The European Commission proposed €489 million from the EU Solidarity Fund on 17 September for the January and February storms. Portugal's share is €261 million, of which €65.37 million was already advanced in July. The rest waits on a vote in Parliament and Council.

On 17 September the European Commission proposed mobilising €489 million from the EU Solidarity Fund for the storms that swept southern Europe at the start of the year. Portugal's slice is €261 million. Spain, Italy and Malta share the remaining €227 million between them. The gap reflects what happened here. Between 22 January and 15 February, Portugal took a run of unusually intense storms, with high winds, heavy seas, concentrated rainfall, flooding and…

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The proposal tabled on 17 September gives €160 a month in 2026, backdated to July, and €230 in 2027, but only to the PSP and GNR border units. Six of the seven PSP unions at the table were willing to negotiate. Two organisations are still holding protests over the 2024 deal.

Read that the government has offered Portuguese police another €160 a month and you will want the next line. The supplement tabled on 17 September is not for the PSP or the GNR as a whole. It is for two units: the PSP's national foreigners and borders unit, and the GNR's coastal and border control unit. The offer is €160 a month in 2026, backdated to July, rising to €230 in 2027. The interior ministry grounds it in how particular the job is: dedicated…

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OpenAI closed the hole fourteen hours after it was reported and paid a 6,500 dollar bounty. The figure that matters to anyone running a website is the cost: a two-month campaign that also probed Slack and Meta ran on under 3,000 dollars of tokens.

The version of this story that travelled was the catchy one: a team used one AI lab's model to get inside another AI lab. That is documented and true. The detail worth your attention if you run a website sits halfway down the report instead. Start with what happened. On 25 July, three researchers at a security startup called Hacktron AI reached OpenAI staff accounts and, through them, an internal code repository. To prove the access without reading…

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The Furnas classification ran for eight days and lapsed. We went back to the CIVISA page and counted again: Santa Bárbara and the west Terceira fissural system, both at V1 since July, and Manadas on São Jorge, at V1 since March 2024.

Furnas is back at V0. The classification CIVISA gave the São Miguel volcano on 8 September ran for eight days, was not renewed, and the system has returned to the resting state it occupies almost all of the time. The announcement itself is not the interesting part, and the regional press has already carried it. The count is. When Furnas went up, we counted the entries on the CIVISA alerts page and found four Azorean volcanic systems sitting at V1…

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IPMA's August bulletin is out and it closes a question left open ten days ago. Mean temperature came in 0.16C above normal, the average daily high came in below normal, and more than two and a half times the usual rain fell.

Ten days ago we were left holding a question. Copernicus had just handed western Europe its hottest summer on record, 2.54C above the 1991-2020 average, and Portugal — which sits inside the geographic box that produced that record — appeared nowhere on any of the lists. The national bulletin that would explain the absence did not exist yet. It does now. The answer is almost anticlimactic. Mainland Portugal's mean August air temperature was 23.07C, an…

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Round seven of the Portuguese league at the Estádio do Dragão. Porto arrive with six wins from six and two goals conceded, Benfica two points behind and fresh from a first ever win over Milan at San Siro.

Sunday, 20:30 Lisbon time, Estádio do Dragão. It is the season's first meeting between the two clubs at the top of the Portuguese league, and Benfica's own fixture list carries the date and the kick-off for the round-seven trip north. If you are reading this from Newark, Toronto, London or Paris: Lisbon and the UK and Ireland share a clock right now, so it is 20:30 there too. That makes it 21:30 across most of continental Europe, 16:30 in Rio, 15:30 on…

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A running tracker of AIMA — case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. Updated whenever there is news.

If you are dealing with residence or nationality, this is the page to bookmark. Instead of one article per announcement, we gather the essentials of AIMA here: case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. For the citizenship rules, see the new nationality law. Official information is at AIMA. A small, practical change to the Renewals Portal: EU citizens and their family members no longer have to supply a NIF or a NISS when…

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A running tracker of Portugal's housing market — the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability. Updated with each new data release.

