WORLD DIGEST || Separatist party wins power in Quebec

Separatist party wins power in Quebec

MONTREAL

A separatist party won power in Quebec on Tuesday night, potentially placing the French-speaking province on course for another referendum to break away from Canada.

Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marios, who becomes Quebec’s first female premier, replaces Liberal leader Jean Charest, who headed Quebec for nearly a decade.

More than 100,000 Syrians fled in Aug.

BEIRUT

More than 100,000 Syrians fled their country in August, the highest monthly total since the crisis began in March 2011, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday.

That exodus sharply increased the number of Syrians now living in neighboring countries, bringing the total number of refugees to 234,368 in the past 17 months, the agency said.

Along with activists’ reports that the death toll in August also was the highest in the civil war with 5,000 killed, all signs are pointing to unprecedented levels of misery in a country where President Bashar Assad’s regime is fighting an increasingly violent rebellion.

La. residents blame floodwalls for flooding

LAPLACE, La.

At the urging of residents who have long felt forgotten in the shadow of more densely populated New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers says it will look into whether the city’s fortified defenses pushed floodwaters provoked by Hurricane Isaac into outlying areas.

However, the Corps has said it is unlikely scientific analysis will confirm that theory, suggested not only by locals, but by some of the state’s most- powerful politicians. Instead, weather experts say a unique set of circumstances about the storm — not the floodwalls surrounding the New Orleans metro area — had more to do with flooding neighborhoods that in recent years have never been under water because of storm surge.

Isaac was a large, slow-moving storm that wobbled across the state’s coast for about two and a half days, pumping water into back bays and lakes and leaving thousands of residents under water outside the massive levee system protecting metropolitan New Orleans.

Associated Press