The park, located in the Ferguson Forest Centre, features a sheltered picnic area and floating docks for both residents and visitors.

A ceremony and barbecue, hosted by the municipality, along with the North Grenville Chamber of Commerce, Rideau Valley Conservation Authority and Parks Canada will mark the occasion.

The kick off begins at 11:30 a.m.

The park was first proposed in 2006 for Kemptville’s 150th anniversary, along with the 175th anniversary of the Rideau Canal.

Wassill underwent lengthy surgery and was expected to recover, but his family said he suffered irreversible brain damage.

His family made the announcement Thursday night on a Facebook page dedicated to Wassill.

“Today Michael passed away peacefully, lovingly surrounded by his close family…we are all deeply mourning the loss of our son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend and hero.”

The man charged with the attempted murder of Michael Wassill will be back in court at the end of May. Carson Morin, 20, appeared in court via video link Tuesday to choose his lawyer.

A memorial will be announced later.

The 42-year-old Grammy winner, who is launching a summer tour where most tickets are priced at $20, said he’s scalping about 1,000 tickets from each show to make up for the cheaper regular price.

“I’m in the scalping business, but you know what? We told everyone. A lot of artists have been doing this for years behind fans’ backs, taking all these backdoor deals,” he said. “We look at StubHub and other places and see what they’re selling them for and we just undercut them.”

Kid Rock’s “$20 Best Night Ever Tour” kicks off June 28 in Bristow, Va., and the Detroit native, who released his debut album in 1990, said he likely scalped secretly on past tours.

“I’m sure we have,” he said. “I can’t say for sure, but I’m not going to say that we haven’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did.”

Kid Rock’s discount ticket pricing is leading a change in tours where scalpers play a major role as the marketplace for secondary sources for tickets continues to grow, especially in a summer when key acts like The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z are on the road.

“If I see a scalper, I’ll scalp him,” the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards said, laughing.

He said he would like to play free shows to balance the high cost for tickets; The Rolling Stones’ “50 & Counting Tour” has a range of ticket prices, and Pollstar reported that the average price of a ticket among the tour’s seven shows was $355.14.

“I’d do some free shows. I’d work my butt off and I don’t care how much. But these are set up above my head, man,” Richards said in a recent interview. “You’re kind of locked in a thing here whether you like it or not. I wish it was five bucks a ticket.”

The Rolling Stones did play a secret show at the Echoplex club in Los Angeles last month, where fans got in by winning a lottery and had to be ID’d and given photo bracelets to eliminate the chance of scalping the tickets, which were just $20.

But Mick Jagger said there isn’t much the artists can do about scalping and secondary sources for tickets.

“The artist is totally powerless in this. People have made a lot of fuss about it before, but on the other side, some people are like, ‘We might as well participate in it.’ And you can’t really blame the artist for participating in it because why shouldn’t they in a way?” he said. “I know we don’t participate in it, but nevertheless, I don’t blame people if they wanted to do it.”

“You can look at it like, ‘Well, no one’s making any money except these secondary ticket selling companies and they’re making more money than anyone,’” Jagger continued. “It’s completely legal so until it’s illegal, there’s nothing much anyone can do about that.”

Ticketmaster’s North American President Jared Smith said Kid Rock’s deal, which he completed with Ticketmaster partner Live Nation, is a first of more to come, though they might not be as risky as Kid Rock’s plan, which also includes $4 draft beers and $20 T-shirts.

“I absolutely believe that we’re starting to see the real acceleration of some really healthy things in pricing that are going to create new opportunities for fans to come and experience it in a really special way,” Smith said.

A small way that artists have been able to control scalping is through paperless tickets, which only allows the buyers of the tickets to use them at shows and are not allowed to resell them. Smith said paperless tickets, which launched five years ago, accounts for “about 1 per cent” of the tickets at Ticketmaster.

“It hasn’t grown necessarily as a percentage of the total tickets that we sell, but we certainly see more artists employing it,” Smith said. “When it really first started, it was kind of looked at as a tool to use across the entire seats in the arena, but it’s really become a tool for the best seats in the house. Increasingly we see artists using it very, very targeted for like the top 500 seats in the house or the top 1,000 seats.”