We gather here, in one place, how Portugal's housing market is moving. Instead of one article per data point, we update this page with the essentials: the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability for buyers and renters — which since 1 August also runs through the new mortgage rules, with the debt-service cap down to 45%. Official data is at INE.

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Warren Buffett, 96, becomes chairman emeritus with immediate effect and stays on the board. His eldest son, a director since 1993, takes the chair, while Greg Abel continues to run the company.

Warren Buffett stepped down on Friday as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the failing textile mill he bought in 1965 and turned into a trillion-dollar conglomerate. He is 96. The change took effect immediately. The board elected his eldest son, Howard G. Buffett, a director since 1993, as chairman, and named the father chairman emeritus. Warren Buffett remains a member of the board. In a letter to shareholders he wrote that Father Time always wins.

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Applications shut at 15:00 Lisbon time on 30 September, while recommendation letters are due on 6 October. The entry bar is a 16.5 average with no rounding.

One detail about the Gulbenkian New Talents scholarships rescues a good share of the late applications every year, and hardly anyone says it out loud. There are two deadlines, not one. The applicant's own form closes at 15:00 Lisbon time on 30 September. Recommendation letters work differently: the Foundation requests them directly from whoever you name in the references field, and they are not due until 15:00 on 6 October. So if you are putting off…

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Zunder's station at junction 19, outside Caldas da Rainha, went live on 11 September with 400 kW CCS points and a solar canopy. The bays sized for heavy vehicles are the first public ones in Portugal.

If you drive an electric car between Lisbon and Porto, range has quietly stopped being a conversation. If you drive an electric lorry, it is most of the conversation, because until this month there was nowhere public in Portugal to stop halfway and put charge back into a heavy vehicle. The station the Spanish operator Zunder opened on 11 September at Caldas da Rainha is the first answer to that, on a modest scale. It sits at junction 19 of the A8, beside…

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The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana's official calendar for the spring/summer 2027 women's season lists two Portuguese names with runway slots, both on Sunday 27 September. The last show on the grid, at 17:00, belongs to Miguel Vieira.

Milan Fashion Week opens on 22 September and closes on the 28th. Look at the official runway grid, though, and the last slot on it falls on Sunday the 27th, at 17:00, on Via Besana — and the name in that box is Miguel Vieira. Everything scheduled after it, on the Monday, is digital. This does not come from a press release. It is on the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana's Final Calendar, dated 8 September and updated on the 17th, the document the…

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Portugal's interior minister said on Friday that the Government is preparing a legislative change creating a dedicated fraud offence, prosecutable without a complaint, for selling substances passed off as narcotics.

Anyone who has walked through Lisbon's Baixa in the early evening knows the approach. Someone falls into step, offers hashish under their breath, and what is actually in their hand, almost every time, is pressed bay leaf — culinary laurel compacted into a block and sold to visitors at the price of a drug it is not. That is not currently a crime. At most it is an administrative offence for unlicensed street trading, which is why officers can identify a…

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Portugal's new head coach named his 25 for the start of the Nations League title defence on Friday at the Cidade do Futebol. João Palhinha returns, and only six of the players picked are at Portuguese clubs.

Twenty-five names, and three of them had never been on a Jorge Jesus list before. Portugal's head coach named his squad at midday on Friday at the Cidade do Futebol for the first four games of the Nations League, and the arrivals that stand out are goalkeeper Samuel Soares, full-back Nuno Tavares and forward Fábio Silva. João Palhinha, left out of the most recent squads, is back in midfield. Much of the rest is the spine that went to the World Cup. Diogo…

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Fennesz plays with the Sinfonietta de Braga, Marta Salogni brings a co-commissioned piece to a seminary chapel, and the festival opens with a surprise concert in a basilica. The day-by-day programme is out, and the dates are 22 to 25 October.

