The move to bail out two Italian banks for €5.2 billion last Friday (June 23rd) comes two days after the European Central Bank stated that Banca Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca were “failing or likely to fail. “

Italy’s Prime Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, said the bailout was needed to protect savers and ensure "the good health of our banking system" with the good assets be taken over by the Intesa Sanpaolo banking group whose branches and employees will be under new management on Monday morning but up to 4,000 job losses are predicted.

India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, arrived in Portugal on Saturday 24th June and praised the contribution of more than 65,000 of his countrymen living and working here.

Modi said that these were India’s “real ambassadors” and have enriched the culture of the country that they have made their home.

For those of us that thought Portugal’s privatised airline, TAP, was no fun anymore, the company run by Humberto Pedrosa and David Neeleman has gone retro and painted one of its Airbus A330-300s in a 1960s livery.

"We wanted to celebrate the journey that has been made so far with a very special paint job," said a TAP spokesman.

Portugal’s traditional childhood games may come from antiquity, from former colonies or from trading posts in far-flung places such as China and India.

Portimão Museum is hosting a new exhibition of games and toys, under the heading ‘Traditional Games - Remembering and Learning to Play,’ open from the evening of July 1st.

Seven Portuguese men aged between 46 and 58, all from the western Algarve, were caught red-handed at dawn on Sunday as they unloaded 2 tonnes of Moroccan hashish.

The Portuguese authorities had been tracking the shipment and, by using night vision equipment, knew at which Sagres beach the criminals were going to collect the drug bales from the delivery boat.

The Pedrógão Grande fire officially was reported as extinguished mid-afternoon on Saturday, a week after it broke out.

Some 570 fire service personnel remain in the area, according to Miguel Cruz, from the National Civil Protection Agency, along with 214 vehicles as there are small pockets of fire within the perimeter that still need dealing with.

The surprising thing about today's  ‘scoop’ by the Daily Telegraph is that it has taken so long to reveal what hundreds of thousands of customers have known for years, that car rental companies are ripping-off customers over supposed ‘repairs’ that either overcharged or charged for several times for the same scratch of dent.

Europcar in the UK now stands accused of fraudulently overcharging customers with Trading Standards officers raiding the French company’s UK head office last week.

Angolan Vice President Manuel Vicente will face trial in Portugal over allegations he bribed a magistrate to drop two investigations against him, according to a Wednesday ruling cited in Portuguese media.

Vicente, who was the president of Angolan national oil company Sonangol at the time of the alleged crimes, is accused of bribery, money laundering and document falsification, the public prosecutor's office said, according to Portugal's main news agency Lusa.