Statistics Portugal's monthly vital figures show more marriages, fewer June births than in 2025, and a natural balance that is less negative. Across the first half of the year, live births were up 0.8%.

By Marta Carneiro

Chart: Tugadaily · data from INE, Vital Statistics

Deco Proteste's weekly count rose 1.48 euros in seven days. Tinned tuna, cake flour and butter beans did most of the pushing.

Some sums do not wait for the end of the month. They happen at the supermarket till. This week the trolley of 63 essential goods that consumer body Deco Proteste has tracked since 2022 costs 253.55 euros, 1.48 euros more than a week ago, according to the analysis the association published on Wednesday. A weekly move that small is easy to shrug off. What it does when it accumulates is harder to ignore. At the start of this year the identical basket cost…

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SGIFR figures to 18 August count 6,572 rural fires and 60,572 hectares burnt — 185,000 hectares less than 2025, but 748 more fires, and more than half of them started on low or moderate risk days.

Between 1 January and last Tuesday, 60,572 hectares of scrub and forest burned in Portugal across 6,572 rural fires. The figures come from the rural fire management portal run by AGIF, and they pull in opposite directions. Start with the good half. Over the same stretch of 2025, Portugal lost 245,760 hectares. This year's total is 185,000 hectares lower, and a shade over a quarter of last summer's damage. Now the other half. There were 5,824 fires by this…

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The fire at Cabeça Boa, in Torre de Moncorvo, drew 413 personnel, 135 vehicles and five aircraft on its own. Arouca and Santo Tirso accounted for the rest, while nine districts stayed under an orange weather warning until 6pm.

Nearly a thousand firefighters were tied up on three fires on Tuesday, and not one of them was under control by the end of the afternoon. The largest was burning at Cabeça Boa, in the Torre de Moncorvo district of Bragança, where at 1.10pm the tally stood at 413 personnel, 135 vehicles and five aircraft — more resources than any other incident in the country. In Arouca, in the Aveiro district, a fire that began on Monday night in the parishes of Cabreiros…

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The Taxa Zero ao Volante campaign runs nationwide from 18 to 24 August. Of every 100 road crash victims autopsied in Portugal in 2025, 28 were over the legal alcohol limit — and 78% of those were at criminal levels.

Driving anywhere this week, expect more checkpoints than usual. Road safety authority ANSR has launched the Taxa Zero ao Volante campaign with the GNR and the PSP, running nationwide until 24 August and aimed squarely at drink-driving. It is the eighth of eleven campaigns in this year's National Enforcement Plan. ANSR handles the awareness side; the two police forces put more units on the road, concentrated where serious crashes cluster.

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The fire started on the Spanish side of the border early on Saturday, crossed into the Montesinho natural park and destroyed a Vinhais fire engine with five crew aboard. Civil protection declared it under control at 7.50am on Sunday.

The fire that pushed into the Montesinho natural park was declared under control at 7.50am on Sunday, a little over 24 hours after it started. It cost five injured firefighters, one destroyed engine and a village emptied overnight. It began at 4.36am on Saturday on the Spanish side of the border and crossed into the municipality of Vinhais, in the Bragança district. At around 7pm, a forest firefighting vehicle belonging to the Vinhais brigade was caught…

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The quake struck the north coast of Flores at 5.58am local time on Saturday. More than 1,300 homes are damaged, about 5,000 people are displaced and over 230 aftershocks were recorded on day one.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the Indonesian island of Flores early on Saturday, killing at least 51 people. The epicentre sat about 68 kilometres north-northwest of the town of Ende, in East Nusa Tenggara province, at 5.58am local time — figures recorded on the US Geological Survey's event page for the quake. The toll climbed through the weekend. It began at two confirmed deaths in the first hours, passed 38 and then 47, and reached 51 on Sunday…

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The green rail pass costs €20 a month and has so far excluded the suburban lines around both metropolitan areas. The prime minister says that changes in September.

