Pakistan court extends Musharraf's remand

Pervez Musharraf's political party says it will boycott next week's historical Pakistan elections. Source: AAP

A PAKISTANI anti-terrorism court has ordered former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to remain in custody for a further two weeks ahead of his trial for unlawfully sacking judges during his rule, officials say.

"Pervez Musharraf's remand is extended for judicial lock-up for 14 days, he should be presented before the court on May 18," Judge Kausar Abbas Zaidi, ordered on Saturday.

Police had asked the judge to grant the custodial extension saying the investigation into Musharraf's activities was still under way.

Lawyers for Musharraf, who is locked in his own home, which has been declared a sub-jail while he is awaiting trial, filed a bail application in the court and the judge fixed a hearing for May 6.

The court was also asked if Musharraf's trial could be held inside his plush villa, citing security reasons, but the matter was left pending.

"It has been brought into my notice that the Chief Commissioner of Islamabad issued a notification for the jail trial, but approval from Islamabad high court is needed in this regard," the judge said.

Musharraf was placed in police custody at his home following his arrest on April 19, in an unprecedented move against a former army chief of staff ahead of key elections.

He was arrested for making a decision to sack judges when he imposed emergency rule in November 2007 - a move that hastened his downfall.

He also faces charges of conspiracy to murder opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and over the death of a rebel leader during a 2006 military operation.

The retired general has been humiliated since returning in March from self-imposed exile to contest elections.

However, his party on Friday announced it will boycott next week's historic election after a court on Tuesday banned him from standing for the rest of his life.

The May 11 polls for the national and regional assemblies mark the first time that a civilian government completes a full-term and hands over to another at the ballot box, in a country that has been ruled by the military for half its life.

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Man dies after vehicle hits tree in Vic

A MAN has died after his vehicle hit a tree in Victoria's north west, the second road fatality in the state in one day.

Police believe the man was driving west on Polkemmet Road, near Horsham, when he lost control and died at the scene.

Emergency crews were called to the scene about 8.30pm (AEST) but police believe the incident happened on Saturday afternoon.

Victoria's road toll stands at 89 compared to 101 this time last year.

Earlier on Saturday, a motorcyclist died after colliding with a car in Victoria's northeast.

The man was travelling at Baranduda, near Wodonga, when he collided with a car turning onto the Kiewa Valley Highway on Saturday morning.

He died at the scene.

Three women who were in the car suffered minor injuries in the crash.

The man is yet to be formally identified.

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Hundreds protest China chemical plant

HUNDREDS of people have protested against a proposed chemical plant in southwest China, state media said.

Local residents have also accused authorities of preventing a similar protest in another city.

More than 200 protesters gathered in the city of Kunming to protest against plans for a factory which will produce paraxylene (PX), a toxic petrochemical used to make fabrics, China's official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

Around 1,000 people described as "onlookers" surrounded the protesters, some of whom wore face-masks and held banners, the report said.

Police also lined the streets of Chengdu, the capital of southwest China's Sichuan province, after locals planned a protest against a nearby chemical plant on Saturday, residents told AFP.

"There were a lot of police outside government offices, public spaces and important crossroads in the city," one resident surnamed Liu said, adding that fliers posted around the city in recent days had called for a protest.

"The fliers said the chemical plant has a big impact on people's health," he said.

The government responded with notices calling on people not to demonstrate, Liu said.

Photos posted online showed ranks of police lining the city's streets.

Local police on Saturday morning announced that they would be carrying out an earthquake protection drill, a claim dismissed by thousands of internet users.

"It's about preventing the protest," one user of the popular social networking website Sina Weibo wrote.

Locals online said that the protest did not take place.

China has seen a number of urban demonstrations against proposed chemical plants in recent years, in what analysts have identified as a rising trend of environmentally-motivated "not in my backyard" protests in China.

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Fears over man-made hybrid bird flu virus

IMMUNOLOGISTS are concerned about the "dangerous" work of Chinese scientists in creating a hybrid bird flu virus able to spread in the air between guinea pigs, and now living in a lab freezer.