Bruce Springsteen, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Radiohead, Rascal Flatts, Selena Gomez, Muse, Miley Cryus, Iron Maiden, Atoms for Peace and Eric Church are among the acts using paperless tickets.

On his “Wrecking Ball World Tour” last year, Springsteen used paperless tickets for 20 per cent of the seats, and Ticketmaster said its data showed that Springsteen’s decision helped reduce scalping by 75 per cent. (New York is the only state where Springsteen couldn’t offer paperless tickets because the state does not allow nontransferable tickets).

StubHub, the largest reseller of tickets, said business is booming thanks to the top acts on the road as well as summer festivals. But the company, which has a partnership with AEG, knows the idea of paperless tickets hurts their business.

“That limits a person’s right to resell or transfer or to just give away their ticket. We do not support that because we believe in a fan’s right to do whatever they want with their tickets,” said Alison Salcedo, the head of U.S. Communications for StubHub. Fan Freedom, an organization that supports the rights of ticket holders, echoed StubHub’s thoughts on paperless tickets.

“I don’t see any reason why nontransferable tickets need to be the solution,” said Joe Potter, the CEO of Fan Freedom, which is financially supported by StubHub. “Scalpers get tickets through pre-sale and fan club memberships.”

Ticketmaster isn’t against the idea of reselling tickets, in fact they resell concert tickets online.

“More often or not tickets are underpriced, that’s why you see so much resell activity,” Smith said. “What we try to do is make sure it’s done very transparently.”

Ticket holders are allowed to sell tickets at any price on sites like StubHub and ticketsnow.com, that’s why Kid Rock isn’t selling tickets for the first two rows at his shows. He’s randomly pulling fans from the nose bleed sections to enjoy his concert from the venue’s best view. And the first 20 rows at his shows are seats offered through paperless ticketing.

“We really don’t know what we’re going to make yet. We were doing estimates on it and they’re already going through a lot of these numbers, and it looks like it’s going to be a good summer,” he said of what his potential tour earnings.

Kid Rock, whose tour openers include ZZ Top, Uncle Kracker and Kool and the Gang, is playing the same venues he’s performed at in the past, but he said he’s filling up more seats and selling tickets faster. Even scalpers have approached the performer to cut deals.

“I’ve had people in the scalping business come at me already and try to make side deals like, ‘I can make you thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash if you’ll just flip a few of these tickets our way for certain shows,’” he recalled.

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Follow Mesfin Fekadu at http://www.twitter.com/MusicMesfin

Each year cleanup crews throughout the U.S. collect millions of pounds of plastic trash from beaches and coastal waterways, with the biggest numbers coming from California’s 1,100-mile coastline.

Once in the ocean, plastic takes ages to decompose. The manmade junk either collects into floating trash islands called “garbage patches,” or it breaks into smaller pieces that harm and kill sea creatures throughout the food chain.

It’s a complex problem with no easy fix, but two California legislators have introduced an “extended producer responsibility” bill that would require manufacturers to figure out how to keep the most common plastic junk out of state waterways. The proposal, Assembly Bill 521, aims to reduce 95 per cent of plastic pollution along the state’s coastline by 2024.

The Assembly Appropriations Committee will vote on the bill Friday. If it passes, the measure will go before the full chamber next week and would face several other legislative hurdles before it could become law.

But supporters say the idea is to influence the private sector to make more environmentally friendly packaging and have businesses pick up the cost of collecting and disposing plastic trash, shifting that burden away from local governments.

“Cities and counties spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year cleaning up plastic trash that is on its way into the ocean,” said state Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Monterey Bay, one of the bill’s sponsors.

“Isn’t an increased cost tied to a making a new product that is causing a problem better than a taxpayer paying for it after it becomes a problem?” he asked.

If a plastic manufacturer doesn’t comply with the reduction targets mandated by the proposal, each violation could cost up to $1,000 per day. For “intentional, knowing or negligent” violations, companies could be fined up to $10,000 per violation per day.

The regulation is just the latest California legislation seeking to address some of the world’s toughest environmental problems, often at the expense of private business, critics say.

