Employees in France begin 2017 with a new freedom dubbed the “right to disconnect”.

The new legal right will mean that employees will not be obliged to deal with business emails, texts or other messages outside of defined working hours.

The president of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, António Domingues, who technically left his job on the last working day of 2016, sent a message to the bank’s employees saying what a good job he had done.

Domingues said his objectives had been fulfilled and the recapitalisation plan of State-owned bank had been agreed, even though it has been delayed until early 2017 due to the adverse impact it will have on the national accounts.

Three of the Algarve’s decrepit national monuments are to be transferred into private hands under the government's Revive programme.

These three historic monuments have been so neglected by successive governments and councils that they now are to be leased to private enterprise and turned into tourist venues.

The Italian rubbish shipment, held up at the dockside while analysts determine the safety of the contents, can now be carted off and dumped in a Portuguese landfill site.

The rubbish suddenly has become quite safe to be buried in Portugal, (why not in Italy ask many readers?) and represents the first of many shipments of domestic waste from the Naples region that will be buried here.

Tax from house sales in the Loulé area will raise €27 million for the council’s coffers next year.

This is the figure in the 2017 council budget under the heading IMT, the municipal tax on real estate sales.

Portugal is to extradite to Italy, Sabrina de Sousa, a former US spy convicted of conspiring to abduct the Egyptian cleric Abu Omar in 2003.

De Sousa, a Portuguese-American dual national is a former CIA agent, said last week that the extradition process was due to start "after January 3rd."

As we raise glasses to the notion of peace and goodwill on Earth, more realistic hopes are centred on Portugal’s António Guterres who takes office as United Nations Secretary-General on New Year’s Day.

One of the few things top leaders across this bitterly divided world seem to agree on is that Guterres is the best man for the herculean task of curbing warfare, deprivation and poverty.

A group of utterly fed up creditors have lodged a lawsuit to block the imminent sale of Novo Banco.

The group, made up of 232 smaller depositors at the original Banco Espírito Santo, lodged the injunction on Wednesday at the Administrative Court in Lisbon. Drawn up by legal firm Miguel Reis and Associados, the defendants are named as the Bank of Portugal, the Ministry of Finance, Novo Banco, BES and the Resolution Fund.