Evangelos Venizelos added that a planned meeting by eurozone ministers on Greece originally scheduled for Monday would now be held on Wednesday.

“I will participate in a Eurogroup telephone conference at 1230 GMT” to discuss details of a rescue deal for Greece worth 130 billion euros ($171 billion) which officials have been trying to seal since October, the minister said in a statement.

“Critical issues pertaining to the country’s future remained open” after 12 hours of “tough” negotiations Friday with the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, he said.

The three organisations, which rescued Greece in 2010 with an earlier loan, are demanding further labour cost cuts which Greek unions are refusing to concede amid fears that they could worsen an already deep recession.

Venizelos will brief fellow cabinet ministers before another meeting with senior auditors from the EU, IMF and ECB, known locally as the ‘troika’, a finance ministry source said on Saturday.

The political coalition backing Greece’s interim government is strongly opposed to the troika’s demands for further civil servant cuts and to a reduction in the minimum wage, currently at 750 euros.

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos has reportedly threatened to resign if his coalition backers reject the demanded austerity measures.

The government spokesman on Friday declined to comment on the reports.

“I do not want to make such assumptions,” spokesman Pantelis Kapsis told Real FM radio. “I think the political leaders and the prime minister will jointly take the decisions on how we will proceed from now on.”

Representatives of private holders of Greek debt are also returning to Athens this weekend for more negotiations on a crucial writedown Greece needs to avoid sovereign default.

A spokesman for the Institute of International Finance, the global banking organisation leading the debt writedown talks, said in an email to AFP that IIF chief Charles Dallara and Jean Lemierre, adviser to French bank BNP Paribas, were headed to the Greek capital to continue the talks.

Greece has been negotiating for months to obtain debt relief under the so-called Private Sector Initiative as a condition for receiving a second international bailout from the EU and the IMF, agreed in October.

Eurozone governments and banks have both been playing hardball for weeks in their bid to reduce by at least half the 200 billion euros in privately held Greek debt. The country’s overall debt stands at 350 billion euros.

Papademos said in a statement Friday that Greece had nearly completed negotiations on the eurozone bailout which depends on the debt writedown.

“We are in the final phase of a very critical procedure to form Greece’s new economic programme and complete a loan deal that will lighten the load of the public debt and ensure the country’s financing for many years to come,” he said.

Pressure is mounting for Greece to strike a deal with private creditors.

The finance minister this week said an official offer to creditors must be made by February 15.

Athens faces debt repayments of 14.4 billion euros ($19 billion) on March 20.

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard said eight military helicopters would help in search, evacuation and resupply missions in the eastern state, where days of heavy rainfall have prompted hundreds of evacuations and dozens of rescues.

“The helicopters will be available to assist in rescue operations as required until the immediate crisis has passed,” Gillard said in a statement.

In the inland Queensland town of Charleville authorities are on alert amid fears a temporary levee will collapse as the Warrego River continues to rise, flooding the whole town.

The weather bureau’s Paul Birch told the ABC the situation was “touch and go” as the water will be “rushing in quick over the levee”.

“If it does that you find it tends to erode out part of the levee fairly quickly. So then it will just open up the river into town — it’s quite catastrophic,” Birch said.

Mayor Mark O’Brien said hundreds of people had been evacuated from their homes but so far Charleville itself was “high and dry”.

“We’ve just got an enormous body of water going down the river, but if this thing passes quickly people can just go straight back to the way they were before,” he told the ABC.

In the town of Roma to the east, police were continuing their search for a woman missing since Friday after her vehicle was swept off the side of a road.

“A boy was rescued from the car and a woman got out of the vehicle but rescuers could not keep hold of her,” police said in a statement. “The woman was swept away in fast flowing flood waters.”

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who just over a year ago was dealing with epic floods that swamped the state, sweeping away entire hamlets and flooding thousands of homes, has warned the community faced dangerous new territory.

In New South Wales, the State Emergency Service said 16,550 people were stranded with the worst affected areas around Moree in the state’s far north where floodwaters are expected to remain at their peak for one or two days.

