Germany has at last introduced a minimum wage.

An hourly rate of €8.50 will come into effect from January 2015.

A large shipment of cocaine hidden in dozens of boxes of bananas has been seized by Portugal's police.

The unexpected ‘Columbia’s Finest’ promotion from Lidl involved the concealment of 198 packets of cocaine weighing in at 237 Kilos.

Socialist and Communist MPs today raised in parliament the matter of Loulé’s medical emergency unit, already closed twice this week due to a lack of qualified staff.

On Tuesday, and again today, the unit that has been confirmed as the responsibility of the Algarve Central Hospital group, was closed for several hours with patients asked to make their way to Faro hospital.

The privatisation of national airline TAP will only proceed when the government feels that "the proposals are as advantageous for the interests of the country, as for the company."

Minister for the Economy Pires de Lima today said there is "no rush and no urgency" in the privatisation of the airline, "It will only occur when all the conditions for its success are reasonably assured."

Makeshift refugee camps in Calais are being cleared by French police.

Some 1,000 refugees are estimated to be living rough on the northern French coast, with around 650 near Calais.

A British regulator is investigating Facebook to determine if it broke data protection laws in its controversial “emotion” study.

Facebook studied 700,000 of its users without their consent in a psychological project. It manipulated news feeds by making either positive or negative messages predominate to see if recipients adopted the same emotions.

Norwegian Air Shuttle is offering trips twice a week from Gatwick to Los Angeles, to Florida and to New York.

Not since Freddie Laker's “no frills” venture ended in the early 1980s has a budget carrier attempted to challenge over airlines on the London to New York route.

Of the lynx bred in captivity so far, all have been released in secret locations in Spain but after today’s signing of a national programme to re-introduce the cats in Portugal, an autumn release has been authorised - if there are enough rabbits.

Miguel de Castro Neto, Secretary of State for Nature Conservation, said today that the goal is to have a "broad consensus" to reintroduce the most endangered feline in the world back to its natural habitat in Portugal.