The team from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Gansu Agricultural University have written in the journal Science that they have created the new virus by mixing genes from H5N1 "bird flu" and H1N1 "swine flu".

H5N1, transmitted to people by birds, is fatal in about 60 per cent of cases but does not transmit between humans - a characteristic so far preventing a pandemic.

Some argue hybrid studies like these shed light on how the virus could mutate in nature to cause a human epidemic, and may help us prepare.

Since 2003, H5N1 has infected 628 people, killing 374, according to the World Health Organisation.

H1N1, which erupted in Mexico, is highly transmissible and infected a fifth of the world's population in a 2009-10 pandemic, but is about as lethal as ordinary flu.

The new mutant virus was easily transmitted between guinea pigs through respiratory droplets - which the Chinese team said proved the deadly H5N1 virus may need but a simple genetic mutation to "acquire mammalian transmissibility".

Flu hybrids can arise in nature when two virus strains infect the same cell and exchange genes in a process known as reassortment, but there is no evidence that H1N1 and H5N1 have done so yet.

Some observers fear science is putting mankind at risk by pre-emptively creating such mutants.

"These are manmade viruses, they have never been made in Nature. They are now sitting in a freezer," virology professor Simon Wain-Hobson of France's Pasteur Institute told AFP.

He pointed to a laboratory leak of foot and mouth, a cattle disease, which caused an outbreak in Britain six years ago.

It was unclear how the flu hybrid, which is not deadly in guinea pigs, would affect people - but Wain-Hobson warned: "These could be pandemic viruses.

"That is, if there was ever an error or they got out or there was a leak or whatever, this could infect people and cause anywhere between 100,000 and 100 million deaths."

Wain-Hobson and others fear the risk may far outweigh the scientific value of the research.

The findings held little value for finding a vaccine or treatment that would take years to develop - probably long after an outbreak, they argue.

"The record of containment in the highest containment laboratories is not good. There have been repeated leaks," said Robert May, a former president of Britain's Royal Society of science.

"You do not do these things unless there is some call of extreme emergency," he said.

"We are encountering a real and present danger with extremely dubious benefits to the public."

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Eurozone recession to continue in 2013: EU

RECESSION in the crisis-hit eurozone will continue unabated for the rest of the year with unemployment remaining at record levels, the EU warns, though signs of recovery could emerge in 2014.

Economic output in the 17-nation area - home to 340 million people and a global rival to the United States, Japan and emerging giants - will shrink by 0.4 per cent this year, the European Commission said on Friday, worse than the 0.3 per cent forecast in February and after a 0.6 contraction last year.

Record unemployment in the single currency area will endure, the Commission's spring forecasts showed, with strong divergence between richer eurozone states to the north and members to the south mired in deep recession.

Repeating its last estimate, the Commission said eurozone joblessness this year would hit a record 12 per cent and 11 per cent across the whole 27-member EU. The rates vary hugely, with an alarming 27 per cent in Spain and a low 4.7 per cent in Austria.

"In view of the protracted recession, we must do whatever it takes to overcome the unemployment crisis in Europe," EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Ollie Rehn said in statement accompanying the Commission's latest economic forecast for the eurozone and full European Union.

"In Spain and Greece unemployment rates are at unbearably high levels," Rehn said at a news conference.

France, which has barely avoided recession despite significant headwinds, will in the end shrink by 0.1 per cent in 2013 as weakness in household demand, a key economic driver, finally takes its toll. France will then rebound to 1.1 per cent growth in 2014, the data said.

But France will widely miss its commitment to meet the EU's 3 per cent of GDP deficit ceiling and will post a 3.9 per cent deficit this year and 4.2 per cent shortfall next year.

Spain will continue a hard slog from its crisis, brought on by the 2008 implosion of a decade-long housing bubble, and should contract by 1.5 per cent in 2013 before reversing to 1.4 per cent in growth in 2014.

