A total of  56 centimetres of snow fell on Ottawa over the weekend after one of the snowiest blasts of winter on record struck much of Ontario. Hundreds of travellers were stranded at airports in Ottawa and Toronto, and the movement of traffic -- and people -- came to a virtual standstill.   The nation's capital is just a few centimeters shy of breakng the winter snowfall record of 444.1 centimetres set in 1970-71, which in itself was about 100 centimetres higher than the previous record, according to Environment Canada.

A man pushes a wheelbarrow through a sewage-infested drainage ditch in a slum area of Puerto Plata, the Dominican Republic, Feb. 13.

A woman in the Dominican Republic poses for a portrait outside her family's dilapidated old house in a poor rural area near Puerto Plata Feb 11.

Haitians form the largest minority group in the Dominican Republic, about   500,000, according to Human Rights Watch. Many Haitians in the Dominican Republic are illegal immigrants

A young boy in a poor rural area of the Dominican Republic performs a hand stand before asking visitors for money.

The conservation group Amphibian Ark has named 2008 the Year of the Frog to draw attention to what it calls the amphibian extinction crisis, the Ottawa Citizen reported March 10. The organization says as many as half of the world's 6,000 known amphibian species could disappear over the next 50 years - the biggest extinction since the dinosaurs.

At left, an image-enhanced photo of a young aboriginal girl who participated in the "Remembering the Children" launch March 2 of the Church and Aboriginal leaders' multi-city tour in support  of the  work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools.

A tiger at Ocean World, in the Dominican Republic, is the subject of  a digitally altered "out of box" photo.