General Maurice Baril, the armed forces chief, compared the scene of devastation on the South Shore to "Sarejevo without the bullets".Hydro Quebec workers, battling round the clock to restore power with the help of the army and of American crews who have been called in from as far away as Connecticut, say the damage to electrical towers, pylons and power lines is so bad that the grid infrastructure will have to be completely rebuilt, rather than just repaired.American workers battling in Arctic conditions say they are appalled at the conditions and at the extent of the damage. Hydro- Quebec, the company that runs the power network, is still rationing electricity by "powershedding" (prolonged cuts), to conserve energy until more lines can be restored.But by far the worst-affected area is Montreal's densely populated South Shore and areas further south, dubbed the "triangle of darkness", where thousands of households, and entire sizeable towns, are still cut off.Nearly 10,000 Canadian troops have been drafted in to help with one of the country's worst natural disasters. But this fragility has meant that most businesses, factories and stores and all schools, universities and government offices have remained closed for a second week.The Premier appealed to businesses to stay closed until last Thursday to prevent the system overloading (as happened again on Monday).
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Snapped, ice-encrusted cables trail and loop across roads still blocked with branches and trees that toppled under the sheer weight of the ice.A freak five days of freezing rain coated power lines with up to four inches of ice, many times more weight than they could support. And as they collapsed and shorted, they overloaded other parts of the system which also blew, in a domino effect.At one stage, four out of five links of the so-called "ring of power" surrounding Montreal, which supplies the city's electricity, collapsed. The entire city and surrounding area came within a hair's breadth of being blacked out, according to Lucien Bouchard, the Premier.They have still not been repaired, making the whole system highly vulnerable, even though some temporary ancillary lines have now been hastily set up. But 350,000 households - more than a million people - in Quebec (and thousands more in New Brunswick and Eastern Ontario), are still without light, water or heat.This is particularly serious as temperatures have plummeted to as low as minus 20C and tens of thousands have had to evacuate their freezing homes for temporary shelters in schools, gyms, synagogues and libraries, heated by generators - and they still don't know when they can return home.The devastation is awe-inspiring: some 600 giant transmission towers have crumpled like giant toys, while tens of thousands of broken pylons and electrical poles litter the snow-covered ground in every direction.For once, apocalyptic banner headlines reading "c'est l'enfer" ("it's hell") in local papers were entirely justified.Now, 13 days after the start of the "storm of the century", life, at least in major urban areas, is slowly and patchily starting to return to a semblance of normality. Montreal, the second largest city in Canada, of more than 2 million inhabitants, became a ghost-town as the entire downtown commercial and business centre was suddenly blacked out. Thousands of office workers stumbling out in shock onto surreally dark streets found that the metro had also ground to a halt, its power shorted. His Versace silk ties and French and Italian suits became a trademark. But his wife and two daughters cover their heads in accordance with Islamic tradition.Mr Erbakan also displayed strong political pragmatism, allowing him to appease the hard-line Islamists in his party while not totally alienating the military and other protectors of Turkey's secular policies..
A Saudi woman has given birth to seven babies - four boys and three girls. It is only the third set of septuplets known to be born alive. The babies, born on Wednesday, are in good health in the Abha obstetric hospital in Aseer, 750 miles south of Riyadh, the Okaz daily said. The father, Abdullah Mohammed Ali, 55, was quoted as saying: "We didn't know of the number of babies during the pregnancy, but we're ecstatic and can't wait for them to join their brothers and sisters at home.". Top United Nations officials are discussing sending humanitarian aid to help victims of the massacres in Algeria. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, is considering with senior UN colleagues what can be done, said spokesman John Mills. Despite the Algerian government's insistence that the unrest and massacres are a purely internal affair, Ms Robinson is convinced that the current situation is of international concern, he said. "When you have very large numbers of people killed, whole communities devastated by these attacks, there is a need for humanitarian assistance," Mr Mills said.He said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the head of the UN Children's Fund were involved in the talks, but declined to elaborate further.Algeria said on Thursday it had agreed to a visit starting on Monday by three junior ministers from the European Union, shocked at the slaughter of about 1,100 men, women and children since the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on 30 December..