But Spanish public finances will remain dire well into next year with a government deficit of 6.5 per cent in 2013 expected to worsen in 2014 to 7.0 per cent as certain measures expire.

The crisis will be hugely felt in recently bailed out Cyprus where output is expected to contract by 8.7 per cent this year in the wake of a severe restructuring of the island nation's key banking sector, including a controversial "haircut" on deposits.

The Cypriot recession will prolong into 2014 and beyond, the Commission said, with the economy expected to contract by an overall 15 per cent between 2012 and 2015.

In a rare glimpse of encouragement, the Commission saw recovery in Greece by the end of the year after six consecutive years of recession. The country is forecast to eke out 0.6 per cent growth in 2014, after contracting sharply by 4.2 per cent this year.

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Boston bombing suspect's remains claimed

The body of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev will be released to his family. Source: AAP

A FUNERAL home has claimed the body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunbattle with police after an intense manhunt.

Department of Public Safety spokesman Terrel Harris said on Thursday a funeral home retained by Tsarnaev's family had picked up the 26-year-old's remains.

Authorities are now closer to being able to make public Tsarnaev's cause of death.

The medical examiner determined Tsarnaev's cause of death on Monday, but officials said it wouldn't be disclosed until his remains were released and a death certificate was filed. It was unclear whether the death certificate had been filed.

Tsarnaev's widow, Katherine Russell, who has been living with her parents in Rhode Island, learned this week that the medical examiner was ready to release his body and wanted it turned over to his side of the family, her lawyer Amato DeLuca said days ago.

Tsarnaev's uncle Ruslan Tsarni, of Maryland, said on Tuesday night the family would take the body.

"Of course, family members will take possession of the body," Tsarni said.

After a hearse believed to be carrying Tsarnaev's body departed Boston, television stations reported that their helicopters followed it to the Dyer-Lake Funeral Home in North Attleboro.

About 20 protesters gathered outside the funeral home. An Associated Press photographer later saw a hearse leaving the home escorted by two police cars.

Dyer-Lake funeral director Tim Nye told The Sun-Chronicle newspaper late on Thursday that the body was only brought to his funeral home temporarily and was transported to another facility, but he didn't say where.

"He is not at our funeral home and we won't be handling final arrangements," Nye said.

Tsarnaev, who had appeared in surveillance photos wearing a black cap and was identified as Suspect No. 1, died three days after the bombing.

The April 15 bombing, using pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, ball bearings and metal shards near the marathon's finish line, killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Authorities said Tsarnaev and his younger brother later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer and carjacked a driver, who later escaped.

Authorities said that during the gunbattle with police, the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago, set off another pressure cooker bomb and tossed grenades before the older brother ran out of ammunition.

Police said they tackled the older brother and began to handcuff him but had to dive out of the way at the last second when the younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, drove a stolen car at them. They said the younger brother ran over his brother's body as he drove away from the scene to escape.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured later, wounded and bloody, hiding in a tarp-covered boat in a suburban Boston backyard. He is in a federal prison and faces a charge of using a weapon of mass destruction to kill.

The Tsarnaev brothers' mother insists the allegations against them are lies.

Three of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends, college classmates, were arrested on Wednesday and accused of helping after the marathon bombing to remove a laptop and backpack from his dormitory room before the FBI searched it.

A top Republican senator on Thursday asked President Barack Obama's administration to explain how one of the students entered the United States without a valid student visa.

Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, in a three-page letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, asked for additional details about the student visa applications for Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, college roommates from Kazakhstan charged with obstruction of justice in the marathon bombing case, and how Tazhayakov was allowed to re-enter the United States in January.

Tazhayakov was a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth when he left the US in December. In early January, his student visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed by the university.

Peter Boogaard, a DHS spokesman, said on Wednesday that when Tazhayakov arrived in January Customs and Border Protection had not been alerted that he was no longer a student. Boogaard said the department was working on a fix to the student visa system.

The third student arrested, Robel Phillipos, was charged with willfully making materially false statements to federal law enforcement officials during a terrorism investigation.