For almost two years Portugal has had a rail pass that carries you from Bragança to Faro for €20 a month, and for almost two years it has had a hole in the middle of it. The suburban lines around Lisbon and Porto — where a very large share of the country actually commutes — were left out. Prime minister Luís Montenegro said on Friday, at his party's summer rally in the Algarve, that the green rail pass will be extended to urban trains in both metropolitan…

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The military-backed government confirmed that more than 300,000 refugees in Bangladeshi camps were residents of Rakhine state and will be accepted back once security improves. Nine years after the exodus, that condition still has no date.

Myanmar said on Saturday it has verified more than 300,000 of the Rohingya refugees living in camps in Bangladesh as former residents of Rakhine state, in the country's west, and will accept them back once security conditions improve. The figure says less than it appears to, and it only makes sense next to the other one. Around 1.15 million Rohingya refugees live in the Cox's Bazar camps and on Bhasan Char island, according to joint Government of…

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The vote was 468 to 88. The 12-article law suspends sentences and postpones prosecutions for five or ten years, but stays frozen until Turkish authorities verify the PKK has fully given up its weapons.

Turkey's Grand National Assembly has passed a law clearing the way for thousands of Kurdistan Workers' Party militants to be pardoned. The vote was 468 in favour and 88 against, a margin that says most of what needs saying about how far this has stopped being a party-political question in Ankara. The text runs to 12 articles and is not an amnesty in the ordinary sense. It suspends prison sentences already handed down to convicted PKK members and postpones…

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The Chiba weather station logged 351 mm on 13 August, the largest daily total in a series going back to 1966, and 115 mm in a single hour. Six thousand people spent the night inside Narita airport.

Chiba sits east of Tokyo, it holds one of the Japanese capital's two big international airports, and it is in theory one of the best-prepared places on earth for heavy rain. On Thursday that was not enough. The Japan Meteorological Agency logged 351 millimetres of rain at the Chiba station on 13 August. That is the largest daily total in a series beginning in 1966, and it clears the previous record of 259.5 millimetres, set in 1996, by a wide margin. In…

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A European Commission Joint Research Centre bulletin published on 12 August puts 50% of EU and UK territory under some level of drought in July, with 505,683 hectares burned across the EU by 5 August against 379,392 on the same date in 2025.

Half of the European Union and the UK sat under some level of drought through July. That figure comes from the bulletin the European Commission's Joint Research Centre published on 12 August, and it arrives with a harder one beside it: 505,683 hectares had burned across the EU by 5 August, against 379,392 by the same date last year.

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History A climbed from 94 to 109 points and descriptive geometry fell from 108 to 95. Some 85,745 papers were sat, 2,663 fewer than in 2025, and the no-show rate went from 6% to 9%.

Average marks in the second phase of Portugal's national secondary exams improved in 16 of the 24 papers sat, measured against 2025. The figures come from the Júri Nacional de Exames and were released by the education ministry late in the afternoon of 12 August. History A rose furthest, from 94 to 109 points on the 0-200 scale. Descriptive geometry fell furthest, from 108 to 95. What sits between those two ends is more interesting than either. Among the…

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The man was detained on a domestic violence warrant, questioned by a judge and freed on condition of reporting to a police station every two weeks. The government says it is holding extra officers in Lisbon's tourist areas.

The man detained after the shooting that wounded a Swedish tourist on Rua Augusta, in central Lisbon, has been released. He appeared before a judge for a first questioning and was freed on condition that he reports to his local PSP station every two weeks. One detail explains the decision and got lost in most of this week's argument about it. The arrest was not made over the shooting. He was picked up on a warrant issued in a separate domestic violence…

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An average of 0.8 millimetres of rain fell across the mainland, under 8% of the normal figure for the month, and meteorological drought went from covering 60% of the country to all of it.

Mainland Portugal recorded an average of 0.8 millimetres of rain across the whole of July. That is under 8% of what the month normally delivers, according to IPMA's provisional figures. It makes July 2026 the driest July of this century, and the eighth driest since comparable records began in 1931. Outside Viana do Castelo and Braga, essentially nothing fell anywhere. The drought map moved accordingly. At the end of June, meteorological drought covered…

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