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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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 238 known survivors arrived by five vessels at the city of Lae. Many were undergoing medical tests, according to Capt. Nurur Rahman, rescue coordinator with the country’s National Maritime Safety Authority.

About 350 people were aboard the MV Rabaul Queen when it sank Thursday, said Rahman.

The MV Rabaul Queen went down about 16 kilometers (10 miles) off Cape Fortification in the Vitiaz Strait after getting into trouble early Thursday, officials said.

The ferry is about 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) below the surface, Rahman said.

After an alert was sent out, boats and helicopters rushed to the scene to try to save scores of people left adrift at sea by the sinking. They had to deal with high winds and ocean swells.

Joanne Meehan of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority told CNN two of that country’s aircraft were assisting in the search.

Australia is Papua New Guinea’s closest neighbor minus Indonesia, with which it shares a border.

“I’m pleased that a large number of people have been rescued,” said Kevin Rudd, the Australian foreign minister. “We’re deeply concerned about those who are still missing.”

Rudd said he didn’t have any information on the nationalities of the passengers aboard the ship.

“This is a difficult operating environment,” he said. “We are doing everything within our power.”

The Rabaul Queen was ferrying passengers from the town of Kimbe on New Britain Island to Lae when it got into difficulty.

“Taking ferries is the most economic method of transport for people traveling between the islands and the mainland,” Rahman told CNN. “What I understand from local media is that a lot of students and their parents were traveling to schools that recently reopened on the mainland.”

Jurgen Ruh, the chief executive of Manolos Aviation Ltd. in Lae, was in one of the helicopters that helped with the rescue effort.

“I could see the survivors on the debris,” he said, noting that the passenger ship had sunk completely by the time he reached the scene.

There were about 10 life rafts visible, each with roughly 10 people on them, the first time his helicopter flew overhead, he said. However, when the helicopter returned to the area after refueling, no more survivors were spotted.

The weather was likely to be a contributing factor in the ferry’s sinking, Ruh said, as there were high winds at the time in what is a notorious area.

Papua New Guinea had a population of 6.7 million in 2010, the U.S. State Department says, with about 190,000 people living in Lae. Most of the population is scattered in small settlements across the state’s many islands.

The largely Christian country is part of the Commonwealth and has Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. The bulk of the estimated 2,000 American residents in Papua New Guinea, are missionaries and their families, the State Department says.

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China “is investigating and evaluating concrete ways in which it can, via the IMF, get more deeply involved in solving the European debt problem through [European Stability Mechanism/European Financial Stability Facility] channels,” Mr Wen said in a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Beijing.

The comments have revived hopes that China, which holds by far the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, could add some of this $3.2tn cash pile to existing and future European bail-out funds.

European officials said they believed Beijing had clearly changed its position and more concrete terms of any Chinese contribution were likely to be discussed in two weeks at a delayed EU-China summit.

Mr Wen said it was increasingly “urgent” that a solution be found to the European debt crisis and he called on the international community to co-operate towards that end. The euro rose about half a per cent against the US dollar soon after his words were reported.

Chinese officials have long signalled their willingness to contribute to global efforts to bail out Europe but have also made clear Beijing would not take the lead and would like to see more convincing efforts from Europe’s own governments to resolve the crisis.

European leaders last year agreed to leverage the approximately €250bn left in the eurozone’s rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, as a way to make the EU’s dwindling bail-out resources go further.

One option would be for China to put money into a so-called “co-investment fund” which Klaus Regling, the EFSF chief, has been promoting to public and private investors across the world, including Chinese sovereign wealth funds.

Ms Merkel is in China on a three-day mission to reassure Beijing that Europe is able to tackle its mounting debt problems.

She told an audience of Chinese scholars on Thursday that European countries were taking serious steps to rein in debt and strengthen growth.

“I want to tell you: The euro has strengthened Europe,” Ms Merkel said in a speech at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one of the country’s leading academic institutions, which functions as a think-tank for the government. “This is not a crisis of the euro, it is a debt crisis and a crisis of different levels of competitiveness,” she said.

Ms Merkel’s visit comes just days after the EU decision to make the budget discipline required from the 17 euro economies part of national law, which she had been pushing for strongly.

Ms Merkel, who is scheduled to meet President Hu Jintao on Friday, also stressed that she would press her Chinese counterparts to support actions against Iran and Syria, two of the countries that top the global political agenda.

Acknowledging Beijing’s opposition to a new round of sanctions against Iran, Ms Merkel said it could use its influence to tell Iran to be more transparent about its nuclear programme.

But questions from the audience showed that China’s focus is clearly on Europe. Ms Merkel said the financial crisis required every eurozone member country to “do their homework”, but also solidarity among the group, and claimed that Europe was growing together in the crisis.

That contrasts with Chinese perceptions that the euro group is plagued by frequent friction and difficulties in communicating a clear common agenda.

In response to a question, Ms Merkel said European countries were looking into whether there was a way to limit the negative fallout from sovereign ratings downgrades in financial crises. “We must face [rating agencies'] judgment, they tell the truth,” Ms Merkel said. “But [ratings decisions] can have a reinforcing effect on a crisis.”

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China, the world’s second-biggest economy, has watched with increasing concern as eurozone economies have deteriorated, and has repeatedly urged European leaders to get a grip on the situation.