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Major Australian exhibition in London

THE most significant collection of Australian art ever mounted in the United Kingdom is to go on display in London from September.

It was revealed on Thursday that the Prince of Wales will be the patron of the exhibition, which is simply called Australia.

The exhibition spans 200 years, taking in indigenous and non-indigenous art from 1800 to the present day. It focuses on the influence of landscape.

Co-curator Kathleen Soriano from the Royal Academy of Arts said the exhibition was several years in the making.

"There has never been an exhibition like this before," she told the press launch at the academy on Thursday.

"This survey is long, long overdue."

The exhibition brings together works from the most important public collections in Australia.

Works by artists including Albert Namatjira, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley, Bill Henson and Tracey Moffatt will be on display.

Judy Watson has been commissioned to create a new sculpture that will remain in the academy's courtyard for the duration of the exhibition.

Deputy high commissioner Andrew Todd said the Australian government, which helped fund the exhibition, was "immensely proud" of it.

"We see this exhibition as a particularly exciting platform to promote and celebrate Australian art and culture more widely," he told reporters on Thursday.

"Artists, in holding up a mirror to Australian life and landscape, express so effectively who we are as a people and a nation."

The BBC will broadcast a three-part series on Australian art to coincide with the London exhibition.

The series will be presented by former Art Gallery of NSW director Edmund Capon.

The exhibition, organised in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia, opens on September 21 and will run until early December.

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Nationals WA president stands down

COLIN Holt has stood down as The Nationals' West Australian president because of his increasingly heavy parliamentary workload.

Mr Holt, who held the position for four years, was last month appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister for training and workforce development Terry Redman and is also leader of The Nationals WA in the Legislative Council.

David Eagles has accepted the role of acting state president until the party's state conference in August.

Meanwhile, several nominations were received for the party's new candidate for the federal seat of O'Connor, currently held by retiring MP Tony Crook, before the close of nominations on Tuesday.

While the party's policy is to not name nominees, one that is known is William "Chub" Witham, who worked as a geologist in the Goldfields and is well known in the Great Southern region.

The successful candidate will be ratified at the State Council meeting on May 25.

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US boy, 5, accidentally shoots sister dead

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD boy playing with a rifle given to him as a gift accidentally shot dead his younger sister, officials say, thrusting the issue of US gun violence back into the spotlight.

The boy's two-year-old sister was pronounced dead after being rushed to a hospital following the shooting on Tuesday in rural Kentucky, police said.

Cumberland County Coroner Gary White on Wednesday identified the girl as Caroline Starks and said the children's mother was cleaning the house at the time and had stepped outside onto the porch.

"She said no more than three minutes had went by and she actually heard the rifle go off. She ran back in and found the little girl," White said.

The .22 calibre rifle had been given to the boy last year and was kept in the corner of a room. The parents didn't realise a shell had been left in it.

"It's a Crickett," White told the Lexington Herald-Leader. "It's a little rifle for a kid. ...The little boy's used to shooting the little gun."

An autopsy was set to be conducted but White said he expects the shooting will be ruled accidental.

"Just one of those crazy accidents," White said.

"Down in Kentucky where we're from, you know, guns are passed down from generation to generation," White said. "You start at a young age with guns for hunting and everything."

What is more unusual than a child having a gun, he said, is "that a kid would get shot with it."

The Crickett is just one of many child-sized rifles on the market and is sold with the tag line 'My First Rifle.'

It comes in a number of child-friendly barrel designs and colours, including hot pink for little girls. A host of accessories are also available, like story books and a gun-toting beanie baby of the rifle's mascot, a cartoonish cricket.

"It's a normal way of life, and it's not just rural Kentucky, it's rural America - hunting and shooting and sport fishing. It starts at an early age," said Cumberland County Judge Executive John Phelps. "There's probably not a household in this county that doesn't have a gun."

In Cumberland County, as elsewhere in Kentucky, local newspapers feature photos of children proudly displaying their kills, including turkey and deer.

