A crash on the Via de Infante motorway has left seven people injured, one of them seriously.

The incident involved a collision between two cars on a section of the A22 in the Silves municipality on Monday afternoon, July 3rd. The wounded were transported to Faro Hospital.

Assunção Cristas, who took over from Paulo Portas as the leader of the CDS - People's Party, has used a cozy chat with the president to launch a fierce attack on the government as it struggles with the fallout from the Pedrógão Grande fires and the theft of significant amounts of military arms and ammunition from the Tancos depot near Santarém. Click HERE

In today's meeting with the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Cristas demanded that the Prime Minister, António Costa returns to Lisbon (he is said to be on vacation on a Spanish island) in order to sack his ministers of defence and of internal affairs.

A burglary at an army supplies facility at Tancos near Santarém took advantage of a perimeter where the CCTV security coverage had been out of action for over two years.

The incident, on or before June 28th, is starting to look like an inside job and the scale of the theft now has become clear, only because a list of weapons and munitions was published by El Español this weekend.

There will be over one million indirect and direct tourism jobs in Portugal within ten years.

The forecast is from the World Travel and Tourism Council and tourism specialists from Oxford Economics who have estimated the economic impact and social relevance that tourism will play in different countries over the next decade.

Quercus has called for a total ban on all plastic bags in Portugal where two billion are used each year, many of which end up littering the land and polluting the sea.

Despite the astounding drop in use of plastic bags in the country, an estimated 70%, Quercus has urged the Government to take urgent steps, once and for all, to ban the use of plastic bags.

Portugal weather service scientists agree that there is a close to zero chance that a direct bolt of lightning caused the killer fire in Pedrógão Grande.

A new IPMA report concludes that there is “a close to zero chance (but not zero) of the occurrence of a cloud-to land discharge in the vicinity of the fire ignition site."

This is what the president of the Portuguese Institute of Atmosphere and Sea (IPMA) wrote to the Government in his letter accompanying a full report on the local weather systems at the time of the fire which killed 64 people.

The main US base now is the Lajes airbase on Terceira (pictured left) but American military presence in the Açores started 100 years ago with at Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel.

The reason for an Allied military presence was the German Navy which had been sinking US and Allied shipping in the Atlantic. The governments of the US and Portugal formed an agreement and the first base was created in this strategic area that was an ideal mid-Atlantic refuelling point.

The council of Vila do Bispo is pleased that the road works in its area now are completed but now that the traffic cones and workmen have gone, locals now are complaining to the council that the EN125 road has been designed to slow down traffic to a frustrating crawl in many sections.

Rotas do Algarve Litoral had been instructed by Infraestrutura de Portugal to paint solid white lines along sections of renewed road where previously overtaking has been allowed. This leaves only three sections of road where vehicles can overtake between Lagos and Vila do Bispo and guarantees frustration and risky driver behaviour.