Uber and Re-food have teamed up to bring meals to more poor families this Christmas season.

The partnership will be active between 18 and 22 December in Lisbon, Oporto and Faro.

A further step has been taken to position Portugal as the in place for start ups as crowdfunding specialist, Seedrs, has linked with Portugal Ventures together to fund promising businesses.

Portugal Ventures is the first local venture capital company to join the Seedrs investment platform with investments of up to 50% of the funding target.

Ryanair airline pilots based in Portugal have decided to halt the strike scheduled for December 20, according to a Civil Aviation Pilots Union statement.

"Ryanair's decision to recognize the SPAC union as the representative organisation of its pilots in Portugal and their commitment to start negotiations with the aim of establishing a business agreement led to the decision," the statement read.

A car ploughed into two horses early on Sunday morning on the EN125 by the Portimão bridge.

The 47-year-old male driver was seriously injured and was rushed to the nearby Barlavento hospital.

Portugal’s Communist Party is suspicious that the legislation put in place to monitor and control heavy shipping off the Algarve coast has not been enacted.

The concern from the PCP’s parliamentary group is that any accident involving an oil tanker may lead to a similar disaster to the Prestige* that sank in 2002 and deposited 63,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea and onto 3,000 kilometres of shoreline in Portugal, Spain and France.

Ryanair calls for the planned strike action to be called off in Italy, Ireland and Portugal and has told pilot unions it cannot meet their representatives before Wednesday, the day when strikes are scheduled in Ireland and Portugal.

According to union sources, Wednesday's stoppage will not be called off without an initial meeting with Ryanair management taking place.

Fitch Ratings has taken Portugal out of its embarrassing ‘junk’ rating category, lifting it two grades to 'lower medium investment grade, BBB.'

This is the best rating of the four key agencies and largely is based on the long-overdue decline in Portugal’s public debt and the expectation that this will continue to fall.

EDP ​​had made sure that any physical evidence, that the fire in Pedrógão Grande was started by its power lines setting light to trees, has been destroyed by staff cleaning up certain key areas under investigation.

Xavier Viegas, the expert from the Center for Studies on Forest Fires at the University of Coimbra, asked the Public Prosecutor's Office to ensure the areas where the fires started were left untouched but EDP ​​cut down trees and cleared burned scrub, claiming the instruction was received after this work has been completed.