People in Paris have been given with a special manual to encourage civility when using the metro.

Paris’ public transport body released the manual for the “modern traveller” which breaks down behaviour into four categories: "helpfulness", "courtesy", "manners" and "politeness", drawn up from among more than 2,000 suggestions from the general public.

A quarter of Portugal's population was living in poverty or social exclusion in 2012, making the country in line with the EU average of 24.8% according Eurostat data released today.

In Portugal there was an increase of almost 1% between 2011 and 2012, with the number of people facing poverty or social exclusion rising from 24.4% to 25.3% of the population, equivalent to 2.7 million people.

The Association of Hotels and Resorts in the Algarve (AHETA) has called on the “authorities responsible for promoting tourism in the Algarve to begin activities to take advantage of the new added value to regional gastronomy" following the classification of Portugal's Mediterranean Diet as a UNESCO intangible.

The association welcomes the classification of the Mediterranean Diet and congratulates "the organisers of the submission process, the council of Tavira, which led to the successful addition of the diet on the UNESCO list.”

The Committee of Users of the Via do Infante (CUVI) expects that MPs will approve the suspension of tolls on the Algarve’s motorway when the topic is dicsussed in parliament on Friday.

The 14,000 name petition for the suspension of the tolls has been filed and is on Friday’s parliamentary agenda.

João Vasconcelos, the CUVI leader said that the projections and targets put forward in December 2011 clearly have not been fulfilled. Meanwhile, "the situation is getting worse in the Algarve."

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.