Rugby-Burgess signs deal to return to Australia with Rebels

April 15 (Reuters) - Former Wallabies half-back Luke Burgess has signed a two-year deal with the Australian Rugby Union and will return from France to play with the Melbourne Rebels, the ARU said on Monday.

The 29-year-old, who has been capped 37 times, would leave French Top 14 club Toulouse at the end of the current campaign to revive his career in Australia, the ARU statement said.

"I'm looking forward to getting home, seeing a few familiar faces and resuming my career in Australia," Burgess said in the statement.

"Obviously representing my country again is a goal, but I'm also looking forward to linking up with the Rebels and playing my part in the ongoing development of the game in Melbourne."

Burgess, who helped the Rebels reach the final of the now-defunct Australian Rugby Championship in 2007, made his last appearance for Australia at the 2011 Rugby World Cup finals.

(Reporting by Amlan Chakraborty in New Delhi, editing by Peter Rutherford)

View the original article here

Positive signs lost to latest boat

IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.

Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.

An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.

There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.

It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".

The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".

The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".

For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.

Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.

China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.

"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.

And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.

In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.

Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.

Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.

But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.

Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."

I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)

Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.

WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.

"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."

The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.

But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.

The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.

It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.

Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.

Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."

But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.

In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want

an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."

Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

View the original article here

Some hopeful signs out of the Afghan army

CAMP THUNDER, Afghanistan (AP) — Gen. Mohammad Sharif Yaftali, commander of Afghanistan's 203rd Thunder Corps, looked happy as he sat down for lunch in his eastern command post near the border with Pakistan.

He had every reason to be smiling, as did his U.S. advisers.

His troops, he said, had just successfully completed a large-scale operation — code-named Azadi, or "freedom" — aimed at securing strategic highways leading out of Kabul and at clearing a region around the capital. Over the course of the 13-day sweep, his forces battled Taliban and other insurgents 20 times, killing at least 20.

Along the way, his officers sat down with tribal elders to win support for the military and set up local police forces to defend their villages from the Taliban. Separately, his troops successfully freed two Afghan soldiers kidnapped by militants.

It was all done without international troops. "We did the planning and everything ourselves," Yaftali beamed. "The coalition was there, but they did not fight with us. They just gave us advice. We are in the lead, we are no longer shoulder-to-shoulder."

Unlike past operations where American and coalition forces were fighting alongside Afghan soldiers or going into the field alone, both sides expressed a confidence in Afghanistan's army that was not present as little as one year ago.

There have been deep questions about the ability of the Afghan army to take the fight to the insurgency with international combat troops due to leave the country by the end of 2014.

It is not certain that the performance of the 203rd can be replicated in all the army corps around Afghanistan, or even at the brigade and battalion level. But if its ability to successfully carry out large-scale operations can be replicated across the army, then it offers hope the Afghans may be able to hold their own against the insurgency after 2014.

U.S. and coalition military officials say that overall, the nascent force is surpassing many of their expectations. They say it is far better prepared to fight alone than many people think and should be able to take over.

Canadian Brig. Gen. Thomas Putt, the director of the U.S.-led coalition's program for development of the Afghan security forces, said the Afghan troops were accelerating in their preparedness and "we have to rush to keep up."

"We are rushing to catch up in their rush to get at it," he said. "We have the delicious problem of being behind them."

Coalition officials point to continuing problems in logistics and equipment for the Afghan troops. But they say the forces' ability to work on their own is speedily improving. Five of Afghanistan's 26 brigades are now operating independently from the coalition, and 16 are working with only advisory support, said British Lt. Gen. Nick Carter, the second-in-command of the international coalition. Last year just one out of the 23 brigades then operational was able to operate independently.

The Afghan National Security Forces are supposed to finish taking the lead in security later this spring, with the coalition forces moving entirely to a training and advisory role. Already, Afghans are in the lead in more than 80 percent of the nation. According to NATO, the Afghan army now numbers over 175,000, about 12,000 shy of its goal, and has an annual attrition rate of 2.6 percent — higher than the target of 1.4 percent.

