and moved to Canada in 1988 with her family.

“I have been a human rights activist all my life,” she said.

“My main work has been to speak out against radicalization and extremism and Islamism. This has been the constant battle.”

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage, Raza has “also been a very vocal advocate of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. I’ve been there 13 times and I work very closely with the Jewish community.”

Raza has no plans to stop that work.

“The more they try to intimidate me, the stronger my resolve to speak out,” she said of the IRGC.

“I will speak out against violence, against extremism, against hate.”

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