Seven of them carry an asterisk, which is how the festival marks a piece nobody has heard anywhere yet. Semibreve returns to Braga from 22 to 25 October with seven world premieres — the full set is flagged on the official line-up, and they belong to João Carlos Pinto, Malcolm Pardon and Gustaf Broms, Nuno Canavarro and Bruno Miguel Pinto, PYUR and Tarik Barri, Qasim Naqvi and Steven Wendt, Ricardo Jacinto, and System Sophie.

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Portugal's securities regulator cleared VAA — Vista Alegre Atlantis to leave Euronext Lisbon on Thursday, with immediate effect. Visabeira Indústria must now buy the shares of holders who did not vote for the delisting, at €1.07 each, within three months.

Vista Alegre shares can no longer be bought or sold on the Lisbon exchange. The CMVM, Portugal's securities regulator, approved the delisting request from VAA — Vista Alegre Atlantis, SGPS on Thursday, and the decision took effect immediately under article 251-F of the securities code. Nobody should be startled by it. The route was opened at the annual meeting on 29 May, where shareholders backed the exit at the request of Visabeira and a block of holders…

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Rates fall by 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points across the first six brackets, at a cost of about 400 million euros and covering nearly three million households. The government approved the bill on Thursday; parliament has not voted on it.

Portugal's cabinet signed off a bill on Thursday that lowers IRS income tax rates across the first six brackets. The cut runs from 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points, costs roughly 400 million euros and, according to the government's own statement, reaches close to three million households. The word doing the heavy lifting there is bill. Tax rates are not changed in cabinet. They are changed by a law passed in the Assembleia da República, and that is where the…

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European Heritage Days run from 18 to 27 September, with activities in almost every district and much of it free. Here is what is happening between Friday and Sunday, from a hospital ship in Viana do Castelo to a wine press cut into bare rock.

Friday opens the European Heritage Days in Portugal, and for ten days a lot of buildings that normally keep their doors shut will not. This year's theme is "Reviver, resistir, reinventar" — revive, resist, reinvent. The practical part is that the national programme runs from 18 to 27 September, covers almost every district, and is free more often than not. This is the first of its two weekends.

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It went up on a Vega-C from Kourou on 15 September, the first satellite built specifically to measure photosynthesis. It flies at 814km, has three and a half years of life and revisits the same spot every 27 days.

A struggling plant does not change colour on the day it starts struggling. It slows down internally first, and the leaf gives the game away weeks later. Catching that earlier stage is the whole reason the European Space Agency put a satellite up this week. It is called FLEX, and it launched on 15 September aboard a Vega-C from Kourou in French Guiana, on flight VV30. It had company. Copernicus Sentinel-3C rode the same rocket, sitting on top of the launch…

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Abanca Mar launched in Portugal on Thursday, lending to fishing, aquaculture, shipbuilding, ports, logistics, maritime tourism and offshore energy. It takes vessels as security and fronts public subsidies that have not yet landed.

A bank announcing that it lends to businesses is not news. A bank building a team that looks only at people who make their living from the sea says something about where it thinks the money is. Abanca launched Abanca Mar in Portugal on Thursday, a segment aimed at companies and sole traders in what gets called the blue economy. The definition is deliberately wide. It takes in fishing, aquaculture, seafood processing and trade, shipbuilding and the yards…

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The 2026-2027 seasonal campaign opens on 30 September at SNS units, participating pharmacies and other vaccination points. Free flu vaccination now covers children aged two to four, and the Covid-19 recommendation moves from 60 to 70.

There is a date at last. Portugal's autumn-winter vaccination campaign opens on 30 September at National Health Service units, participating community pharmacies and other vaccination points. The norms setting out who is entitled to what came out this week, after a stretch in which the date simply did not exist and the calendar was being guessed from last year's.

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Parpública notified the market regulator of a qualified holding of 91,723,676 shares, completed on 7 September once the Court of Auditors signed off. The Socialists want statutory criteria for when the state may buy into a private company.