Afghan experts also warn of continuing difficulties, some tangible and some intangible.

Jawed Kohistani, an Afghan political and military analyst, said morale is low in a military force made up mostly of soldiers who joined only for the steady salary. He added that a lack of modern military equipment also poses problems.

"The Afghan security forces will face more challenges and won't be able to fulfill all the expectations of the international community or the Afghan people," Kohistani said.

Many of the brigades that are now able to operate independently are in the eastern part of Afghanistan and many are under Yaftali's command.

Yaftali's 203rd Corps in Gardez, the capital of eastern Paktia province, numbers 19,000 soldiers in four brigades. It is one of the largest of the army's six corps and is responsible for six eastern provinces, including two of the most active — Ghazni and Wardak.

The Azadi operation involved some 2,500 Afghan soldiers and police, operating in Ghazni and Zabol provinces, located on a strategic route connecting the capital, Kabul, with the southern province of Kandahar.

Nationwide, some 150,000 police are being trained by the coalition. They make up a large part of the 332,753-member Afghan National Security Forces but are gradually supposed to take the lead role in law enforcement and leave fighting the insurgency to the army.

During the Azadi operation, the army fought insurgents in more than 20 engagements, killing 20 of them and wounding 12. They also found 59 roadside mines. By comparison, two Afghan village police were killed and nine policemen and one soldier were wounded.

The coalition provided no combat support, said Col. Terry Cook, of the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division from Fort Bliss, Texas, and an adviser to Yaftali.

"They even did their own medical evacuations," he said.

"We are pretty good, we are in a better place. We can take the fight to the insurgents," Yaftali said.

Yaftali's sprawling base in Gardez has a regional training center, a logistical one, the best military hospital in the country, and soon will have its own air support when MI-17 helicopters are based there. It will probably be one of the places where the U.S. military stations advisers after 2014.

"It is amazing the progress they have made," said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Clarence Chinn, the deputy commanding general. His advisers have been working with Yaftali and his senior officers, but no Americans are on the front lines fighting the insurgents — they have left that completely to the Afghans.

"They are an extremely capable force and we are helping them with logistics and training. We are really shifting our effort," Cook said.

Putt said the coalition is now focusing on getting Afghan troops the equipment they need to be more effective. They include mortars at the company and battalion levels, and howitzers at the brigade level. The U.S. also recently announced it would buy an additional 30 Russian made MI-17 helicopters, some with gunship capabilities, to supplement the nearly 50 already acquired.

They are also working on training them on logistics, or as Putt said, the problem of "how do you sustain thousands of troops."

"If there is an Achilles heel, it is logistics, and we are working on it," Putt said.

But the fighting is taking its toll on the Afghan army.

Last week Taliban militants stormed an Afghan army outpost in Kunar province, on the border with Pakistan, and killed 13 soldiers in a five-hour gunbattle. Insurgents have been stepping up their attacks this spring as they try to take advantage of the rapid withdrawal of foreign forces.

More than 1,200 Afghan soldiers died in 2012 compared to more than 550 in 2011, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Brookings Institution. By comparison, coalition casualties have declined as they take forces off the battlefield — with 32 so far this year, 394 in 2012 and 543 in 2011.

About 660 militants were reported to have been killed by coalition and Afghan forces so far this year, compared with close to 3,000 militants last year. The NATO command does not issue reports on the number of insurgents its troops have killed, and Afghan military figures, from which the AP compiles its data, cannot be independently verified.

"People say that 2014 will provide challenges," Yaftali said. But, he predicted, the year the Afghan army takes the security lead will be far more important: "2013 is going to be the crucial year."

View the original article here

Positive signs lost to latest boat

IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.

Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.

An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.

There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.

It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".

The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".

The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".

For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.

Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.

China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.

"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.

And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.

In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.

Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.

Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.

But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.

Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."

I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)

Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.

WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.

"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."

The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.

But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.

The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.

It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.

Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.

Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."

But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.

In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want

an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."

Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

View the original article here

Positive signs lost to latest boat

IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.

Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.