Merkel’s meeting with President Hu Jintao came a day after talks with Premier Wen Jiabao, who said Beijing was looking at ways it could contribute to Europe’s bailout funds and warned of an “urgent” need to solve the debt crisis.

“China is investigating and evaluating ways, through the International Monetary Fund, to be more deeply involved in solving the European debt problem via ESM/EFSF channels,” Wen said at a news conference with Merkel.

Wen was referring to the European Financial Stability Facility, a temporary rescue fund that was established to help struggling economies in Europe, and the European Stability Mechanism — a newer, permanent fund.

Hu told Merkel before their closed-door meeting Friday that her visit would “increase mutual understanding” between the two countries, whose bilateral trade reached $169 billion in 2011, an 18.9 percent increase from the previous year.

Merkel, who will return to Germany on Saturday, said in a speech Thursday she would raise the issue of human rights during her visit.

After meeting Hu she flew to the southern province of Guangdong, where German companies already have a significant presence, with Wen and executives from the energy, chemicals, engineering, banking and electronics sectors.

Her visit to the manufacturing hub will include a meeting with Gan Junqiu, the state-backed Catholic bishop of Guangzhou — the provincial capital — according to a German diplomatic source.

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Experts said the incident, which follows smaller leaks last weekend, is not a big setback to getting the plant under control but the timing is awkward for the government as it strives to win public acceptance for the restart of reactors elsewhere to avoid a summer power crunch.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant, on the coast 240 km northeast of Tokyo, was wrecked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering reactor meltdowns and radiation leaks that caused mass evacuations and widespread contamination.

The leak discovered late on Tuesday was from a pipe at the plant’s No.4 reactor that may have burst after freezing due to cold weather, said a spokesman for the utility, known as Tepco. He said leaking water would go into a drain leading to a storage facility.

It contained only a tiny amount of radiation compared with the huge amount of water used to cool the reactors in the aftermath of the March disaster, much of which is still being treated at the plant to lower its radiation level, he said.

The No.4 reactor was shut for maintenance when the tsunami struck, and no fuel rods are inside thereactor vessel.

“I wouldn’t say this is a positive development. But it isn’t something that would further stoke safety concerns over other nuclear plants,” said Kenji Sumita, honorary professor at Osaka University.

“If it hadn’t been for the Fukushima disaster, an incident like this could have gone unreported.”

Shattered trust in the safety of nuclear energy has prevented the restart of reactors shut for routine maintenance, straining power supply and threatening blackouts. Only three of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors are now operating. Without approval for restarts, all of them could be shut by the end of April, boosting the use of fossil fuels and adding over $30 billion a year to the nation’s energy costs, a government estimate said.

U.N. nuclear experts gave their backing on Tuesday to stress tests aimed at showing Japan’s nuclear plants can withstand the sort of disasters that devastated Fukushima Daiichi.

The government announced on December 16 that reactors at the plant had reached a state of cold shutdown, a milestone in cleanup efforts and a pre-condition for allowing about 80,000 residents evacuated from a 20-km (12 miles) radius of the Daiichi plant to return home.

Resource-poor Japan had aimed to increase the share of nuclear power to more than half of its electricity supply by 2030 before the disaster, but now looks to reduce its reliance on nuclear power and raise the role renewable sources such as wind and solar power.

Tepco initially estimated the size of this week’s leak at six litres but later revised it to 8.5 cubic metres, and is looking into how it can prevent similar incidents.

It follows the discovery and plugging of smaller leaks at the same reactor last weekend.

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Her trip comes just days after China was hit by deadly unrest in Tibetan-inhabited areas, and the leader of Europe’s biggest economy will also broach the issue of human rights with her Chinese counterparts.

Germany and China, the world’s top two exporters, enjoy vibrant trade relations and Merkel will meet investors and seek to boost confidence in Europe on her fifth trip to the world’s second largest economy.

She is due to make a key address on the euro crisis Thursday morning, before holding talks with Premier Wen Jiabao later in the afternoon.

Accompanied by a trade delegation, she will also hold talks with President Hu Jintao and visit the wealthy, southern province of Guangdong — a manufacturing hub — on Friday.

Observers will be watching her visit for any mention of last week’s violence in Tibetan-inhabited areas of Sichuan province, which saw police fire on protesters in unrest that left at least two ethnic Tibetans dead.

A German government source said human rights would figure highly on the trip’s agenda, with Merkel keen to talk about minority issues and social development in China.

The German leader will also discuss the eurozone with her Chinese counterparts, who are keen to see a return to growth in Europe and a stable euro.

She will hold talks on possible increased Chinese involvement in the International Monetary Fund, access to Chinese markets and intellectual property rights, the source said.

Merkel will also urge China not to take advantage of Europe’s ban on Iranian oil — imposed on Tehran over its nuclear programme — to boost its own imports of the resource, the source said.

And the German leader will ask for Beijing’s support for a UN Security Council resolution against Syria, where fighting between President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces and rebels is escalating.

On Friday, Merkel will fly to Guangdong — where nearly 500 German companies are already present — with Wen and executives from the energy, chemicals, engineering, banking and electronics sectors.

On the agenda of her discussions will also be rare earths — valuable elements that are used in the production of high-tech products and which are of “very great importance for the German economy,” the source said.

China has been accused of deliberately restricting their exports to drive up prices and force manufacturers onto its shores, but Beijing says it limits them for environmental reasons as mining them is very polluting.

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