The deal is done. REN told the market that Parpública holds a qualified stake of 91,723,676 ordinary shares, representing 13.7% of its capital, putting the Portuguese state back on the share register twelve years after it left. The shares changed hands and the price was paid on 7 September. When we wrote about this in August the open question was procedural. The contract with Pontegadea had been signed on 14 August but hung on a condition, and we said the…

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The simplified regime has had legal effect since 1 September, but the maximum rent by property type only exists once a portaria is published. Article 16 of the decree-law gave the government 30 days from 20 May. In 2019 the equivalent took 15.

Everyone reported that Portugal's new affordable-rent regime is waiting on a portaria. Nobody checked when that portaria was supposed to arrive. We read the decree-law, and the answer is written into it. The Simplified Affordable Rent Regime was created by Decreto-Lei 97/2026 of 20 May. Article 16, headed Regulation, gives the government 30 days from publication to approve the portarias the regime needs, and the missing one is precisely among them. Thirty…

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'A Memória do Cheiro das Coisas', by António Ferreira, beat five other titles in a vote of Portuguese Film Academy members. It follows a colonial-war veteran who moves into a care home and refuses to be looked after by a Black Portuguese carer.

A Memória do Cheiro das Coisas, directed by António Ferreira, will represent Portugal in the Best International Feature category at the 99th Academy Awards, on 14 March 2027 in Los Angeles. It is worth knowing what it is walking into. Portugal has entered this category every year since 1980, and we counted the run the academy and the category register keep between them: 42 entries across 46 years, not one of them nominated. No country has tried more times…

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The petition to scrap the Volta deposit-return scheme reached parliament on 15 August with 34,211 signatures, against a legal minimum of 7,500 for a plenary debate. A month on it stands at 37,134 and is still waiting to be ruled admissible.

The petition calling for an end to Portugal's Volta scheme has 37,134 signatures. That is the figure that went round the press this week, and it is a big one. It is also not the figure that decides anything. For a petition to be considered in plenary, Portugal's right-of-petition law sets a minimum of 7,500 subscribers. When this one arrived at the Assembleia da República on 15 August it already carried 34,211 — four and a half times what it needed. The…

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Dodi Lukébakio scored after sixteen minutes and Jakub Kaminski added a second early in the second half at San Siro. The only previous competitive meetings were the 1963 and 1990 European Cup finals, and Benfica lost both.

Benfica won 2-0 at San Siro on the opening matchday of the Europa League league phase. Dodi Lukébakio put them ahead after sixteen minutes and Jakub Kaminski, who had made the first goal, scored the second shortly after the interval. It is the first time the Portuguese club has beaten Milan in a competitive match. The two had met only twice before in a real fixture, and Benfica lost both: the 1963 European Cup final at Wembley and the 1990 final in…

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The Portuguese Grand Prix is confirmed on the world championship calendar for 2027 and 2028. The race runs 18-20 June at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portimão, and the first of four ticket phases opens on 21 September.

There is a date. The Portuguese Grand Prix returns to the Formula 1 calendar and the race weekend is set for 18-20 June 2027 at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portimão. Confirmation landed on Wednesday, and it covers more than one season: the agreement between Formula 1 and the Algarve circuit runs through 2028 as well. Portugal has not hosted a championship round since 2021. That was the second of two consecutive visits, in 2020 and 2021, and…

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In her State of the Union address, the Commission president announced a European alliance for climate risk insurance. Around 25% of catastrophe losses in the EU are covered by private insurance, and the rest lands on national budgets.

One line in Wednesday's State of the Union address will get less coverage than the headline items, and it is probably the one that touches household finances in Portugal most directly. Only about a quarter of losses from catastrophes in Europe are covered by private insurance. The rest ends up where it always ends up, on the national budget.