It was the second fatal shooting involving minors in America this week.

The Anchorage Daily News reported that a five-year-old girl in a remote Alaska community had been shot and killed by her eight-year-old brother on Monday. The circumstances of the shooting were not immediately clear.

The United States has been embroiled in a heated debate over gun control and gun culture in the wake of a horrific December shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut that killed 26 young children and educators.

President Barack Obama has pushed for tougher federal gun laws to require universal background checks on gun buyers and called for a ban on assault weapons like the one used in Newtown.

But last month, his background check proposal - condemned by the powerful National Rifle Association as an infringement on Americans' constitutional right "to keep and bear arms" - failed to muster the necessary 60 votes needed to clear the US Senate.

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Telstra maintains earnings guidance

Telstra has maintained its full-year earnings guidance and is aiming to lift dividends over time. Source: AAP

AUSTRALIA'S biggest telco, Telstra, has maintained its full-year earnings guidance and is aiming to lift dividends over time.

Telstra said on Wednesday that it expects to pay fully franked dividends totalling 28 cents per share in fiscal 2013, in line with prior years.

"We have continued revenue, profit and customer growth," Telstra deputy chief financial officer Mark Hall told a Macquarie Australia equities conference in Sydney.

"Our strategic focus remains unchanged, and, most importantly, we are on track for full-year guidance."

Telstra shares had lifted two cents to $5.00 by 1410 AEST - around their highest range since July 2005, according to IRESS data.

Mr Hall said the unchanged guidance for 2013 included low single-digit growth for both total income and EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation), and a capex (capital expenditure) to sales ratio of 15 per cent.

Mr Hall said Telstra's outlook for EBITDA growth was at the top end of its guidance range.

Telstra aimed to ensure that its dividend remains fully franked, and subject to board approval, to increase it over time.

The telco was constrained from increasing a fully franked dividend at the moment by its franking account balance.

"Our key focus operationally is to grow the business over time, which would provide the opportunity to increase our franking balance and then give us the capacity to grow dividends," Mr Hall said.

Mr Hall said Telstra was investing $1.2 billion in its wireless network this fiscal year and Telstra's 4G network would cover 66 per cent of the population by June this year.

Capacity was critical, with the average Australian now spending 12 hours per week accessing the internet on a mobile device.

Most customers were using their smartphone to watch video content.

Mr Hall said that in the third quarter of the financial year, Telstra's net customer numbers had grown across all mobile categories.

Telstra's 4G network now had 2.1 million customers, including 1.4 million handsets; 150,000 tablets; 370,000 dongles; and 225,000 wifi hotspots.

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Mount Fuji may get World Heritage status

JAPAN'S iconic Mount Fuji looks likely to win recognition as a World Heritage site.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs issued a notice on Wednesday saying Mount Fuji was recommended for World Heritage status by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a body affiliated with UNESCO.

Formal approval is expected in June at a World Heritage Committee meeting in Cambodia.

A collection of cultural sites in Kamakura, a scenic town near Tokyo that once was the nation's capital, were not recommended.

Mount Fuji would be Japan's 13th cultural World Heritage site. The 3776-metre volcanic peak is ringed by lakes, national parks, temples and shrines. It rises from the Pacific coast and is seen as a sacred part of Japan's cultural landscape both in Buddhist and indigenous Shinto traditions.

About 300,000 people follow religious pilgrims of centuries past in climbing Mount Fuji each year, according to the Japan National Tourism Organisation, most of them crowding into a brief summer climbing season.

Local officials are already pondering how to improve traffic access and other facilities to accommodate an anticipated increase in visitors, while preserving the area's natural beauty.

"It's crucial that we preserve all the vantage points from which we can view Mount Fuji," Shoji Watai, an expert on a cultural preservation panel of Fujinomiya city, one of several towns near the mountain

The news pushed shares in Fuji Kyuko Co., a railway that serves the area, up 16 per cent to their highest level since 1991.

