Parts of Britain may be sacrificed to the sea after December’s tidal surge and continued heavy flooding.

The surge was the worst in 60 years and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from their homes.

Scotland’s Forth Bridge has been put forward to World Heritage status consideration.

The railway bridge linking Edinburgh and Fife, now 124 years old, was the first major British construction to be built out of steel. It carries trains for more than a mile and a half across the Forth.

Aviva health insurers will launch a new scheme to allow expat customers to keep their insurance cover when they are in another country.

Its new international medical policy, Aviva claims, will allow policyholders to cross national boundaries without paying full "globetrotter" premiums.

The USA and the Caribbean, however, are not included.

According to the latest Portuguese Housing Market Survey it is predicted that house sales in Portugal will continue to rise in the next three months.

The report showed that Lisbon was "the only region where there has been an increase in the level of house sales, Oporto remains stable and the Algarve shows a slight decrease."

Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, Secretary of State for Tourism, has decided that Portugal does not have nearly enough hotels, even though significant numbers have to close each winter due to a lack of tourists.

New rules speeding up and facilitating the planning permission and building stages for new hotels have been drawn up and already have been published in the Official Gazette.

The Agriculture Minister has promised to simplify the tax bureaucracy for small scale farmers but said that there would be no changes to the Social Security contribution or tax registration rules for the sector.

Small farmers have until the end of January to declare their activity at Finanças and from then on must issue receipts for every transaction, however inconsequential.

The annual taxation applicable in Portugal to imported second-hand vehicles has been sharply criticised by Brussels which accuses Portugal of not taking into account the actual depreciation of vehicles.

The European Commission "formally calls on Portugal to amend its legislation on imported used cars.”

A statement issued today from Brussels read that the calculation of the taxable value of used vehicles does not take into account their capital depreciation.

New areas in the Algarve and Alentejo containing copper, lead and nickel in have been identified.

The discovery was made possible by a European study which has enabled an update to be made of Portugal’s mineral resources log.
 
The information was provided by Teresa Ponce de Leon, head of the National Laboratory for Energy & Geology who said the main discoveries in the Alentejo and Algarve regions are along the Iberian Pyrite belt, i.e. the main mining region in southwestern Europe .