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An APEL study with Nielsen GfK puts the reading rate at 78%, its highest in three years, up from 73% in 2023. Over the same period the share of people who bought at least one book fell from 65% to 62%, and the average per buyer dropped from 7.5 books to 6.9.

More people are reading. Fewer people are paying for it. Both sentences come out of the same study, presented this week at the opening of Book 2.0 at the Centro Cultural de Belém, and the gap between them is the interesting part. Start with the good news. The reading rate went from 73% in 2023 to 76% in 2024 and 78% last year, which is the share of people aged 15 and over who say they read at least one book that year, and the highest figure of the three.…

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Milan host Benfica at 20:00 Lisbon time on Wednesday in the first round of the league phase. Gonçalo Ramos and Diego Moreira both came through Benfica's academy, Rúben Amorim coaches the Italian side, and Sport TV 5 has it in Portugal.

Benfica begin the Europa League league phase on Wednesday, and they begin it somewhere loud. Kick-off at San Siro is 20:00 Lisbon time, an hour later locally in Milan. In Portugal the match is on Sport TV 5, which holds the rights to Portuguese clubs in European competition. The team sheet does most of the talking here, and a lot of it is in Portuguese. Gonçalo Ramos and Diego Moreira, both products of Benfica's academy, will be wearing red and black on…

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ERSE is raising the energy tariff by €0.005 per kWh, about 2.7% on the average monthly bill. A couple with no children pay 95 cents more; a couple with two children pay €2.70 more. It covers 779,000 customers, and the regulator is passing on less than a third of the gap it found.

Electricity gets more expensive on 1 October for anyone still on Portugal's regulated tariff. ERSE is lifting the energy component by €0.005 per kWh, which works out at roughly 2.7% on the average monthly bill — and it is the percentage, not the amount, that will travel. The amount deserves an airing, because it changes how the number reads. The regulator's own statement works it through for two household types. A couple with no children, on 3.45 kVA and…

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Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel have won the 2026 António Champalimaud Vision Award, worth one million euros. It recognises two decades of work on optogenetic therapies, which make surviving retinal cells respond to light after the eye's photoreceptors are gone.

There is a one-million-euro science prize that leaves Lisbon every year and is the largest in its field anywhere in the world. It is the António Champalimaud Vision Award, given by the Champalimaud Foundation, and the 2026 edition now has its winners: Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel. Roska is a neuroscientist and a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel. Sahel is an ophthalmologist and clinician-scientist at…

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The investigation into the 10 August shooting that hit a 42-year-old Swedish visitor has changed hands and changed charge. The three men sought by Portugal's judicial police presented themselves on Tuesday and were being questioned that night on suspicion of attempted homicide.

The three men wanted by Portugal's Polícia Judiciária over the Rua Augusta shooting presented themselves to the authorities on Tuesday. By late evening they were being questioned. The offence named is attempted homicide. Investigators had identified them during the day. A morning search operation failed to find them, and the judicial police obtained an undertaking from their defence lawyers that all three would come in before the day was out. They did.…

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MEO says the outages were a distributed denial-of-service attack and that no data was accessed. Under the cybersecurity regime in force since April, the operator now owes a 24-hour notification, a 72-hour update and a final report within 30 working days.

If your internet and television dropped out three separate times between Monday night and Tuesday morning, that was not a fault on the line. MEO's own technical analysis points to a distributed denial-of-service attack aimed at its infrastructure, with enough traffic thrown at it to congest the network and degrade service temporarily. The operator was precise about two things. Nobody got into the data, its own or its customers'. And the instability in BGP…

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Iran, Iraq and five Gulf states were due to meet on Monday to draw shipping corridors through the strait. It was called off the night before, with no new date, after Riyadh filed amendments to a proposal Tehran and Muscat had already settled.

