Brodie Armstrong, 21, died last Wednesday after being stabbed multiple times outside an Arnprior apartment building.

Funeral:

Wednesday, June 19, 2013
11 a.m.
St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church
80 Daniel St., Arnprior

Visitation was held Monday and Tuesday at the Boyce Funeral Home in Arnprior.

Jesse Gervais, 22, also from Arnprior, is charged with first-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of Brodie, who he went to school with. Gervais was arrested at the Greyhound bus terminal in Sault Ste. Marie late Friday night.

It is hoped the Fed will shed some light on what it intends to do about curbing some of its economic stimulus.

The loonie was up 0.06 of a cent to 98.02 cents US as markets also looked to a speech later in the day by Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz. The topic is “Recovery: Rebuilding Business Confidence in Canada”.

Poloz has only been on the job since June 3 and traders will want to see how he potentially differs in tone from his predecessor, Mark Carney, who left the central bank’s top job to take over as governor of the Bank of England.

Meanwhile, the Fed statement has been much anticipated as a cloud of uncertainty settled over markets after Bernanke first mentioned the possibility of tapering the Fed’s monthly purchases of US$85 billion of bonds during congressional testimony May 22. Analysts don’t expect the Fed to make a move on tapering just yet. But uncertainty over whether the Fed feels economic conditions are appropriate for such easing, along with questions about how much the bank might cut back, has resulted in volatility where daily, triple-digit moves have become almost routine.

The bond purchases, the third round of quantitative easing embarked on by the Fed in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent recession, have kept interest rates and bond yields low. They have also helped keep a strong rally on most stock markets going for all this year.

Commodity prices were mixed with the July crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange ahead 18 cents to US$98.62.

July copper was a cent higher to US$3.16 a pound while August bullion rose $5.10 to US$1,372 an ounce.

New Democrat MP Peter Julian won unanimous consent late Tuesday for a motion aimed at creating an independent body to oversee House of Commons spending, including MPs’ expenses.

The new oversight body would replace the secretive board of internal economy, a multi-party committee that is currently responsible for the financial administration of the Commons.

Julian said the idea is to enhance transparency and ensure that MPs are no longer in charge of policing themselves.

But whereas Trudeau’s proposals — dismissed by the NDP last week as a “stunt” — would have taken effect immediately had he won unanimous consent, Julian’s proposals could take almost a year to produce any result.

His motion calls for public hearings — involving the auditor general and the Commons chief financial officer — to examine the creation of a new oversight body.

It anticipates that any resultant changes to the disclosure and reporting of MPs’ expenses would not be implemented until April 2014.

The NDP said it has been working on the proposals for over a year.

“It’s time to have a serious debate about this issue. We need to move beyond stunts and political games,” Julian said in a written statement.

Conservatives supported Trudeau’s attempt last week to require MPs to publicly post their travel and hospitality and office expenses quarterly, among other things. New Democrat MPs denied unanimous consent so his effort failed.

Trudeau has said Liberal MPs will begin posting their expenses online in the fall, regardless of what other parties choose to do.

Julian said the NDP is deliberately taking its time because the matter is too serious to be dealt with “at a moment’s notice,” as Trudeau tried to do.

“It gives members of Parliament a chance to think about it over the summer,” he said in an interview.

His motion passed at the same time as MPs voted to adjourn the Commons for the summer.

The CBSA says it has recently learned that people purporting to be employed at the agency’s Border Information Service have been calling Canadians and requesting personal information and payment over the phone.

It says the CBSA BIS call centre is a free information service for general enquiries regarding CBSA programs and services.

The federal agency adds that the unit is not designed nor is it mandated to make phone calls requesting personal information or payment over the phone.

It says anyone receiving such calls should immediately contact the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre toll free at 1-888-495-8501.

More than a dozen people died in the state’s Rudraprayag district alone, while another 50 people were missing, said Amit Negi, an official in Uttarakhand.

A landslide triggered by the monsoon rains buried a bus, killing three people in Almora district.

At least three other people were washed away when a three-story apartment building toppled into a river and was carried away by the swift-moving current, said Amit Chandola, a government spokesman.

More than 10,000 pilgrims stranded along a mountain pass leading to a Hindu religious site were being evacuated by helicopter after roads to the pilgrimage spot were blocked by landslides.

Army and paramilitary troops were leading efforts to rescue scores of people from the rooftops of their flooded homes. The state government was readying food parcels and drinking water pouches to be air dropped to villages cut off after roads were washed away.

The River Ganges and its tributaries are flowing above the danger mark in several areas in the Himalayan state.

“The situation is very grim. The meteorological office has predicted that the rain will continue for another three days at least,” said Chandola.

State authorities were preparing to evacuate people from the worst-hit districts to relief camps, he said.

