New Zealand will hold a binding referendum in 2016 on changing the national flag, with Prime Minister John Key hoping to drop the current design featuring Britain's Union Jack in favor of a silver fern.

Key announced a schedule Wednesday for New Zealanders to vote on the contentious issue, saying it was time for the former British colony to adopt a flag that was more recognizably Kiwi after more than a century under the existing banner.

Thousands of mourners lined the streets of the Canadian city of Hamilton Tuesday for the funeral of a soldier killed last week in an attack in the center of the nation's capital.

To the tune of wailing bagpipes and a solitary drum beat, hundreds of soldiers, veterans and police officers walked alongside the flag-draped casket of Corporal Nathan Cirillo to a cathedral in Hamilton, his hometown in Ontario.

A man who killed three Canadian police officers on the streets of a New Brunswick city appeared in court Monday, facing a possible 75 years in prison.

Prosecutors asked for Justin Bourque, 24, to serve three consecutive life sentences -- an unprecedented penalty in Canada -- for the rampage that also wounded two officers.

The shooter who rampaged through Canada's parliament took a video of himself just before the attack and was inspired by ideological and political motives, police said Sunday, contradicting the claims of his estranged mother.

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who was shot dead by police in the parliament in Ottawa after killing a soldier Wednesday, was mentally ill and wanted to die, his mother wrote in a lengthy separate statement to the public.

A hatchet attack on New York police officers was a "terrorist act" carried out by a self-radicalized Muslim convert who had been in the military and browsed al-Qaida websites, police said Friday.

"This was a terrorist act," police commissioner Bill Bratton told a news conference on Friday, one day after the attack, saying he was "very comfortable" describing it as a "terrorist attack."

A gunman who stormed Canada's parliament after killing a soldier at a nearby war memorial was a petty criminal fighting a drug addiction and was estranged from his family, reports said Friday.

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, 32, had moved across the country to westernmost British Columbia province to try to start over following a drug conviction in Montreal.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was shoved into a closet when a gunmen stormed parliament, local newspapers said Friday.

According to MPs cited anonymously by the daily Globe & Mail and others, Harper spent as much as 15 minutes in the tiny space off a meeting room where he and his Conservative caucus were meeting.

Suspicious envelopes containing a yellow powder were sent Friday to the Belgian, Canadian and German consulates in Istanbul, prompting a security alert, officials said.

One person who opened the envelope at the Canadian mission was directly exposed to the unknown substance, which was now being analysed by experts, Turkey's disaster management agency AFAD said.

A former Ottawa x-ray technologist was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison for conspiring to facilitate terrorism, officials said.

Misbahuddin Ahmed, 30, was convicted in July, but was acquitted of a more serious charge of bomb-making for terrorist purposes.

While they may not have officially been designated as jihadists, two suspected extremists who killed Canadian soldiers in shooting and driving rampages followed instructions issued by Al-Qaida and the Islamic State group to the letter.

The country was left reeling Wednesday after a gunman shot dead a soldier and stormed parliament in Ottawa, just two days after another suspected Islamist militant ran over two military personnel with his car in Quebec, killing one.