Widespread power outages in Venezuela

Widespread power outages struck Venezuela on Tuesday afternoon at an hour of peak demand, an official said. 'It's affecting quite a few areas of the country,' Luis Diaz Curvelo, national director of civil protection, told Globovision Television. It said that about 40 percent of the country had been blacked out since about 4:15 p.m. local time (4:45 p.m. ET). The president of the Electric National Corporation, Hipolito Izquierdo, told state-run Venezuelan Television that power would begin returning by 5:30 p.m. (6 p.m. ET). He said most of the western part of the country was unaffected.