“At this height the properties on the north side of the Mehi River in Moree will remain isolated with many properties surrounded by floodwater and some, possibly in excess of three hundred, inundated,” the service said.

SES assistant commissioner Andrew Edwards said while the rain was easing, the amount of flooding in the region and to the north meant that “we can expect these floods to be going on for months” in some pockets.

Australia suffered epic floods late 2010 and in the January 2011 which swamped a huge area of Queensland, inundating thousands of homes and businesses, sweeping away small villages and leaving more than 30 people dead.

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The first demonstration demands fair elections at the March 4 presidential polls, at which Putin is expected to secure a third term in the Kremlin. It also calls on Russians “not to give a single vote” to Putin.

The opposition rally is widely seen by analysts as a litmus test of protesters’ ability to maintain momentum after two earlier protests against alleged vote fraud in favor of Putin’s United Russia party at December’s parliamentary polls.

“We are prepared for a long tough struggle,” protest organizer and opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on the eve of the rally. “One peaceful march will not change the country.”

Around 30,000 have signed up on social networks to attend the demonstration. The protests are to include a march through downtown Moscow and a rally across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The two previous rallies drew an estimated combined total of 100,000 people.

Protesters were set to gather by the downtown Oktyabrskaya station starting 12 p.m. local time, when temperature in Moscow stood at minus 22 degrees Celsius.

President Dmitry Medvedev, widely seen as Putin’s junior partner in Russia’s ruling tandem, proposed a host of political reforms after the initial vote protests, including the return of direct elections for regional governors and easier registration for political parties and presidential candidates. His proposals were dismissed by protest leaders on Friday as “imitation reforms.”

Putin has also ordered the installation of video cameras at polling stations and has encouraged independent monitors to oversee the presidential vote.

The organization of Saturday’s march has seen the involvement of the Voters League, a freshly-minted public group that claims no involvement in politics and is led by popular figures such as novelist Boris Akunin, TV journalist Leonid Parfyonov and rock musician Yury Shevchuk.

A separate rally, expected to draw some 15,000 people, will urge protesters to resist what organizers say are attempts to instigate an Orange Revolution in Russia. So-called Color uprisings took place in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia in the early 2000s after contested presidential elections.

Putin thanked late on Friday those people who planned to attend the rally in his support.

“I share their views,” he said.

There have been numerous reports in the Russian media of state employees being coerced to attend the Anti-Orange rally, but the authorities have said these are untrue or the actions of over-zealous, low-level officials.

Both demonstrations have been authorized by City Hall. Moscow police say they will deploy 9,000 officers to maintain order at the rallies.

Rallies by both the opposition and Putin’s supporters took place in cities across Siberia and the Far East, most of them gathering several hundreds of protesters. An opposition rally in Novosibirsk was attended by an 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to police estimates, while a pro-Putin indoors rally in far eastern Birobidzhan had 600 participants, organizers said.

Police said some 11,000 gathered for the opposition rally at Moscow’s Kaluzhskaya Ploshchad as of 12:30 a.m. Saturday, though video feed from the site indicated the figure was considerably higher.

About 35,000 were in attendance for the rally in support of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Poklonnaya Gora an hour before its scheduled start at 1 p.m., Moscow police said. No video feed from the site was available at the time.

“People keep on arriving, the situation is changing constantly,” police said in a statement.

Police estimates of attendance during two previous opposition rallies in December were considerably lower than those by organizers and independent observers.

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During her three-day trip to the world’s second largest economy, Merkel praised the advantages of the single currency and urged China to put pressure on Iran and to condemn Syria at the United Nations.

Merkel, who was prevented from meeting journalists and a human rights lawyers, ended her official visit in the southern city of Guangzhou, Xinhua news agency reported.

Merkel, who held talks with Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao during her visit, had said that she would raise human rights issues during the trip.

She attended a business forum with Wen, who Friday said China had neither the intention nor ability “to buy Europe”.

Experts believe China holds more than $550 billion of European sovereign debt, although the figure has not been officially confirmed.

Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will preside Monday over the 14th Franco-German council of ministers, which will be largely devoted to the eurozone financial crisis.

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In a proposal presented on Friday, the justice ministry said the new identity cards would help tackle illegal immigration.

“The residency card system will increase security surrounding residency permit documentation, thereby contributing to the prevention of illegal immigration and illegal residency,” said Justice Minister Grete Faremo (Labour Party) in a statement.

The move follows pressure from the European Union to ensure that immigrants from outside the European Economic Area, of which Norway is a member, are provided with residency cards that include fingerprint details.

Faremo said the cards would benefit immigrants with legitimate residency permits, enabling them to display fully reliable ID to prospective employers and banks.

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Greece, which is racing to complete talks with the EU and the IMF on a second bailout worth 130 billion euros, had previously estimated that the deficit would be above 9.5 percent of GDP.

“The numbers aren’t final yet but we believe the deficit will come in at between 9.1 and 9.4 percent (of GDP),” the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

The official said the smaller deficit was due mainly to the fact that Greece will raise about 2 billion euros from a controversial property tax the government imposed in September in a desperate move to plug fiscal gaps. That would beat a target of 1.7 billion euros.

A deficit of 9.1 to 9.4 percent of GDP would still be above initial EU/IMF targets but it might help Athens which, to secure the bailout, must persuade the European Union and the IMF – which have grown increasingly exasperated with its repeated failures to meet deficit and reform targets – that it will implement long-delayed reforms and slash spending further.

Another senior finance ministry official had said this week that the 2011 budget deficit would most likely be below 9.5 percent of GDP, but did not give more details.

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The Foreign Ministry said Friday the recent activity had taken place within Chinese-controlled waters and was completely normal. A ministry statement said China was strongly dissatisfied with recent comments from Japanese officials.

Japan’s chief Cabinet secretary on Wednesday said Japan protested to China after a flare was seen a day earlier at a Chinese structure at an undersea gas deposit.

The deposit, known as Kashi in Japan and Tianwaitian in China, sits near a median line in the countries’ overlapping exclusive economic zones.

Japan and China agreed in 2008 to suspend unilateral exploration in that field while continuing talks.

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Doku Umarov, whose Caucasus Emirate group claimed atrocities including a deadly Moscow airport bombing in 2011 and a metro attack in 2010, said from now only security objects and officials would be targeted.

“I order all special groups that are carrying out or plan to carry out special operations in Russia to put a halt to these operations that could hurt the peaceful population,” Doku Umarov said in a video address posted on the rebel mouthpiece kavkazcenter.com.

“Today’s events in Russia have shown us that Russia’s peaceful population does not support Putin’s Chekist regime and are hostages of a regime that is fighting against Islam in the Caucasus.”

A “Chekist” is a commonly used term in Russian for an employee of the security services, who are hugely prominent in Russia under Putin who is himself a former KGB agent.

His once iron grip on the country has been shaken by a series of mass protests against his rule ahead of March 4 presidential elections where he is seeking a historic third Kremlin term.

“If this peaceful population does not take part in the war against Islam, our religion tells us to take care of this peaceful population and not to touch them,” said Umarov.

“This population definitely does not support Putin,” he added.

The video showed Umarov — who over the last years has eluded numerous attempts by Russia on his life — sitting in khaki fatigues in snow-covered woods flanked by two bearded comrades.

He said after the halt on civilian attacks, special operations should be carried out “with precision against the security services, the special services and the reprobate who are officials and are enemies of Allah,” he added.

Kavkaz Center said that with this “decree” Umarov had “changed the status” of the Russian population.

Umarov claimed to have organised suicide bombing at Moscow’s largest airport in January 2011 that killed 37 as well as the double bombings carried out by two female suicide bombers on the Moscow metro in March 2010 that killed 40 people.

His group has been seeking to impose an Islamist state throughout Russia’s mainly Muslim Northern Caucasus region and has for years been waging deadly insurgency against the Russian security forces there.

