WEST WARWICK, R.I. – Flooding on a scale rarely seen in New England forced hundreds of people from their homes Wednesday, overwhelmed sewage systems to the point that families were asked to stop flushing toilets, and washed out bridges and highways from Maine to Connecticut.

Hardest hit by three days of record-breaking rain was Rhode Island, where the worst flooding in 200 years could persist for several more days and permanently close businesses already struggling in the weak economy.

“I think we’re all done,” said Angelo Padula Jr., a West Warwick town councilman whose family owns a 100-year-old auto-restoration shop. The shop and 260 cars stood in 10 feet of water from the Pawtuxet River.

Padula said officials told him they believe his shop and about 40 surrounding businesses would have to be condemned, as will several blocks of nearby homes.

“We were wiped right out,” said Padula, whose 86-year-old father was hospitalized after having a heart attack during Tuesday night’s flooding. “You’re talking millions and millions of dollars in these businesses. Now I know how the people in New Orleans felt” after Hurricane Katrina.

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LA PAZ, Bolivia – Bolivian President Evo Morales seeks to take control of the last bastion of political opposition to his campaign to redistribute Bolivia‘s wealth and land to the indigenous majority with regional elections on Sunday.

Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism own a comfortable majority in Congress and the military’s loyalty. They could soon win a friendly judiciary: Voters this year for the first time choose the nation’s top justices.

But even with two-thirds of Bolivians behind him, Morales continues to be frustrated by opposition governors in the South American nation’s eastern lowland states.

There the president and his allies have recruited locally famous candidates from outside party ranks — including a beloved 62-year-old state university headmaster and a 26-year-old former Miss Bolivia.

Former headmaster Carlos Cabrera, the pro-government candidate in opposition controlled Tarija state, is running as a consensus builder who can improve a troubled relationship with Bolivia’s central government.

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CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – A suspect in the killing of three people linked to the U.S. consulate says his gang was hunting for the vehicle of a Texas jail guard who was slain in one of the two white SUVs attacked, Mexican authorities said Tuesday.

The purported confession appears to suggest that El Paso jail officer Arthur H. Redelfs was targeted in the March 13 shootings in Ciudad Juarez that also killed his wife, Lesley A. Enriquez, an employee of the U.S. consulate in this border city. The husband of another consulate worker was killed in the other vehicle attacked.

A statement by the joint army, federal and state anti-crime task force in Chihuahua state said suspect Ricardo Valles de la Rosa confessed to acting as a lookout in the shootings. It said he had been imprisoned in the United States and deported in 2007, after which he took up with the Barrio Azteca gang.

According to the statement:

An Azteca gang leader “ordered him by telephone some days before to locate the white sport utility vehicle in which Arthur Hancock Redelfs was traveling, which he did on March 13 at a children’s party.”

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