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The new year made a stormy entrance last week, lashing the Continent with the severest cold snap in a decade. Snow, ice and subfreezing temperatures spelled chaos, and sometimes death, from the Mediterra-nean* to the Urals. More than 220 deaths, mostly among the homeless and the elderly, were reported as far south as Valen-cia, Spain. Travel became a Homeric* task. In the Caucasus, an ava-lanche sealed 300 people in a mountain tunnel connecting Russia and Georgia for days. Air traffic was disrupted as was train travel. A Paris-bound Eurostar train carrying some 500 passengers got stuck in the Chunnel* for more than two hours, its engine stalled by snow. Ice clogged river traffic on the Loire, Elbe, Main and Danube. Even England's Thames* froze in places for the first time since 1963. The brutal weather put a damper on New Year celebrations. Those who booked holiday trips to resorts on the Adriatic found snow, not sun, on beach-es. Parisians ice-skated in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower early in the week, but by New Year's Day the city was a ghost town as its citizens hid from the chill. In London, the freeze even muzzled the chimes of Big Ben for a few hours on New Year's Eve. The cold snap didn't spoil all the fun. In London, brave bathers still took the annual New Year's Day dip in Hyde Park's Serpentine.* And in the Netherlands, some 16,000 Dutch donned ice skates Saturday for a 200-kilometer race across the E'rozen lakes and canals in Friesland. That's marking the )est of a bitter situation.