The Kremlin fought two wars against separatists in Chechnya after the fall of the Soviet Union but the rebellion then became more Islamist in tone and also spread to neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan.

Putin rose to power as prime minister under president Boris Yeltsin in 1999 and immediately won prominence with his hard line on the Chechnya conflict, including his notorious promise to kill the rebels “even in the outhouse”.

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China is “willing to cooperate with Europe to fight the current crisis. Some people say this means China wants to buy Europe”, Wen told a German-China business forum in the southern city of Guangzhou.

“This a concern and doesn’t fit reality. China doesn’t have this intention and doesn’t have this ability.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in China for a three-day visit to boost her host’s confidence in Europe, also attended the forum along with executives from the energy, chemicals, engineering, banking and electronics sectors.

There are growing concerns in Europe that a recent wave of investment by Chinese companies and government-backed funds will give Beijing too much influence over struggling European economies.

In the latest deal, China State Grid has agreed to pay 387 million euros ($508.2 million) for a 25 percent stake in the national electricity grid of debt-stricken Portugal, Treasury Secretary Maria Albuquerque said Thursday.

European leaders have called on China, which has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, to invest in a bailout fund to rescue debt-stricken countries.

China has so far made no firm commitment to provide financial assistance, although Wen said Thursday it was considering getting more involved in bailout funds through the International Monetary Fund.

Analysts say bargain-hunting is behind the recent acquisitions by Chinese companies seeking to expand overseas. The country’s sovereign wealth fund has also sought to diversify away from US bonds.

At the forum Wen also touched on the politically sensitive topic of rare earths — 17 elements crucial in the manufacturing of many high-tech products — amid accusations China unfairly restricts exports of the valuable minerals.

China — the world’s largest producer of rare earths — “has no discrimination when it comes to foreign companies”, Wen told the forum.

State media said this week Beijing was bracing for renewed calls to ease its rare earths controls after the World Trade Organization ruled the country’s limits on key raw material exports broke trade rules.

Merkel, who earlier Friday held talks with President Hu Jintao and the country’s top legislator Wu Bangguo in Beijing, had said that she would raise human rights issues during her visit.

Rights lawyer Mo Shaoping, whose clients include jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, told AFP Friday that police had prevented him from meeting with Merkel at a reception at the German Embassy on Thursday.

Mo said police told him he was not allowed to attend the meeting due to concerns over social stability ahead of a key Communist Party meeting slated for late this year that will usher in a 10-yearly leadership transition.

The German embassy in Beijing did not immediately comment on the absence of Mo, who also defended the jailed rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.

Merkel’s visit to Guangdong province will include a meeting with Gan Junqiu, the state-backed Catholic bishop of Guangzhou — the provincial capital — a German diplomatic source said, before returning to Germany on Saturday.

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The Liberal Democrat MP has been charged with perverting the course of justice after an investigation into the 2003 incident by Essex Police.

His former wife, the economist Vicky Pryce is also facing charges of perverting the course of justice. They are due to appear before Westminster Magistrates’ Court on February 16. The maximum sentence for perverting the course of justice is life in prison, the CPS and the Sentencing Council said.

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said a criminal complaint was made to Essex Police in May 2011, alleging Ms Pryce had accepted responsibility for a speeding offence committed by Mr Huhne in 2003.

“That complaint was investigated by Essex Police and a file was passed to the CPS in late July 2011. The CPS advised that further investigations should be made, including obtaining certain material from a national newspaper,” he said.

“Those further investigations were made and, in October 2011, an order was made for the newspaper to produce material to the police. The newspaper appealed that order, as it was entitled to do, but subsequently consented to producing the material in question just before the appeal was due to be heard, on 20 January this year.

“All the available evidence, including the new material, has now been carefully considered by the CPS and we have concluded that there is sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against Mr Huhne and Ms Pryce for perverting the course of justice.

“The essence of the charges is that between March and May 2003, Mr Huhne, having allegedly committed a speeding offence, falsely informed the investigating authorities that Ms Pryce had been the driver of the vehicle in question, and she falsely accepted that she was the driver.”

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