The Forestry Commission plans to give millions of pounds of public money to landowners to cull grey squirrels.
There are some five million grey squirrels in the UK and this plan is the first national one to manage their numbers.
The Italian police believe that the people smugglers who abandoned ship last week made $3 million on just the one trip of the Ezadeen which was carrying 359 illegal migrants, mostly from Syria.
The abandoned cargo ship was found by coast guards and towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro on Friday night.
Some of the new administrators at the Treasury Management and Public Debt Agency (IGCP) who took office last September are on a monthly salary well above that of Portugal’s Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho and indeed the President of the Republic, Cavaco Silva.
A notice in the Official Gazette last Friday noted the new salaries of the three new members of the IGCP board.
The first new baby in Portugal for 2015 was a girl, delivered at midnight +55 seconds in the Centro Materno Infantil in Oporto.
The parents thought it would be just another visit to the hospital but the timing could not have been more auspicious as less than a minute into 2015 they had claim to the first born for the new year.
Portugal's National Road Safety Authority has announced the national road death figure for 2014 with a comment that 'you would have to go back to 1950, when there were about 100,000 vehicles on the road, to match a figure of under 500 fatalities.'
With 7 million vehicles now registered in Portugal there were only 480 fatalities in 2014, a decrease of 7.3% compared to 2013.
Anti-Islamisation marches in Germany have spread from Dresden to other parts of Germany.
A demonstration planned for Cologne has been met with opposition from the cathedral there which has said it will switch off its lights in protest.
Faro Council has received approval for its 2015 budget with a slim majority in the City Council.
The executive was delighted to report that this was the first year that income would equal expenditure, thus breaking the unwritten code adopted for years by many Algarve councils that expenditure should wildly exceed income.
New EU rules came into effect on 1 January requiring many electrical gadgets and appliances to switch off automatically in order to save energy.
Now devices such as routers, modems, smart televisions and printers should be able to switch into a low power standby mode if the equipment has not been used for some time. For example, espresso machines must now power down after 30 minutes and functions keeping cups warm will end after 60 minutes.