The state’s large economy and population has already influenced automakers to produce cleaner burning cars, forced warning labels for toxic chemicals on a range of consumer products and put a price on heat-trapping carbon emissions from industrial sources.

“With nearly 40 million people in the state, what happens here matters whether it is cap-and-trade and renewable energy portfolio standards, solid waste reduction, water conservation,” said Mark Gold, associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

“What happens in California matters both nationally and globally,” he added.

Gold said the legislation won’t solve the plastic pollution problem, but it could have a wide-ranging effect and would be the first significant proposal to try to reduce the amount of plastic junk in the ocean that makes up trash formations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, known as the world’s largest landfill.

The plastic industry, California Chamber of Commerce and other business have lined up in opposition to the bill, saying they already fund recycling and other programs to reduce marine plastic pollution. Plus, they say, the bill asks manufacturers to develop new products or other ways to reduce trash, but it doesn’t say how.

“This bill would establish responsibility for manufacturers alone to somehow reduce litter, and it’s unclear how the manufacturers might do that,” said Keith Christman of the Washington DC-based American Chemistry Council, a plastic manufacturing industry group.

“This is something that traditionally was a function of government working with the private sector — but this bill seeks to put all the responsibility on manufacturers,” he said.

These types of extended producer responsibility laws have already taken root in more than two dozen European countries.

In France, nearly 90 per cent of consumer products are part of the “Green Dot” program, requiring manufacturers to pay into a program that recovers and recycles packaging materials. It has successfully influenced manufacturers there to cut down on packaging or use alternative materials.

Environmental groups have lined up in support of the bill, applauding California’s leadership on such regulations.

Proponents say the proposal is a good first step from a big market, adding that if the problem goes unchecked, the islands of plastic junk in the world’s oceans will continue to grow.

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Follow Jason Dearen on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/JHDearen

The annual rain or shine event gives people a chance to hunt down good bargains while helping out the Ottawa Food Bank. Ten per cent of the money raised is donated to the food bank.

Glebe homeowners are the primary vendors working on their front lawns, driveways and porches. Community centres, businesses, schools and churches also participate.  The sale runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., but people often show up before 7 a.m.

The annual community event has been organized by the Glebe Community Association since 1986.

The Detroit Free Press reports Friday the city’s state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr is considering whether the collection should be considered city assets that could be sold to cover Detroit’s long-term debt. The debt is estimated at more than $14 billion.

Orr spokesman Bill Nowling tells The Detroit News that Orr told the museum it may face exposure to creditors if Detroit seeks bankruptcy protection. Nowling says the notification is a “precautionary measure” and there’s “no plan on the table to sell any asset of the city.”

The museum says it’s hired a bankruptcy attorney to suggest ways to protect the collection from possible losses.

Races kick off at Laurier Avenue and Elgin Streets and offer a scenic route along the Rideau Canal, before taking runners over the bridge to Gatineau and back again.

There will be a number of road closures around the city due to the event, which draws approximately 100,000 spectators each year.

This year’s event supports 26 charities, including the Ottawa Hospital Foundation, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Ottawa and the Ottawa Humane Society.

Click here for a map of the Ottawa Marathon/Half Marathon route.

Click here for live coverage. Live coverage of the Ottawa 10K will begin at 6 p.m. Saturday.. Coverage of the Ottawa Marathon will begin at 6:45 a.m. Sunday.

The silent gesture offered a glimpse into what was likely a tense few days inside the deliberations room as the jury finally determined it could not agree on whether to sentence Arias to life in prison or execution for murdering her boyfriend.

After about 13 hours of deliberations over three days, the panel gave up.

Judge Sherry Stephens gave a heavy sigh as she announced a mistrial in the penalty phase of the case Thursday. A conference with the judge and attorneys was set for June 20 to determine how both sides want to proceed. In the interim, Stephens set a July 18 retrial date, sending prosecutors back to the drawing board to rehash the shocking case and details of sex and lies to another 12 people.

“This was not your typical trial,” Stephens told jurors. “You were asked to perform some very difficult duties.”

The jurors declined to comment and left the courthouse.

