The British tax authority is to be given the power to raid personal bank accounts for unpaid tax bills.

The change in the law was described in documents published in tandem with the Chancellor’s ‘summer’ Budget earlier this week.

The 50th anniversary of Faro International Airport was celebrated today along with the news that French owned airports operating company ANA plans to spend €32.8 million to expand and remodel the airport terminal.

The investment aims to increase the airport's capacity from March 2017 when it will be able to cater for 30 aircraft movements per hour, six more than at present.

The Greek parliament will sit on Friday, hopefully to endorse new suggestions on debt reduction. This is part of  Prime Minister Tsipras’ latest attempt to avert a banking collapse and a probable exit from the eurozone.

A 'yes' vote is needed to authorise the Greek government to offer Europe a list of ‘prior actions’ that it will take before any more money can be thrown at the problem.

Addressing the Congress of Economists at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon today, the Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho pointed to the reversal of the current demographic situation, the reduction of structural unemployment and the correction of "profound imbalance" in the country’s social security system as “challenges for the coming years.”
 
Saying that there have been no concrete solutions to these challenges, Passos Coelho considered that it will be necessary further to reduce primary public expenditure and that this "still requires a good debate."

House prices across European Union countries rose by 2.5% and in the eurozone by 0.9% in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2014.

The data, from Eurostat, shows that for Portugal the rise for January to March 2015 was 0.8% higher than the same time in 2014.

Vila Real de Santo António council has been invited by UNESCO to apply for world heritage status for its city centre and the entire village of Cacela Velha.

For Vila Real de Santo António, the application is for the historic centre as it is one of the best examples of urban architecture surviving from the eighteenth century.

Employment in Europe remains well below the pre-crisis level, with time “running out” for a generation of workers “stuck in chronic joblessness or moving between unemployment and low-paid precarious jobs”, according to the OECD.

Countries such as Portugal, Spain and Greece could see thousands of its citizens “trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder”, a result which would only “ratchet up inequality yet another notch from levels that were already far too high”.

Monchique council has won recognition in the ‘Council of the Year Awards 2015’ which compliments and highlights good practice and sensible thinking.

Monchique’s ‘Casas sem Fogo’ (houses without fire) programme was been selected as an outstanding contribution and fine example of civic action by the organisers UM-Cidades and Minho University.