As Brussels prepares to impose a limit on fees paid by business customers to their banks for processing electronic payments the head of the Portuguese Association of Banks, Faria de Oliveira, said today that banks may simply charge their customers to withdraw cash from the ATM network.

Anything that puts banking costs up will impact on profitability, so revenue will have to be obtained from another route, commented Faria de Oliveira, guaranteeing himself even fewer fans from the general banking public who will see little correlation between the banks traditional game of gouging their business customers, and a planned fee structure for customers accessing their own cash.

Growth in the eurozone has slowed yet again, leading to hopes for recovery losing momentum.

In the third quarter of the year, fragile growth was down to 0.1% as the eurozone average. November, however, brought a slowdown.

Authorities in Germany fear that hundreds of killings could be linked to a neo-Nazi group.

Officials there are undertaking a re-examination of hundreds of cases of murder and attempted murder over the last twenty years to see if they are linked to far-right extremists.

The ‘Man in the Opera Hat’, a Cubist work in gouache by Picasso, is valued at $1 million.

It has been placed in a Christmas charity raffle with tickets on sale for €100.

The president of Tavira Câmara is very satisfied that the Algarve's Mediterranean Diet has now been officially recognised, and its spiritual homes designated as being in Tavira.
 
The Mediterranean Diet encompasses various techniques and practices and the Algarve version now has been registered as an Intangible Heritage of Humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at its meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The president of Algarve Tourism, the omnipresent Desiderio Silva, professed himself chuffed to bits with the results obtained by his Andalician, Galician and northern Portuguese roadshow ‘Enchanting Algarve' and said that this exercise would be repeated next year.

The magic bus returned home last week after its 2,000 kilometre round trip which transported the essence of the Algarve to Spanish tour operators and travel agencies, and home grown ones in Oporto and the north.

From January until October 31st this year the Algarve’s Bombeiros have attended 550 countryside fires, luckily most of them small ones (the fires, not the Bombeiros) and the police arrested 23 people and charged them with arson, one was caught in the act.

Data from the National Authority for Civil Protection (ANPC) released today at a press conference in Faro showed that despite the seemingly high number of fires the total was 28% down on 2012 with most fires destroying less than 1 hectare (54%).

British savers have been removing cash from their savings accounts at the fastest rate seen since nearly 40 years ago.

According to the Bank of England, £23 billion has been withdrawn from long-term savings in the last year. This works out to be the equivalent of £900 for each household.