The mistrial set the stage for a whole new proceeding to determine whether the 32-year-old former waitress should get a life sentence or the death penalty for murdering Travis Alexander five years ago. Arias stabbed and slashed him nearly 30 times, slit his throat slit from ear to ear and shot him in the forehead in what prosecutors described as a jealous rage after the victim wanted to end their affair and planned to head off on a trip to Mexico with another woman.

Prosecutors have the option to take the death penalty off the table, in which case a new trial wouldn’t be necessary and the judge would determine whether to sentence Arias to spend her entire life behind bars or life with the possibility of release after 25 years. Should the state decide to seek death again, jury selection alone could take weeks, given the difficulty of seating an impartial panel in a case that has attracted global attention.

The guilty verdict of first-degree murder would stand, leaving the new panel only tasked with sentencing Arias. However, former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley said the case could drag on for several months as the new jury reviews evidence and hears opening statements, closing arguments and witness testimony in a “Cliffs Notes” version of the trial.

If the second jury cannot reach a unanimous decision, the judge would then sentence Arias to one of the life-in-prison options. The judge cannot sentence Arias to death.

Arias, who first said she wanted to die but later changed her mind and pleaded with the jury for mercy, looked visibly upset about the mistrial and sobbed in the courtroom before it was announced. Her family didn’t attend Thursday but has been present for much of the trial.

Alexander’s family member cried as they left the courtroom without commenting.

Jurors began deliberating Arias’ sentence Tuesday and first reported they had failed to reach a unanimous decision the next day. Stephens instructed them to keep trying.

The same jury on May 8 found Arias guilty of murder in Alexander’s June 4, 2008 death at his suburban Phoenix home.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery thanked the panel in a statement after the mistrial was announced, and noted prosecutor Juan Martinez would have no comment given the pending proceedings ahead.

“We will assess, based upon available information, what the next steps will be,” Montgomery said, “and we will proceed with the intent to retry the penalty phase.”

For now, Arias will remain in the Maricopa County jail system, where she has spent the past five years. Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Thursday she will be confined to her cell 23 hours a day and not be allowed to give anymore media interviews.

The mistrial came two days after Arias spoke to jurors and pleaded for her life. She said she “lacked perspective” when she told a local reporter after her conviction that she preferred execution to spending the rest of her days in prison.

That same night, Arias gave a series of media interviews from jail, telling reporters about her many fights with her legal team and her belief that she “deserves a second chance at freedom someday.”

Arias contends she killed Alexander in self-defence when he became enraged after a day of sex, forcing her to fight for her life.

Her case became a sensation from the beginning as she gave a series of jailhouse interviews following her 2008 arrest in which first she blamed the killing on armed, masked intruders.

Testimony in the trial began in January as the case soon provided endless amounts of cable TV and tabloid fodder, including a recorded phone sex call between Arias and the victim, nude photos, bloody crime-scene pictures and a defendant who described her life story in intimate detail over 18 days on the witness stand.

Arias told jurors of an abusive childhood, cheating boyfriends, dead-end jobs, her sexual relationship with Alexander, and her contention that he had grown physically violent, yet no evidence was offered to prove her allegations. Her defence largely hung on her words alone.

The trial’s penalty phase featured dramatic statements from Alexander’s sister and brother as they described how their lives were shattered by the loss of their sibling. Arias’ attorneys had planned to call several witnesses on her behalf to convince the jury her life was worth saving but after the judge denied their repeated motions for mistrials and efforts to quit the case, just one person spoke to the jury — Arias herself.

Alexander, 30, overcame a tough upbringing in Southern California to become a successful businessman at a legal insurance company and a source of inspiration to his colleagues, his friends at his Mormon church and his family.

Arias found it difficult to resist the spotlight. She spoke to a Fox affiliate minutes after her conviction, and did a series of jailhouse interviews just hours after the jury got the case in the penalty phase.

“The prosecutor has accused me of wanting to be famous, which is not true,” Arias told the AP on Tuesday as she sat beneath bright lights before TV cameras, her hair makeup done and her hair combed perfectly.

The director who put Robert Redford in a struggle for survival as a capsized sailor in “All Is Lost” is talking about mortality when a gust of wind lifts a large beach umbrella from its base and sends it and its heavy metal pole sailing straight toward a publicist sitting nearby.