The meeting that was meant to draw shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz never opened. It was set for Monday in Salalah, the port city on Oman's southern coast, and it was called off on Sunday night with no new date attached. The host said so itself. Oman's foreign ministry announced the postponement of the Salalah regional meeting, citing the need to build the right conditions for constructive dialogue, and foreign minister Badr Albusaidi framed…

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Brasília opened its first reciprocity case on 13 August. Add up every maximum the decree sets, stage by stage, and the outer limit falls in May 2027.

A month has passed since Brazil opened the first case in its history under the Economic Reciprocity Law, and nothing has been taxed. That is not drift. It is the regulation working as written. So we read the regulation and did the addition. The decree that puts the law into practice is Decree 12,551 of 14 July 2025, and the deadlines sit in articles 11, 13 and 15. Four stages, each with its own clock, and every one of them slower than a first reading…

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The 78th Emmys were handed out on Monday night in Los Angeles. Widow's Bay took six on the night and 14 across the year, a record for a comedy, and The Pitt won drama series again.

The 78th Emmy Awards were handed out on Monday night at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, hosted by Mariska Hargitay, the first woman to front the ceremony in fifteen years. They ended with something the Television Academy had never recorded before. Jean Smart won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Hacks, the fifth the show has given her, and became the first performer to win an Emmy for every season of a series. It is also her eighth…

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Portugal's 2025 National Health Survey puts blood-pressure checks at 80.2% among people with no formal education, the highest of any education level. On colonoscopies the same group drops to 37.3%, against 55.9% for graduates.

Statistics Portugal released another slice of the 2025 National Health Survey on Tuesday, this one on access to healthcare. The figure in its title is that 51.4% of people aged 50 and over said they had had a colonoscopy in the previous ten years. Just over half. The headline average is not the interesting part. What the full table shows is how that average splits by education, and that it splits the opposite way to everything around it.

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The pot is 18 million euros and applications close at 6pm on 12 October. The rate runs from 1.99% of sales for a polyvalent boat under 12 metres to 10.17% for a trawler of 24 metres or more.

It opened on 11 September and closes at 6pm on 12 October. In between, fishing, aquaculture and fish-processing companies operating on the Portuguese mainland can claim compensation for this year's jump in fuel prices. The government announced 18 million euros and said the amount depends on the fleet segment and the size of the vessel. It is worth spelling out what that means, because the gap between one boat and another is fivefold.

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Anna Marques scored in the 7th and 58th minutes and Carolina Tristao in the 34th. It is Portugal's first ever win at this level, and Spain are next, on Wednesday in Katowice.

Portugal went into their third Group E game needing a win, and got one: 3-0 against Costa Rica at Arena Sosnowiec in southern Poland. Anna Marques headed in after seven minutes, Carolina Tristao beat two defenders and finished into the bottom corner on 34, and Marques added her second on 58 from a scramble inside the box. It was Portugal's first ever win at a U-20 Women's World Cup, in a tournament that is also their first ever appearance at the level.…

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Porto Santo's Columbus Festival runs 17 to 20 September in Vila Baleira, from 3pm to 11pm, free to enter. Around 58 performances, three concerts, daily parades, and a landing re-enactment on the Thursday.

When we wrote about the Columbus Festival a fortnight ago, one thing was still missing: the day-by-day programme, which the organisers only publish close to the date. It is out now, and it is bigger than last year's. Roughly 58 performances are spread across the four days. Twenty-five of them are musical, sixteen are dance and eleven are something else entirely, from fire shows to street theatre and juggling. On top of that there are three concerts, on…

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Applications were due to open on Monday. The environment and energy minister put the delay at three or four weeks, and used a visit to Abrantes to confirm that part of the grid capacity at the old Pego coal plant is going to a technology free zone.

Monday was meant to be the day applications opened for 1,050 megavolt-amperes of electricity grid connection capacity, reserved for projects that include storage. They did not open. Maria da Graça Carvalho, the minister for environment and energy, explained the hold-up during a visit to the Tagusvalley science and technology park in Abrantes, and put it at three or four weeks. The reason is mundane, and in its way encouraging. Sixty-two submissions came…

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