Europe shares hit 3-week closing high, telecoms up

LONDON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - European shares edged higher to hit a three-week closing high on Thursday, with telecom shares leading the advance after soothing earnings results and airlines gaining ground on merger news. The FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares provisionally ended up 0.1 percent at 1,014.97 points, the highest close since Oct. 21. The index, which slumped 45 percent last year, is up 22 percent in 2009 and has surged 57 percent since hitting a record low in March. Telecom shares were the top gainers after Britain's BT Group increased its outlook for the full year and Telefonica said its recession-hit Spanish business was shrinking more slowly. BT Group rose 3.7 percent and Telefonica was 1.1 percent higher.

TeliaSonera rose 6.2 percent after the Nordic region's biggest telecom operator and Alfa Group said they would combine their Eurasian mobile assets. "I am fundamentally sceptical, but the market still has short-term underlying positive bias," said Giuseppe-Guido Amato, strategist at Lang & Schwarz. "We can get a setback here, but we have seen that we can recover very quickly after having a losing streak and that's a good sign," he added. The market also got support from data showing the number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless insurance fell for the second week in a row and the four-week moving average of claims was the lowest in nearly a year, pointing to improvements in the labour market. But oil producers fell, hurt by weak crude. BP , Royal Dutch Shell and Total slipped between 0.4 and 0.9 percent. (Reporting by Atul Prakash) Keywords: MARKETS EUROPE STOCKS/CLOSE ([e-mail]; [phone]; Reuters Messaging: [e-mail]) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2009. All rights reserved.

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