An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.

There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.

It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".

The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".

The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".

For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.

Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.

China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.

"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.

And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.

In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.

Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.

Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.

But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.

Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."

I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)

Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.

WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.

"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."

The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.

But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.

The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.

It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.

Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.

Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."

But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.

In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want

an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."

Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

View the original article here

Positive signs lost to latest boat

IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.

Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.

An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.

There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.

It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".

The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".

The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".

For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.

Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.

China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.

"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.

And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.

In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.

Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.

Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.

But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.

Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."

I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)

Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.

WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.

"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."

The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.

But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.

The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.

It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.

Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.

Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."

But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.

In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want

an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."

Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

View the original article here

Canadian economy shows signs of recovery in January

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's hard-pressed economy showed signs of recovery in January, when the nation posted its best trade performance in almost a year and building permits eked out modest growth after the biggest two-month fall in 24 years.

Canada is struggling to cope with weak exports, tough competition, uncertain foreign markets and a strong Canadian dollar, which combined to produce a 0.2 percent drop in gross domestic product in December.

Exports grew faster than imports in January, when the trade deficit shrank to just C$237 million ($230 million), Statistics Canada said on Thursday.

The deficit - less than the C$600 million predicted by market operators - represented the best performance since a C$21 million trade surplus in March 2012. Statscan revised December's deficit to C$332 million from an initial C$901 million.

"The improvement in the trade picture, small as it may be, is an important first step for the Canadian economy this year," Francis Fong of TD Economics said in a note to clients. "After an undeniably weak 2012, exports are going to be increasingly looked to as a driver of growth, given that households and government are expected to moderate spending.

"Over the course of 2013 and through 2014, global economic growth should accelerate, particularly in the U.S., and this should provide Canada's export sector with the shot-in-the-arm it needs to post a more sustained recovery."

The data, along with figures that showed a widening trade deficit in the United States, helped push the Canadian dollar slightly higher. By 9.55 a.m. (1455 GMT) it was trading at C$1.0292 to the U.S. dollar, or 97.16 U.S. cents. It had closed at C$1.0315 versus the U.S. dollar on Wednesday.

January exports rose by 2.1 percent - the greatest month-on-month increase since the 4.3 percent jump seen in December 2011 - thanks mainly to higher volumes for crude oil and crude bitumen as well as precious metals.

Imports increased by 1.9 percent on higher volumes, mainly due to higher shipments of energy products. Imports of metal ores and industrial machinery also grew.

"Higher imports might suggest more robust domestic activity in the month. What argues against this, however, is that much of the monthly rise in import volumes was due to energy and metal ores. Other key import categories were not as strong," wrote Derek Holt and Dov Zigler, economists at Scotia Capital.

Exports to the United States - which took 74.2 percent of all Canadian exports in January - rose by 2.6 percent while imports were up 2.1 percent. As a result, Canada's trade surplus with the United States increased to C$4.25 billion from C$4.03 billion in December.

Separately, Statscan said the value of Canadian building permits edged up by 1.7 percent in January after posting the biggest two-month fall in almost a quarter century.

The increase, less than the 5.3 percent expected by market analysts, follows revised drops of 10.4 percent in December and 16.5 percent in November.

Canada's booming housing industry, boosted by low interest rates, helped the economy recover from the worst of the 2008-09 recession. In a bid to head off a possible bubble, the government stepped in last year to clamp down on the sector with tighter mortgage rules. This has since cooled the market.

($1=$1.03 Canadian)

(Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson; and Peter Galloway)

View the original article here

No trauma signs on body of Canadian woman found in L.A. hotel water tank

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The autopsy of a 21-year-old Canadian student found dead in a water tank atop a historic Los Angeles hotel turned up no fatal wounds, offering no clear answers to her puzzling last days and death, coroner's officials said on Friday.

The inconclusive finding means that further tests must be conducted to determine a cause of death for Elisa Lam, who went missing from the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles under suspicious circumstances in late January.

Lam's body was found floating in one of four large water tanks on the hotel's roof on Tuesday after guests complained of low water pressure in their rooms. Health officials have issued a do-not-drink order for hotel water until it is tested.