A high alert and flood warnings have been issued across Udhampur district and in the Hindu holy city of Haridwar as rivers breached their banks,

Flooding is an annual occurrence in India, which depends on monsoon rains for agriculture. The heavy downpours often cause loss of life and property.

With temperatures topping 80 degrees in Anchorage, and higher in other parts of the state, people have been sweltering in a place where few homes have air conditioning.

They’re sunbathing and swimming at local lakes, hosing down their dogs and cleaning out supplies of fans in at least one local hardware store. Mid-June normally brings high temperatures in the 60s in Anchorage, and just a month ago, it was still snowing.

The weather feels like anywhere but Alaska to 18-year-old Jordan Rollison, who was sunbathing with three friends and several hundred others lolling at the beach of Anchorage’s Goose Lake.

“I love it, I love it,” Rollison said. “I’ve never seen a summer like this, ever.”

State health officials even took the unusual step of posting a Facebook message reminding people to slather on the sunscreen.

Some people aren’t so thrilled, complaining that it’s just too hot.

“It’s almost unbearable to me,” said Lorraine Roehl, who has lived in Anchorage for two years after moving here from the community of Sand Point in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. “I don’t like being hot. I’m used to cool ocean breeze.”

On Tuesday, the official afternoon high in Anchorage was 81 degrees, breaking the city’s record of 80 set in 1926 for that date.

Other smaller communities throughout a wide swath of the state are seeing even higher temperatures.

All-time highs were recorded elsewhere, including 96 degrees on Monday 80 miles to the north in the small community of Talkeetna, purported to be the inspiration for the town in the TV series, “Northern Exposure” and the last stop for climbers heading to Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest mountain. One unofficial reading taken at a lodge near Talkeetna even measured 98 degrees, which would tie the highest undisputed temperature recorded in Alaska.

That record was set in 1969, according to Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the online forecasting service Weather Underground.

“This is the hottest heat wave in Alaska since ’69,” he said. “You’re way, way from normal.”

It’s also been really hot for a while. The city had six days over 70 degrees, then hit a high of 68 last Thursday, followed by five more days of 70-plus.

The city’s record of consecutive days with temperatures of 70 or above was 13 days recorded in 1953, said Eddie Zingone, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who has lived in the Anchorage area for 17 years.

The heat wave also comes after a few cooler summers — the last time it officially hit the 80 mark in Anchorage was 2009. Plus, Tuesday marked exactly one month that the city’s last snow of the season fell, said Zingone, who has lived in Anchorage for 18 years.

“Within a month you have that big of a change, it definitely seems very, very hot,” he said. “It was a very quick warm-up.”

With the heat comes an invasion of mosquitoes many are calling the worst they’ve ever seen. At the True Value Hardware store, people have grabbed up five times the usual amount of mosquito warfare supplies, said store owner Tim Craig. The store shelves also are bare of fans, which is unusual, he said.

“Those are two hot items, so to speak,” he said.

Greg Wilkinson, a spokesman with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, said it’s gotten up to 84 degrees at his home in the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River, where a tall glass front lets the sunlight filter through.

“And that’s with all the windows open and a fan going,” he said. “We’re just not used to it. Our homes aren’t built for it.”

Love or hate the unusual heat, it’ll all be over soon.

Weather forecasters say a high pressure system that has locked the region in clear skies and baking temperatures has shifted and Wednesday should be the start of a cooling trend, although slightly lower temperatures in the 70s are still expected to loiter into the weekend.

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Follow Rachel D’Oro at https://twitter.com/rdoro

RBC Economics has raised its estimate for the country’s 2013 economic growth to 1.9 per cent and says 2014 growth will be about 2.9 per cent.

Both estimates are higher than the Bank of Canada’s most recent outlook and several other assessments.

As others have noted, RBC says the United States has been more resilient than anticipated in the early months of this year.

The bank has concluded that Canada will be the beneficiary of stronger demand from its largest trading partner.

RBC chief economist Craig Wright also says Canadian corporations are financially healthy and have the capacity to accelerate their investments for growth.

“That campaign really just speaks to what crowdfunding is about, which is giving the power to people to decide what matters to them and to fund what matters to them,” said Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of crowdfunding website Indiegogo.

The video fundraising campaign was launched by Gawker, a U.S. website whose editor John Cook claimed he’d watched the video, which was being shopped around for $200,000 by drug dealers.

Ford has said the alleged video does not exist and that he does not use crack cocaine.

Ringelmann said crowdfunding gives people the power of choice.

“It was actually a beautiful example of exactly that, just as people can vote on the ballot to elect what politician they’d like to see, crowdfunding enables people to vote with their dollar to fund what they’d like to see come to life, whether it’s a video of a politician or a baby or a film or what have you.”

Ringelmann dismissed concerns about the money being raised for a transaction with alleged drug dealers.

“The campaign was for a reporter at Gawker, the funds were going to a reporter at Gawker, and I think in general there was interest among the community that people wanted this video to come to life,” Ringelmann said.

