Victoria braces for a scorcher

VICTORIAN firefighters and rural communities are bracing for a horror day with the temperature set to reach a maximum 36 degrees as emergency services continue to battle to contain two massive bushfires.

A blaze in Gippsland covering 60,000 hectares has already destroyed homes while a fire at Harrietville near Mount Feathertop in the state's northeast is threatening towns and ski resorts.

Forecast high temperatures and volatile winds, along with a plentiful dry fuel load, means there is also a risk of grassfires breaking out in central Victoria around Castlemaine, Maryborough and Avoca, and in the west between Horsham and Warrnambool.

Authorities have declared a total fire ban in the southwest district of the state.

Fire Services Commissioner Craig Lapsley said about 300km of containment lines had been established around the entire Gippsland blaze.

A northeasterly wind is predicted to change to a northwesterly late on Thursday, which could threaten the Maffra district, Coongulla and Newry.

A southwesterly wind change is expected late on Thursday night or early Friday morning.

At the ski resort of Falls Creek residents are on a Watch and Act alert and have been told that a change of wind direction overnight could send a fire towards the village.

Mr Lapsley said people in these areas should be aware for the potential of the fires to spread and the importance of keeping up to date with local warnings and advice.

Falls Creek local Debbie Howie told AAP that off-mountain employees who live at Mt Beauty have been told not to come to work on Thursday.

The village's annual Australia Day dragon boat races on Rocky Valley Lake have been cancelled.

She said there are a couple of hundred people at the resort as well as a team of well-trained locals who make up the local CFA unit who will be called on to defend lives and property if the bushfire makes up the mountain.

Neighbouring Mt Hotham is also in the firing line in the event of a wind change.

Wind speed and wind direction will be the key with the potential for embers to be carried ahead of the main fire front.

"The fire has the potential to travel in three different ways if it does break containment lines," Mr Lapsley said.

"It could be embers dropping from the sky that sees new fires start."

Victoria Police have been refining night evacuation plans with text alerts set to be to be sent out to communities before people would usually go to bed.

Mr Lapsley said wildfires at night carry a lot of difficulties.

"The option of leaving and not being there if you've got the potential of fire moving around in your environment at night, I would suggest one of the best options is not to be there," he said.

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Iraq's Aziz depressed, wants Pope's help

TAREQ Aziz, the late Saddam Hussein's ailing former deputy premier now on death row, is suffering from depression and plans to ask the Pope to call for his speedy execution, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

Badie Aref said Aziz, a Christian, believed he was being treated well in prison, but was suffering from ill health and simply wanted an end to his "misery."

"He is in total depression," Aref told AFP by telephone after meeting with Aziz earlier on Wednesday.

The lawyer said Aziz had told him: "I will now write an appeal to the Pope. Even though I have never met him in person, I will call for him to end my misery, because I would prefer to be executed rather than stay in this condition."

Aziz, a close confidante of now-executed dictator Saddam, was sentenced to death in October 2010 after having been found guilty of "deliberate murder and crimes against humanity."

The Vatican, the European Union and several Western governments have called on Baghdad for clemency.

Aziz has been in prison since surrendering in April 2003, days after the fall of Baghdad in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

His family has repeatedly called for his release on health grounds, particularly after he suffered a heart attack in late 2007.

He also suffers from high blood pressure, heart problems, diabetes and ulcers.

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Steady rise in govt data requests: Google

GOOGLE has reported a "steady increase" in government requests to hand over data from internet users in the second half of 2012.

The web giant's semiannual "transparency report" showed the most requests came from the United States, with 8,438 requests for information about 14,868 users.

India was second with 2,431 requests for data about 4,106 users, followed by France, where Google received 1,693 requests for information about 2,063 users. Germany, Britain and Brazil rounded out the top six, Google said on Wednesday.

"The steady increase in government requests for our users' data continued in the second half of 2012, as usage of our services continued to grow," said Richard Salgado, Google's head of law enforcement and information security.

"User data requests of all kinds have increased by more than 70 per cent since 2009," he said in a blog posting.

"In total, we received 21,389 requests for information about 33,634 users from July through December 2012."

Google said it supplied at least some of the requested data in 68 per cent of cases, down from 76 per cent in late 2010.