Police have said that detectives had been hoping the autopsy would help determine if her death was the result of an accident or foul play.

"They didn't find any bullet holes, they didn't find any stab wounds to my knowledge. So then you've got to go to the next step," Los Angeles County Coroner's spokesman Ed Winter said.

He said coroner's investigators would conduct toxicology tests to establish if Lam was on any medication at the time of her death and if it was at therapeutic levels. Her organs will also be studied to determine if she suffered from any medical issues.

"You see if in fact there were any heart issues, did she die of hypothermia, did she drown," said Winter. "Were her lungs filled with water?"

Lam, a college student from Vancouver, British Columbia, was last seen by staff at the hotel on January 31 and detectives had characterized her disappearance as suspicious. She had been traveling alone but in regular contact with her family in Canada.

Police say the reason for Lam's visit to Southern California was unclear but that her final destination was expected to have been Santa Cruz in central California.

Security video taken in an elevator of the hotel and released by police last week showed her acting strangely, hiding in a corner, pushing multiple buttons and repeatedly peering around the elevator doors into a hallway.

Her body was discovered in one of the four large, cylindrical tanks supplying water to guest rooms at the art deco hotel, which was built in the 1920s and is considered a local landmark.

Local public radio KPCC reported that the hotel has had dark chapters in its long history, including murders in the '20s and '30s and a woman who leapt from a window in the 1960s.

The radio station said that two serial killers were known to have stayed there in the 1980s: Richard Ramirez, known as the "Night Stalker," and Austrian murderer Jack Unterweger.

Firefighters removed the remains by cutting through the side of the tank under a canopy that shielded them from news helicopters overhead.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Dan Grebler)

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No trauma signs on body of Canadian woman found in L.A. hotel water tank

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The autopsy of a 21-year-old Canadian student found dead in a water tank atop a historic Los Angeles hotel turned up no fatal wounds, offering no clear answers to her puzzling last days and death, coroner's officials said on Friday.

The inconclusive finding means that further tests must be conducted to determine a cause of death for Elisa Lam, who went missing from the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles under suspicious circumstances in late January.

Lam's body was found floating in one of four large water tanks on the hotel's roof on Tuesday after guests complained of low water pressure in their rooms. Health officials have issued a do-not-drink order for hotel water until it is tested.

Police have said that detectives had been hoping the autopsy would help determine if her death was the result of an accident or foul play.

"They didn't find any bullet holes, they didn't find any stab wounds to my knowledge. So then you've got to go to the next step," Los Angeles County Coroner's spokesman Ed Winter said.

He said coroner's investigators would conduct toxicology tests to establish if Lam was on any medication at the time of her death and if it was at therapeutic levels. Her organs will also be studied to determine if she suffered from any medical issues.

"You see if in fact there were any heart issues, did she die of hypothermia, did she drown," said Winter. "Were her lungs filled with water?"

Lam, a college student from Vancouver, British Columbia, was last seen by staff at the hotel on January 31 and detectives had characterized her disappearance as suspicious. She had been traveling alone but in regular contact with her family in Canada.

Police say the reason for Lam's visit to Southern California was unclear but that her final destination was expected to have been Santa Cruz in central California.

Security video taken in an elevator of the hotel and released by police last week showed her acting strangely, hiding in a corner, pushing multiple buttons and repeatedly peering around the elevator doors into a hallway.

Her body was discovered in one of the four large, cylindrical tanks supplying water to guest rooms at the art deco hotel, which was built in the 1920s and is considered a local landmark.

Local public radio KPCC reported that the hotel has had dark chapters in its long history, including murders in the '20s and '30s and a woman who leapt from a window in the 1960s.

The radio station said that two serial killers were known to have stayed there in the 1980s: Richard Ramirez, known as the "Night Stalker," and Austrian murderer Jack Unterweger.

Firefighters removed the remains by cutting through the side of the tank under a canopy that shielded them from news helicopters overhead.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Dan Grebler)

View the original article here