A fourth-ranked separatist party vying for an upset riveted Quebec's election campaign Wednesday with an ad showing a beaver in a Mountie hat getting the boot.

The beaver is Canada's national symbol, which can be traced back to the nation's early history, when explorers crossed the continent in search of beaver pelts for use in fashionable hats in Europe.

Police in Washington are looking into how a local resident who ordered a color TV set via Amazon.com ended up with a high-powered semi-automatic assault rifle instead.

Seth Horvitz, who lives in the northeast quadrant of the U.S. capital, said he contacted police immediately after a parcel delivery service left the military-style SIG Sauer SIG716 at his apartment door.

A provincial official in Argentina was suspended Wednesday over his proposal that low-income children be fed pigeon meat to counteract a surge in the bird population.

Oscar De Allende, an official at the local environment ministry responsible for wildlife, was suspended over his "controversial statements on pigeon consumption," Cordoba Governor Jose Manuel de la Sota said in a statement.

Canada's immigration ministry on Wednesday rescinded a deportation order for a Portuguese man living in the country for 32 years.

A crackdown on immigration fraud had unwittingly snared Jose Pereira, 58, who said he was ordered out over an administrative gaffe.

An unholy brawl between rival hardline Islamists, some wielding knives, broke out in a Tunisian mosque, after hungry members of one group broke their fast a few minutes early, state media reported on Tuesday.

The bust-up occurred on Monday when followers of a certain Salafist scholar began to eat within the precincts of the Hidaya mosque in Beja, northern Tunisia, shortly before the evening call to prayer, which signals the end of the daily Ramadan fast, the TAP news agency reported.

A woman set off a high-speed police chase worthy of a Hollywood action movie when she refused to stop after police caught her speeding because she was topless, police said Tuesday.

The driver told police "she was topless to surprise her boyfriend," a spokesman for the Marion County sheriff's office, in northern Florida, said.

Members of the all-girl band Pussy Riot who were charged with hooliganism for staging a "punk prayer" against Vladimir Putin were due Wednesday to deliver final statements on the last day of their trial.

The controversial hearings raced toward a verdict with prosecutors seeking a three-year sentence and global calls mounting among stage stars and top Western officials to win the young women's release.

Modest bathing suits have shed their mothballs and come back in style in the United States, with a clientele spanning the religious, the curvy and the sun-sensitive.

"Definitely, there was a need for it," said New York fashion designer Regine Tessone.

North Korea's young first lady has been pictured sporting what appears to be a Christian Dior handbag, in stark contrast to widespread shortages elsewhere in the impoverished nation.

Ri Sol-Ju, the wife of leader Kim Jong-Un, was pictured accompanying him on a "field guidance trip" to an army unit.

A three-year-old Malaysian girl died of suffocation during a lengthy exorcism ritual in which seven family members and a maid piled on top of her, a police official said Tuesday.

The ritual, which also included the child's parents, was held by the ethnic Chinese family late Sunday in the northern town of Bukit Mertajam, local police chief Azman Abdul Lah told Agence France Presse.