Philippines suffers blackout

The main Philippine island, Luzon, suffered a major power cut on Saturday when a technical problem with an electricity line affected the entire grid.

Half the Philippines' population of about seventy-million people were left without electricity for several hours.

Correspondents say the outage raised fears of a return to the power crisis of the early 1990's But officials said the incident was a one-off and that there was no power shortage or problem with generating electricity.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service