A Home Office report into the events subsequent to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and the police investigations both in the UK and in Portugal has been leaked to the press.

The report criticises the competition between the British police forces involved in the search for Madeleine McCann, competition which managed to derail the investigation into her disappearance, has had a long lasting negative influence on the investigation.

There are fifty villages in the Castro Marim municipal area where residents have been waiting for mains water since the first council promise in the 1980s.

While watching the decline of the rural population, while doing a lot of lamenting that soon there will no one left in these tucked away hamlets, successive council chiefs have failed to tackle one of the basics that would help entice newcomers to old villages – mains water.

More bad news for the eurozone arrived with the release of statistics over the state of manufacturing in the region.

While the sector is growing, the August indications point to manufacturing being at its weakest level for more than a year.

Holiday makers in caravans are being warned of sleeping gas attacks.

The Camping and Caravanning club urged tourists to fit narcotic gas monitors to their vehicles and avoid spending the night at service stations.

The new Judicial Map for Portugal, the government masterplan to revolutionise and streamline the country's archaic legal processes, started today, September 1st, 2014.

Looking at the Algarve’s regional capital, Faro, the new court system started operation this morning amid high expectations that all would be working well, judges would have been trained  during the courts' summer recess and that the shiny new technology would be installed and working.

Foreigners working in the UK have been shown to generate an estimated £210bn each year for the British economy as well as 15% of all the country´s output.

The research report from Lloyds Bank says that these skilled workers are now not only a prime driver of the UK economy but also that they are outperforming their counterparts who were born in the UK.

Barclays Bank has announced that it will sell part of its business in Spain.

Barclays’ retail, wealth management and corporate banking business in Spain will be bought by CaixaBank for £633m.

A proposed increase in Portugal's minimum wage, frozen for the past three years, will be decided in September.

The national minimum wage is planned to increase to €500pcm and if the legislation is passed the increase will apply immediately.