One-third of anaesthetists trained in Portugal have chosen to go private or move abroad.
Over the past three years, 145 specialist anaesthetists were trained in Portugal with only 99 then joining medical teams at NHS hospitals.
Caixa Geral de Depósitos, owned by the people for the people, is to shut a further 75 branches by the end of June.
Caixa's bank closure plan lists 77 sites due to axed, but no final decision has been made for two of them.
Today's anti-oil demonstrators in Faro expected at least the usual platitudes and carefully crafted deceptions from the Minister for the Environment but they ended the day in disappointment as Pedro Matos Fernandes failed to show up.
The minister was scheduled to take part in a discussion at the regional planning and development body, CCDR-Algarve, while also taking the opportunity of celebrating World Environment Day.
Campaign groups long have argued that tolls imposed on drivers using Portugal's formerly free SCUT roads, including the Algarve’s Via do Infante A22 motorway, should greatly be reduced or, better still, cancelled.
The government has made small downward adjustments in the past but now has lopped a sizeable 30% off the fees paid to use these roads – but only for Heavy Goods Vehicles which represent currently just 3% of the motorway's traffic.
Attaining news heights in government cynicism, the Minister of the Environment and other members of the Government will be in Faro on June 5th to celebrate World Environment Day.
One of the Algarve’s ardent anti-oil associations, MALP is to take full advantage of the ill-timed and insulting visit by mounting a protest, next to the CCDR-Algarve’s majestic offices, in Praça da Liberdade, Faro.
Diver, biologist, conservationist and film maker, João Rodrigues, is creating a film dedicated to highlighting the desperate plight of the Algarve's Ria Formosa seahorse population.
Cavalos de Guerra (War Horses) is the title of a film and a book that points out that in 2001, there were an estimated two million seahorses in the Ria Formosa lagoon, now there are around 100,000, the decline due primarily to their illegal capture and onward sale to the Asian market.
Last weekend’s anti-hunger campaign by the Food Bank in the Algarve collected donations totalling 115 tons, down 10 tons from last May’s campaign.
At the national level, the Food Banks Against Hunger raised 1,602 tonnes of food, down 243 tonnes from the previous year, which according to the Federation of Food Banks can be explained "mainly by the long holiday weekend, which meant that many people were away from their usual places of residence which changed their usual buying habits."
The National Health Service in the Algarve is paying double or treble the hourly rate to attract doctors to work in regional hospitals.
Diário de Notícias looked at the figures for doctors employed by the HNS and found that some doctors earn more than €50 per hour, when the maximum established by law is €39.