In releasing details of requests in the United States, Google said 68 per cent of the requests it received from government entities were through subpoenas, which "are the easiest to get because they typically don't involve judges," according to Salgado.

Another 22 per cent were through search warrants, mostly issued by judges when there is "probable cause" related to a crime.

Google provided at least some data in 90 per cent of the requests in the United States in late 2012, compared with 94 per cent two years earlier.

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Mali army accused of summary killings

A LEADING rights group accused Malian soldiers on Wednesday of summary killings and serious abuses in the course of a French-led assault against al-Qaeda-linked groups, as concerns rose over the conflict's civilian toll.

Japan, which lost seven citizens in a deadly Islamist backlash in neighbouring Algeria against the French-led offensive, decided on Wednesday to close its embassy in Bamako citing a deteriorating security situation.

Nearly two weeks after France swept to Mali's aid to stop an Islamist advance towards the capital Bamako, reports emerged of atrocities committed by Malian soldiers and growing fears of attacks among light-skinned ethnic communities.

The majority of the al-Qaeda-linked rebels being hunted by the armies are either Tuaregs or Arabs.

The International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) said that in the central town of Sevare at least 11 people were executed in a military camp near the bus station and the town's hospital, citing evidence gathered by local researchers.

Credible reports also pointed to around 20 other people having been executed in the same area and the bodies having been dumped in wells or otherwise disposed of, the organisation said.

At Nioro, in the west of the country close to the border with Mauritania, two Malian Tuaregs were executed by Malian soldiers, according to the FIDH.

The organisation called for an immediate independent inquiry commission to "determine the scale of the abuses and to punish the perpetrators."

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has hailed France's "courageous" intervention but expressed fears over the safety of humanitarian workers and UN employees on the ground.

The tense security situation, heightened after the cross border attack in Algeria which left 37 hostages dead, prompted Japan to shut its embassy and evacuate key staff.

"After the French military advance the already unstable situation in Mali worsened further," foreign ministry spokesman Yutaka Yokoi told reporters in Tokyo.

On the ground French and Malian troops were due to sweep the outskirts of towns recently recaptured from the al-Qaeda-linked rebels for landmines they suspect the extremists left as they fled an air and ground assault by the armies.

France said it had already 2300 soldiers in the west African nation, whose poorly-trained and under equipped force has been overwhelmed by Islamist rebels occupying the vast arid north since April and seeking to push south.

The former colonial power has said its troops will eventually hand over control to a UN-mandated West African force of more than 4000 troops to be boosted by 2000 men from Chad.

The fallout from the war, which experts have warned could be drawn out and complex, is causing concerns.

The UN refugee agency estimates up to a million people could have fled their homes in coming months, and rights bodies have warned of the dire situation faced by those escaping fighting.

There are also increasing reports of attacks on light-skinned Tuareg or Arabs from Malian security forces.

"Here, if you wear a turban, have a beard and wear a Tuareg robe, you are threatened," said a shopowner in Segou, a town some 270 kilometres northeast of Bamako. "It has become very dangerous for us since this war started."

Malian army chief General Ibrahima Dahirou Dembele promised that any soldier involved in abuses would be brought to book.

Mali's year-long crisis began when Tuaregs returning from fighting Gaddafi's war in Libya, battle-hardened and with a massive arsenal, took up a decades-old rebellion for independence of the north which they call Azawad.

They allied with hardline Islamists amid a political vacuum in Bamako after a March coup, and seized the key towns of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu in a matter of days.

The Islamists later broke with their Tuareg allies, and with firm control of the north, implemented an extreme form of Islamic law.

The occupation sparked fears abroad that the vast northern half of the country could become a new Afghanistan-like haven for al-Qaeda.

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US charges East European cyber virus gang

US law enforcement officials have announced charges against three alleged East European cyber thieves accused of stealing banking information from computers across Europe and the United States, including at the space agency NASA.

The "alleged international cyber criminals (were) responsible for creating and distributing a computer virus that infected over one million computers - at least 40,000 of which were in the US - and caused millions in losses by, among other things, stealing online banking credentials," the federal prosecutor's office in Manhattan said on Wednesday.

The defendants allegedly used a malicious computer code or malware dubbed the "Gozi Virus" to hack into bank accounts and "steal millions of dollars," stated the indictment against one of the defendants, Deniss Calovskis, who is also known as "Miami."

