Housing prices rising, but not a boom

NEW figures show housing prices are on the rise.

Australian Property Monitors said on Wednesday in its quarterly housing report that the median price of a house rose by 3.2 per cent over the year to March.

Over the same time, the price of a home unit was up by only 0.7 per cent. (The median is the value in the middle when prices are ranked from high to low.)

The slow rises can be seen in other measures, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics' established house price index, which grew by 2.1 per cent through 2012.

Over the same year, the bureau's consumer price index rose by 2.2 per cent.

So it's not a boom.

Far from it.

And the Reserve Bank of Australia wants to make sure it stays that way.

In a speech in Sydney on Tuesday, the Reserve Bank of Australia's head of financial stability, Luci Ellis, twice warned that the central bank did not want a return to the boom times seen a decade ago.

Her wish is being granted, at least so far.

But the decline starting in late 2010 and extending into early 2012 has ended.

The only questions are how steep, and how durable, the pickup will be.

Dr Ellis thinks the big shift to a low-inflation economy generated a one-off surge in housing prices, as lower interest rates enabled banks to make bigger loans.

"But the transition does end after a while, and it is our assessment that it has now ended," she said.

And that would mean slower growth in prices from here and, as a result, a greater likelihood that fluctuations around that trend would bring falls - rather than just slower growth - in prices, she said.

The recent behaviour of the ABS house price series bears that out.

The index, which in various incarnations goes back as far as 1986, had recorded only two annual falls in prices before the global crisis in 2008.

One was in 1992, but prices fell only 0.2 per cent despite the major recession and double-digit home loan interest rates.

The other was in 1996, but that drop was still only 0.9 per cent even though the RBA had nudged the standard home loan rate up from 8.75 per cent to 10.5 per cent.

More recently, annual falls have been recorded in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012.

Of course, for every rise or fall in housing prices there are winners and losers.

Homebuyers like the falls while home owners, including investors, like to see rises.

But this new environment could be seen as the worst of both worlds.

Homebuyers can look forward to persistently high housing prices, but investors will have to do without the prospect of the kind of recurrent booms seen over the past 30 years.

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Four UK soldiers reinterred 96 years on

FOUR British soldiers have been laid to rest with full military honours in northern France, nearly a century after they were killed in action in World War I.

The soldiers were interred in the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) Cemetery at Ecoust-Saint-Mein near the northern town of Arras in a ceremony attended by relatives of two of the four men who it was possible to identify.

Lieutenant John Harold Pritchard and Private Christopher Douglas Elphick were both killed during an attack by German forces near Bullecourt on the Hindenburg Line on the morning of May 15, 1917.

Their bodies were discovered with two other sets of remains in 2009 when a local farmer was clearing one of his fields.

Pritchard, 31 at the time of his death, was identified by a silver identity bracelet, and Elphick, 28, by a signet ring bearing his initials.

A former chorister and head boy at St Paul's cathedral school, Pritchard had joined the HAC as a reservist in 1909 and was part of the first wave of British soldiers to be sent into action when war broke out in 1914.

Injured in 1915, he could have opted for a desk job in London but chose to return to France, surviving the horrors of the Somme in 1916 before being slain as he led his men into a battle in which they were almost all killed.

Elphick, an insurance clerk, had joined up in 1915 and arrived in France in November 1916, three months after the birth of his son, Ronald Douglas, who was to survive service with the HAC during World War II but died before the discovery of his father's remains.

It is understood DNA samples have been taken to enable positive identification of the unknown soldiers should any relatives come forward in the future.

Hundreds of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Great War were buried in unmarked graves across the swathe of northern France and Belgium that witnessed the bloodiest fighting.

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UK fails again to deport radical cleric

THE British government has suffered a fresh setback in its long-running legal battle to deport radical preacher Abu Qatada, but insists it will not give up trying to send him to Jordan.

The Court of Appeal refused ministers permission to challenge its ruling last month that the terror suspect, also known as Omar Othman, cannot be deported to Jordan because of human rights concerns.

"The Court of Appeal has refused permission" to the government to take the case to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, a spokesman for the Judicial Office told AFP.

However, the refusal is not fatal to the case because ministers are entitled to ask the Supreme Court directly to hear their appeal -- and officials indicated they would do exactly that.

"We are disappointed with the Court of Appeal's decision but will now request permission to appeal directly from the Supreme Court," a spokesman for the interior ministry said.

"The government remains committed to deporting this dangerous man and we continue to work with the Jordanians to address the outstanding legal issues preventing deportation."

There is huge frustration in London over the failure to deport a man considered "an exceptionally high-risk terrorist", who has successfully blocked his removal for eight years.

A Spanish judge once branded him the right-hand man in Europe of Osama bin Laden, although Abu Qatada denies ever meeting the late al-Qaeda leader.

The preacher was convicted in Jordan of terrorism charges in his absence, and is likely to face a retrial if he is returned.