“What’s interesting about this campaign is that no one complained about it; not even the mayor’s office, nobody else. In general the community really wanted it to happen.”

Ringelmann also announced that Indiegogo is planning how-to crowdsourcing workshops in Toronto and Montreal in the coming weeks and will now accept payments in Canadian dollars, which will reduce fees for users in Canada.

Canada is Indiegogo’s second largest market after the U.S. Among the most successful Indiegogo campaigns launched by Canadians was last year’s bid to raise money for Karen Klein, a 68-year-old bus monitor from Greece, N.Y., who was recorded on video being bullied mercilessly by young students. It started as a modest campaign to raise $5,000 to pay for a vacation, but after the video went viral more than $700,000 was collected for her.

More recently, a campaign to launch the Matterform 3D Photon Scanner, which scans objects to be reproduced by 3D printers, raised more than $470,000 for two Toronto-based entrepreneurs.

And Canadian metal band Protest the Hero raised more than $340,000 from fans to help produce their next album independently.

The Indiegogo workshops in Canada are scheduled for June 26 in Toronto and July 11 in Montreal.

FedEx said Wednesday that it earned $303 million in the fourth quarter, down from $550 million a year ago.

Excluding restructuring costs and aircraft write-downs, FedEx’s profit would’ve been $2.13 per share. That’s much better than the $1.96 per share that analysts were expecting.

The company says it’s still being hurt by weak economic growth and customers choosing lower-rate international services. FedEx Express is cutting capacity between the U.S. and Asia.

His 26-hour whirlwind visit to the German capital caps three days of international summitry for the president and marks his return to a place where he once summoned a throng of 200,000 to share his ambitious vision for American leadership.

That was 2008, when Obama was running for president and those who supported him at home and abroad saw the young mixed-race American as a unifying and transformational figure who signified hope and change.

Five years later, Obama comes to deliver a highly anticipated speech to a country that’s a bit more sober about his aspirations and the extent of his successes, yet still eager to receive his attention at a time that many here feel that Europe, and Germany in particular, are no longer U.S. priorities. A Pew Research Center poll of Germans found that while their views of the U.S. have slipped since Obama’s first year in office, he has managed to retain his popularity, with 88 per cent of those surveyed approving of his foreign policies.

Obama also has an arc of history to fulfil.

Fifty years ago next week, President John F. Kennedy addressed a crowd of 450,000 in that then-divided city to denounce the Soviet bloc and famously declare “Ich bin ein Berliner,” German for “I am a Berliner.” Since then, presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have used Berlin speeches to articulate broad themes about freedom and international alliances.

Obama, fresh from a two-day summit of the Group of Eight industrial economies, will speak at the Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of Germany’s division and later reunification. It is a venue that German Chancellor Angela Merkel denied him in 2008, saying only sitting presidents were granted such an honour.

The past context — and the weight of it — are not lost on the White House.

“This is a place where U.S. presidents have gone to talk about the role of the free world essentially,” said Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes. “He is seeking to summon the energy and legacy of what’s been done in the past and apply it to the issues that we face today.”

Rhodes said Obama will make the case that even though the Berlin Wall came down 23 years ago and the threat of nuclear war has dissipated, the type of activism apparent during the Cold War needs to be applied to such current challenges as climate change, counterterrorism and the push for democratic values beyond the United States and Europe.

A senior administration official said Obama will also renew his call to reduce the world’s nuclear stockpiles, including a proposed one-third reduction in U.S. and Russian arsenals. He is not expected to outline a timeline for this renewed push. The official insisted on anonymity in order to preview the issue before the president’s speech.

Obama will also hold a joint news conference with Merkel.

The visit was attracting widespread attention in Germany. People waved and snapped photos as Obama sped by after his arrival and a thick cluster awaited the motorcade as it passed the Brandenburg Gate. An evening news show in Berlin devoted itself to the president’s visit, highlighting “Das Biest,” or “The Beast,” as the president’s armoured limousine is called.

There have been a few small protests, including one directed against the National Security Agency’s surveillance of foreign communications, where about 50 people waved placards taunting, “Yes, we scan.”

Merkel has said she was surprised at the scope of the spying that was revealed and said the U.S. must clarify what information is monitored. But she also said U.S. intelligence was key to foiling a large-scale terror plot and acknowledged her country is “dependent” on co-operating with American spy services.

For Merkel, the visit presents an opportunity to bolster her domestic standing ahead of a general election in September.

The U.S. and the Germans have clashed on economic issues, with Obama pressing for Europe to prime the economy with government stimulus measures, while Merkel has insisted on pressing debt-ridden countries to stabilize their fiscal situations first.

But the two sides have found common ground on a trans-Atlantic trade pact between the European Union and the U.S. At the just-completed G-8 summit, the leaders agreed to hold the first talks next month in the U.S.

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Associated Press writers Julie Pace, Robert Reid and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.