Prosecutors say the scam unfolded between 2005 and March 2012 and that the virus was "virtually undetectable in the computers it infected." First, it was implanted in computers across Europe "on a vast scale," then around 2010 it spread to the United States, the Calovskis indictment said.

In the United States, "more than 160 were computers belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)" were infected, the indictment said.

Financial losses caused by the "Gozi Virus" hit "at a minimum, millions of dollars," the indictment said.

Calovskis, a computer programming expert, has been arrested in his home country of Latvia, the Manhattan federal prosecutor's office told AFP.

The virus' alleged designer and "chief architect," Nikita Kuzmin, from Russia, was in US custody, while the third man, Mihai Ionut Paunescu from Romania and nicknamed "Virus," was in Romanian custody, prosecutors said.

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Spanish recession deepens: central bank

SPAIN'S economy took its steepest dive in more than three years in the final quarter of 2012 as high unemployment and biting austerity measures slashed demand, a Bank of Spain report showed on Wednesday.

Available data pointed to gross domestic product plunging by 0.6 per cent on a quarterly basis in the final three months of the year after a 0.3-per cent dip the previous quarter, it said.

It marked the sharpest quarterly fall in Spanish economic output since the second quarter of 2009 when the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy was reeling from a massive property crash.

Spain's economic output has been on a downward path since the final quarter of 2011 and right up to the third quarter of 2012, the central bank said. "Available data indicate that this intensified in the October-December period."

Demand by consumers and businesses plummeted by 1.9 per cent in the fourth quarter from the previous three months, the Bank of Spain said.

The Spanish economy was hammered in part because a buying spree ahead of a September 1 sales tax increase had evaporated in the final quarter. At the same time, public sector workers had their Christmas bonuses cancelled.

Tough financing conditions in the midst of a crisis in the banking sector crimped activity, it said, as Spain's bad loan-ridden banks undergo a drastic restructuring with the help of a European Union rescue loan of up to 100 billion euros ($A126.94 billion).

A weak labour market - with a jobless rate of 25 per cent in the third quarter - further depressed demand for Spanish goods and services, the bank said. The unemployment rate is estimated to have climbed to about 26 per cent in the final quarter of 2012, it said.

Over the whole of 2012, the Bank of Spain said economic output fell by 1.3 per cent from the previous year. That was slightly better than the government's forecast for a 1.5-per cent contraction, but was likely to provide little comfort given the deterioration at the end of 2012.

The government forecast of a 0.5 per cent fall in economic activity in 2013 appeared to be "very optimistic", the analyst said, tipping instead a 2.0 per cent decline.

Under pressure from Brussels to cut its public deficit and curb a fast-growing debt mountain, Spain has been slashing spending and raising taxes.

It aims to lower the public deficit from the equivalent of 9.4 per cent of annual gross domestic product in 2011 to 6.3 per cent in 2012, 4.5 per cent in 2013 and 2.8 per cent in 2014.

But "despite further onerous austerity, it looks likely that the budget deficit barely fell in 2012 and hence exceeded the official targets significantly," Loynes warned.

"Further falls in economic activity could even see the deficit rising again in the coming quarters."

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Spanish academy urged to drop racist words

URUGUAYANS are petitioning the Royal Spanish Academy to expunge as discriminatory the expression "to work like a black" from its dictionary, the ultimate authority on the Spanish language.

"We ask that you review this expression's remaining in the dictionary," said the petition. "We, for our part, commit ourselves to erase all discriminatory expressions from our plazas, our playing fields, our schools and especially our houses."

Launched by the Casa de la Cultura Afrouruguaya (the House of Afro-Uruguayan Culture) in a televised event on Tuesday, the petition has so far garnered 4,700 signatures.

Grammy winner Ruben Rada and other Uruguayan cultural and sports figures have joined the mass multimedia campaign to raise awareness about racism in daily life.

"In our everyday language there are expressions that can be used to discriminate, one of which appear in the dictionary: 'to work like a black,'" the petition says.

This expression "evokes a past of subjugation that should not be repeated by any human being."

The petition drive will run until March 20, and organisers want to formally deliver it to the Academy on March 21, the UN-designated International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

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