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Nigeria bloodbath cover up: rights group

WITH satellite images showing massive destruction in the Nigerian town of Baga, Human Rights Watch says it fears the military is trying to cover up abuses that should be investigated.

Clashes between soldiers and Boko Haram Islamists have sparked massive fires leaving nearly half the town destroyed.

The Red Cross says 187 people were killed in the fighting, while an area senator puts the toll at 228.

The military has pushed back aggressively against these reports and fiercely denies claims soldiers fired on civilians or deliberately torched scores of homes.

After meeting with senior military officials tasked with probing the carnage, President Goodluck Jonathan said on Tuesday "there is a lot of misinformation being peddled about the situation".

He says the reported death tolls "cannot be substantiated" and it is impossible that more than 1000 homes were destroyed.

"Satellite images of the town analysed by Human Rights Watch ... identify 2275 destroyed buildings, the vast majority likely residences, with another 125 severely damaged," the rights group said in a statement on Wednesday.

On its website, it posted images depicting aerial shots of the town on April 6 against those of the same neighbourhoods on April 26, 10 days after the clashes.

The before-and-after images appear to show scores of newly burnt buildings.

"The glaring discrepancies between the facts on the ground and statements by senior military officials raise concerns that they tried to cover up military abuses," the group added.

Human Rights Watch further called on the International Criminal Court to probe the events in Baga as part of the preliminary investigation the court launched in 2010.

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Spanish inflation falls as demand dries up

SPAIN has reported a fall in annual inflation in April as energy costs tumbled and demand dried up in the recession-hit economy.

Consumer prices over the year to April climbed just 1.5 per cent, after a 2.6-per cent advance the previous month, according to preliminary data from the National Statistics Institute released on Monday.

When compared with March, prices in the eurozone's fourth largest economy were up just 0.1 per cent.

Falling fuel and electricity prices dragged down the annual inflation rate, which was adjusted to smooth out the impact of seasonal blips, the institute said.

Spain's inflation rate shot higher after the government raised the sales tax in September last year so as to boost state revenues and help curb the annual public deficit.

But prices have been kept in check by the feeble demand for goods and services in the shrinking economy, which has left more than 27 per cent of the workforce searching for a job.

Rafael Pampillon, economist at IE Business School, tipped a decline in retail sales in April after a "spectacular fall" in March, when they plunged by 8.9 per cent after correcting for seasonal variations.

"These small shops and supermarkets are competing in a ferocious market. And to be able to compete and sell when demand has collapsed, when consumption falls, they have to cut prices. There is no choice," Pampillon said.

"As long as the Spanish economy remains in recession, it is unlikely that inflation will able to continue rising," the analyst said, adding however that he did not expect Spain to fall into deflation.

Spain has been battling recession since the end of 2011 and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's right-leaning government is forecasting 1.3-per cent economic contraction in 2013. The unemployment rate is expected to stay above 25 per cent until 2016.

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Bangladesh garment industry calls for meet

BANGLADESHI textile bosses have pleaded with Western clothing giants to keep doing business with them after nearly 400 people died in a factory collapse as hopes of finding more survivors faded.

The tragedy has once again focused attention on the poor safety conditions in the $US20 billion ($A19.53 billion) Bangladeshi garment industry, which is the world's second biggest after China.

Britain's Primark and Spain's Mango have acknowledged their products were made in the block. Italy's Benetton acknowledged having its clothes made in Rana Plaza recently, but claimed it was a "one-time order".

Worried that Western firms could look elsewhere, manufacturers met with representatives of leading brand names on Monday in a bid to assure them about safety standards.

Shahidullah Azim, a vice president of the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association which represents more than 4500 factories, said firms such as H&M, Gap, C&A and Li and Fung would be present at the meeting in Dhaka.

"We want to assure them that we're taking action to prevent a repeat of such tragedies," said Azim.

"We'll seek their understanding and will also request them not to cancel orders and shipments," he told AFP. "We need their help - they are part of us."

