'Rainha da Brisa,'  registered in Fuseta, was scheduled to return to the port of Olhão at around 13.00 on Monday. A sea and air search on Monday afternoon revealed nothing of its whereabouts but after further searches on Tuesday, the boat is assumed to have sunk and the men to have drowned.

The 7.5 metre fishing boat set off with two fishermen on board, aged 35 and 58, and was listed officially as missing on Monday afternoon. The search and rescue operation included a Navy ship, a launch, a lifeboat, members of the Coast Guard and a helicopter from the Portuguese Air Force.

A company in Gondomar has reached the end of its tether over a €2,500 invoice to Faro council that after 4 years remained unpaid.

One of the council’s bank accounts has been frozen and municipal property, an apartment, was seized by order of the court until the debt is settled.

A poll by Visit Britain found that the palace is the top attraction for tourists in 15 out of 19 countries surveyed. People from Australia, the USA, China, Italy and Mexico all voted it number one.

Snatching a view of London from the new Shard building or from the London Eye placed second.

Fraudsters are at it again, this time producing counterfeit French wines with high price tags.

Bottles being passed off as vintage Bordeaux are in fact simply counterfeit plonk.

The huge fraud was exposed by French customs and fraud agents. Thousands of bottles were shown to be fake at a specialist lab in Bordeaux, operated by the country’s finance ministry.

France is expressing increasing agitation about the increase of English language on French TV and radio.

In its latest bid to protect the French language, the country’s watchdog is to hold a debate on how to counter the English language invasion.

English has long had a habit of slipping into French broadcasting, but the trend has heightened with the arrival of reality TV and more American series being shown.

Portugal’s globe-trotting Economy Minister, António Pires de Lima, started an exhaustive roadshow today in New York on a mission to attract investment and pitch Portugal as "a privileged place” in which to do business.

"The goal at this point is fundamentally to explain the extraordinary progress that Portugal has made in its adjustment programme. Let's finish this bailout process in June 2014 and highlight what we can offer to different types of investors which can consider Portugal as a privileged space for investment, not only as we are in Europe, but also Portugal acts as a gateway to many African countries," said Pires de Lima in New York on the first leg of his US mission.

Water reaching one fifth of the Portuguese population is controlled by Spanish or Chinese companies. The Government does not agree with these municipal agreements as it messes up its plan to privatise Portugal’s water supply industry.

More than 2.3 million people in Portugal get their water from Spanish or Chinese suppliers and 1.3 million people are supplied by water whose distribution is carried out by companies where most of the capital is foreign.

Silves Camera already is drawing up plans to attack insects and prevent new pests from ruining many holidays as happened this summer in Armação de Pêra as an squadrons of mosquitoes attacked tourists and locals alike in an indiscriminate raids across from their marshy breeding grounds.

The Algarve municipality does not want a recurrence and the new mayor of Silves, Rosa Palma, is already taking steps to ensure that the technicians from the Regional Health Administration and from the Portuguese Environment Agency are in tune and on time with help and opinions as to what went wrong this summer and how to stop it happening again.