Chandor snatches the projectile from the air just in time, to gasps from onlookers.

The garrulous American director shrugs off the feat — “I have good eyes” — before resuming his flow of words about life, death and putting a screen icon through the emotional and physical wringer.

“This guy is essentially me in a weird way,” he said of the film’s central — and sole — character. “Someone asked me if it’s about my dad dying — my dad’s still alive. It’s about me dying. These are my feelings about this.”

“All Is Lost” is writer-director Chandor’s second feature, after Academy Award-nominated Wall St. drama “Margin Call.” You can’t accuse him of opting for an easy project.

Redford plays a sailor whose yacht is damaged in a collision with a shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The film follows him over eight days as he tries, first, to repair his boat and sail on, then simply to survive in increasingly perilous conditions.

The cast consists of Redford and the elements, the set is the claustrophobic confines of a small boat on the open sea. And there is no dialogue. Apart from a few lines of voiceover at the start and an emphatic expletive, it’s a wordless film.

“There was certainly some ego” involved in that decision, Chandor said. “It seemed like a difficult and yet exciting thing to do.”

“I felt I could make a very, very compelling, dramatic, thrilling — hopefully — film, but then by the third act you have this very intense emotional experience about a guy essentially coming to grips with his own mortality right in front of your eyes,” he said. “It came to me that the best way to do that was just to have the audience experience what he was going through, so it was shot in a way that you were literally with him.”

Redford is key to the success of Chandor’s old-man-and-the sea story. The 76-year-old actor’s famous, weather-beaten face and aging but muscular physique help give the movie its compelling intensity.

Chandor met the star when “Margin Call” was selected for Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in 2011. He later sent Redford the “All Is Lost” script, and was surprised when the actor called back within a few days to set up a meeting.

“He said, ‘I just wanted to make sure you weren’t totally crazy. This thing is a little out there, but let’s do it.’”

Redford told reporters this week that making the film — “to have an experience where I could give myself over completely to a director” — was a thrill.

Chandor thinks he can see why.

“When an actor has been working for 40 years, and if you love movies he has so much baggage, that it’s almost hard for him at this point to take on a fresh role, because we have all these other ideas and his voice is so specific,” said Chandor — who skirted that obstacle by silencing the voice.

“There was something visceral in him wanting to do this material,” the director said. “He just came and gave himself to it fully. It was an amazing experience.”

“All Is Lost” is screening out of competition at the Cannes festival, which ends Sunday. Audiences and critics have been enthusiastic.

Trade paper Variety called it “that mainstream-movie rarity: a virtually wordless film that speaks with grave eloquence and simplicity about the human condition.” The Guardian newspaper said Redford “delivers a tour de force performance,” and the actor got a long standing ovation at the film’s premiere.

Chandor has had a dramatic career breakthrough in the past couple of years. He spent years directing commercials before making “Margin Call.”

There has been a lot of griping about the state of the film industry at this festival, but you won’t hear any of it from Chandor.

“You can make any movie you want in the world right now — but you can’t make it for $40 million,” he said. (“All Is Lost” cost $8.5 million).

“Every person on this pier has the means in their hand of making a movie of some sort, and … for the first time in the history of humanity there’s a distribution channel to get that art out there. All it comes down to is that there is a budget for every movie.

“Do I think we need to support the distribution challenge to get these out into the world? Of course. Do I think Hollywood is making the same stupid movie over and over again? Abso-freaking-lutely.

“But to say you can’t make a movie that you want today to me seems absurd. I could make a movie my whole career — I just didn’t have any stories worth telling.”

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Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

A one-line announcement on the race’s website says the test was carried out at Di Luca’s home on April 29. The Giro started May 4 and ends Sunday.

Di Luca stands 26th overall, 33 minutes, 33 seconds behind race leader Vincenzo Nibali.

If confirmed in a backup “B” sample, Di Luca risks a lifetime ban since this is his third offence.

He tested positive for CERA in the 2009 Giro and received a two-year ban which was subsequently reduced by nine months after he collaborated with Italian anti-doping authorities. He was also banned for three months after winning the 2007 Giro for seeing a banned doctor.