A fire at another factory last November in the industrial hub of Ashulia, where clothing for the likes of Walmart was being made, killed 111 people.

The industry accounts for 80 per cent of the country's exports and more than 40 per cent of the country's industrial workforce.

A typical textile worker earns less than $40 a month, with most working around 10 hours a day, six days a week.

Managers at all of the country's garment factories gave workers the weekend off in the hope that anger over the disaster would subside.

But police and unions said there was a mass walk-out in Ashulia, which is on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, soon after the reopening on Monday morning and workers then began a protest march.

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European stocks advance on Italy news

EUROPEAN stock markets have risen, with sentiment bolstered by a new government in Italy, while investors also eyed this week's upcoming interest rate decisions, dealers say.

In late morning deals on Monday, London's FTSE 100 index of top companies added 0.01 per cent to 6,427.29 points, Frankfurt's DAX 30 gained 0.39 per cent to 7,845.32 points and the Paris CAC 40 rose 0.72 per cent to 3,837.67.

The euro hit a one-week high at $US1.3100. It later stood at $US1.3081, up from $US1.3029 late in New York on Friday. The US dollar dipped to Y97.80 from Y97.99.

Milan's FTSE Mib stocks index meanwhile jumped 1.43 per cent to 16,802.38 points as the market also won support after a successful bond auction.

"It's a nice start of what is definitely going to be an interesting week," said Gekko Markets analyst Anita Paluch.

"Markets are in green led by Italian optimism, where newly sworn government is set to tackle country's economic problems."

Italian borrowing rates fell sharply in a five- and 10-year debt auction on Monday, after the swearing-in of a new coalition government ended a two-month stalemate and brought fresh hope to the recession-hit country.

The government raised 3 billion euros ($A3.84 billion) in 10-year bonds at a rate of 3.94 per cent compared with 4.66 per cent on March 27.

Italy also raised three billion euros in bonds due to mature in 2018 at a rate of 2.84 per cent, compared with 3.65 per cent at the last similar auction on the same date.

"Yields on five and 10-year debt fell to two and a half year lows at the debt auction, a clear signal that investors feel much more relaxed about the situation in Italy than they have for a long time," noted Alpari analyst Craig Erlam.

Later this week, on Thursday, the European Central Bank will unveil its latest interest rate decision.

Most analysts predict that the guardian of the euro will cut its key interest rate, which is already at an all-time low level of 0.75 per cent.

The ECB may also decide to launch new measures to kick-start bank lending to businesses.

Also this week, on Wednesday, the US Federal Reserve will announce the outcome of its latest monetary policy meeting.

"The main focus this week will be on the Fed and ECB but as recent economic numbers have painted a fairly moribund picture of global economy investors will be predicting a dovish tone from policy makers," said Mike McCudden, head of derivatives at online stockbroker Interactive Investor.

Adding pressure on the ECB to make moves to boost the economy was data showing confidence in the 17-state eurozone fell sharply in April.

The combined reading of business and consumer confidence, released by the European Commission, fell 1.5 points from March to 88.6 points because of an especially souring mood in the services sector.

European Union-wide, the index fell even more strongly, down 1.8 points to 89.7 points, the data showed.

"April's (commission) consumer and business survey supports other evidence that the eurozone is experiencing its longest recession on record," said Jennifer McKeown of Capital Economics.

In earlier Monday deals, Asian equities were mixed after US economic growth data came in below forecast owing to deep federal spending cuts.

With Tokyo and Shanghai closed and the May Day bank holiday coming up on Wednesday, trading was quiet, while there were few other catalysts to drive activity.

Hong Kong rose 0.15 per cent and Sydney closed up 0.56 per cent, while Seoul ended down 0.20 per cent.

The main focus was last Friday's release in Washington of data showing the world's biggest economy expanded 2.5 per cent in the January-March quarter.

While the figures from the Commerce Department marked a solid rebound from 0.4 per cent growth in the previous three months, they were lower than the 2.8 per cent economists had predicted.

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