The story so far: there are 'swap' agreements between Santander Totta and nine of Portugal's publically owned transport companies which in 2013, following guidelines issued by the Ministry of Finance, stopped paying interest due on the loans due to the rapidly escalating sums due.

On April 12th this year, the government and Banco Santander Totta announced that they had reached an agreement which halted the lengthy litigation on the swaps contracts, complex financial loan deals where the borrower pays more if interest rates drop.

The owner of a Rottweiler that attacked a four-year-old girl this Tuesday morning, has been interviewed and is to attend court in Matosinhos tomorrow to face charges of negligence and fleeing the scene of the attack.

The dog was off the lead and without a muzzle when it attacked the girl, leaving her with severe injuries to her head and face.

A Portuguese man whose daughter was “wrongfully removed” from Portugal to Scotland by her mother has failed in a legal bid to have the 10-year-old girl returned to the country of her birth, reports Scottish Legal News.

A judge in the Scottish Court of Session refused to grant an order under the Child Abduction and Custody Act 1985 after ruling that the child, who had been living with her Portuguese mother in Hamilton since leaving Portugal more than six years ago, had settled in Scotland within the meaning of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

More than 300,000 cans of canned fish products were seized in Portugal during an Interpol and Europol operation targeting modified and adulterated food and drink, that led also to the seizure of 26 million litres of alcohol.

The global Interpol and Europol operation seized €230 million of counterfeit food and drinks.

A catamaran that was drifting around in the Ria Formosa last Friday had to be rescued and towed to shore by Olhão’s lifeboat crew and members of the Maritime Police.

The Police received a warning that "an English-registered catamaran was drifting off the island of Armona, in the Ria Formosa area."

The Portuguese Environment Agency (APA) claims to have recorded thirty rockfalls at Algarve beaches since last summer, due to Winter and Spring storms.

Half of the cases are said to have occurred at Maria Luísa beach, Albufeira, the scene of a gruesome accident in August 2009 when five people were crushed to death by a huge rockfall. (pictured)

The area surrounding Pego do Inferno, the waterfall and pool in the Tavira countryside, was burned to a cinder in the 2012 fire that swept across the eastern Algarve which left 21,500 hectares blackened and charred.

For five years, the Pego do Inferno site has been ignored by the local council, despite the area once attracting thousands of locals and visitors.

The government ban on planting new eucalyptus forests is a “huge loss to the Portuguese economy,” according to the Portuguese Association of the Paper Industry, CELPA.

The head of Portugal’s leading eucalyptus pulp producer, Altri, already has threatened to halt investment in new pulp mills if Portugal continues to demonise the tree.