But the European Court of Human Rights last year blocked his deportation over fears that evidence obtained through torture would be used against him in the new trial.

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Sydney protest over uni Dalai Lama snub

STUDENTS will protest at Sydney University on Wednesday over what they claim is the uni's withdrawal of support for a talk by the Dalai Lama.

The university says it did not receive any official request for an appearance by the Tibetan spiritual leader.

However, emails from the uni's vice-chancellor Michael Spence referred to a decision to "withdraw support for hosting His Holiness the Dalai Lama's planned speech", the ABC reported last week.

The report led to allegations that the university, which has close ties to the Chinese government, dropped the invitation for political reasons.

The Dalai Lama no longer makes political statements but is blamed by the Chinese government for the continued self-immolation of Tibetan monks.

The protest, organised by Students for a Free Tibet, will be held at 10am (AEST).

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China bird flu spreads to new province

CHINA says the H7N9 bird flu has spread to a new area as it confirmed the first case in the eastern province of Shandong in an outbreak which has so far killed 22 people.

Since China announced on March 31 that the virus had been discovered in humans for the first time, most cases have been confined to the commercial hub Shanghai and three nearby provinces, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui.

Beijing and the central province of Henan have also reported cases.

The health ministry said a 36-year-old man living in Shandong's Zaozhuang city was confirmed to have the virus, according to a statement on its website.

That case and three other new ones bring the total number of confirmed infections to 108, according to official figures.

Experts fear the prospect of such a virus mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, which could then have the potential to trigger a pandemic.

But the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday there was still no evidence H7N9 was spreading in a "sustained" way between people in China, though it was possible some family members may have infected one another.

"Right now we do not see evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission", said Keiji Fukuda, a top WHO influenza expert in a team visiting China to study H7N9.

Health experts differentiate between "sustained" human-to-human transmission and limited transmission, in which family members or medical personnel caring for the ill become infected.

Chinese health officials have acknowledged so-called "family clusters", where members of a single family have become infected, but have so far declined to put it down to human-to-human transmission.

The nine close contacts of the Shandong man were under medical observation, but so far were normal, the health ministry said.

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EU plan to buy rebel oil aggressive: Syria

A EUROPEAN Union plan to buy oil from rebel-held areas of Syria is illegal and an "act of aggression," the Syrian foreign ministry has warned in letters to the United Nations.

"In an unprecedented decision that contradicts international law and the UN Charter ... the European Union has decided to allow member states to import petrol ... under the pretext of supporting the opposition," state news agency SANA reported, citing the letters.

"It is an illegal decision and an act of aggression."

Syrian rebels fighting President President Bashar al-Assad's troops won a fresh boost on Monday when the European Union eased its oil embargo to let them exploit the resources they control.

But the EU decision raised a furious response in Damascus.

The EU will be trading "with the so-called opposition coalition, which represents no one in Syria," the letters to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council said.

The decision is an act of "complicity in the theft of resources that belong to the Syrian people, represented by the current, legitimate government," they added.

"The European Union is following its political and economic campaign that targets the national economy and the daily bread of Syrian citizens," the ministry said, referring to EU sanctions on the Assad regime.

EU ministers' decision to ease the 2011 oil embargo will enable companies on a case-by-case basis not only to import Syrian crude but also to export oil production technology and investment cash to areas in the hands of the opposition.

Under the deal, European firms seeking to import Syrian crude or invest in the energy sector would ask for authorisation from their government, which in turn would confer with Syria's opposition National Coalition to secure its agreement.

At the start of the revolt that broke out in March 2011, Syria's oil production was slashed by almost two thirds, falling to 130,000 barrels a day in March, just 0.1 per cent of the world's total production, according to the International Energy Agency's latest estimates.

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Two Iraq ministers quit after deadly clash

TWO Sunni members of the Iraqi cabinet have resigned after security forces moved in against Sunni protesters in the north of the country, sparking clashes that left dozens dead, officials say.

"The minister of education, Mohammed Ali Tamim, resigned from his post after the Iraqi army forces broke into the area of the sit-in in Kirkuk" province, an official from Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak's office said.

"The resignation is final, and there will be no going back."

Parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi later said at a news conference that science and technology minister Abdulkarim al-Samarraie told him by phone that he too was quitting.

Clashes between security forces and protesters in the morning at a demonstration near Hawijah in north Iraq left 27 people dead, while 13 gunmen died carrying out subsequent revenge attacks on army positions.

Later in the day, protesters west of Baghdad killed six soldiers and kidnapped a seventh, security officers said.

The resignations bring the number of ministers to leave Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet since March to four.

Agriculture minister Ezzedine al-Dawleh quit on March 8 after a protester was killed in north Iraq, and finance minister Rafa al-Essawi, some of whose bodyguards were arrested on terrorism charges in December, announced his resignation at an anti-government demonstration on March 1.

Protesters have taken to the streets in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq for more than four months, calling for the resignation of Maliki and decrying the alleged targeting of their minority community by the Shi'ite-led authorities.

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