The Chief Executive of Lloyds, Portuguese banker António Horta Osório, has sent a message to all the bank’s staff to says he regrets the "adverse publicity and damage" caused by the media coverage of his affair with Wendy Piatt on a business trip to Singapore.

Horta Osório, married with three children, said that his expenses were fully in line with company policy and that he settled any personal expenditure out of his own pocket.

Despite the political stalemate which has prevailed throughout all of this year, Spain’s economic resurgence does not appear to have been dented.

For the last eight months, Spain has had only a caretaker government with limited powers, prompting warnings that this would undermine the delicate recovery.

Tourists from five countries generated 64% of Portuguese tourism revenues in the 1st half of 2016.

The top five key markets are the UK, France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands with this group spending record amounts.

Portugal’s forces of law and order have clocked a record 5 million vehicles this year to check which ones are speeding.

Most vehicles going past radars have been driven within the legal speed limit but 100,000 speeding tickets have been issued, to the cheery delight of the treasury.

A weighty statue of the greek Gorgon 'Medusa,' created by the acclaimed Algarve sculptor Toin Adams, has been stolen from the art and furnishings shop 'Gosto' on the EN125 at Quatro Estradas.

The huge statue was lifted some time on Saturday yet nobody noticed despite the weight of the piece normally requiring a team of people to lift it.

The Albufeira flooding last November 1st wiped out many downtown businesses and caused €20 million of damage to private and council property.

The reason for the channelling of so much fast-moving flood water through the town centre was the inept flood defence project put in place by the former mayor Desidério Silva who later moved on seamlessly to run the region’s tourist board.

The number of accidents on the region’s roads has risen sharply when compared to Jan-August 2015.

According to data released from the National Road Safety Authority, to the 15th of August this year there have been 6,419 accidents on the Algarve's roads, 543 up on the 2015 figure for the same period.

In advance of the 16 September Bratislava summit to map out a Union without the UK, the leaders of the three largest EU economies met yesterday in a second mini-summit to start charting a new course for the EU.

Encouraging words followed, but no formula.