Portugal is successfully implementing a series of fiscal reforms that are key to gaining continued international financial assistance.

A team of legal experts in Lisbon is sifting through nearly 30 000 pages of police evidence on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

A high-level mission from Angola has visited Portugal to entice potential investors with business opportunities arising from the new-found stability in the south-western African nation, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. But foreign investors should forget about merely transferring profits abroad without leaving any benefits behind.

East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta is "out of danger" and "recovering" following treatment in Australia after being shot in the stomach by rebels, the speaker of the country's Parliament said on Monday. "According to the information we have, the president has been operated on and the bullet that was in his lung has been removed," Fernando de Araujo said.

Angola's upcoming elections do not pose a risk to the country's economic and political stability, Deputy Prime Minister Aguinaldo Jaime said at a conference in Lisbon on Friday. Angola is expected to hold a long-delayed parliamentary election on September 5 and 6 and presidential elections in 2009.

This year's Dakar Rally has been cancelled over security concerns, in particular direct "terrorist" threats to the race, organisers announced on Friday. The race had been due to start in Lisbon on Saturday but the murder of four French tourists in Mauritania on December 24 led to the French government advising against any travel to the country.

The head of the Portuguese agency responsible for enforcing a new ban on smoking in public was seen lighting up at a New Year party, breaking the law on the first day it came into effect. Antonio Nunes, president of Portugal's food standards agency, was photographed by the daily, Diario de Noticias, smoking a cigar at a casino on the outskirts of Lisbon.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown signed the European Union's reform treaty in Lisbon on Thursday, hours after his fellow European leaders inked the text at a ceremony he missed, an Agence France-Presse photographer witnessed. The treaty replaces a draft EU constitution scuppered by French and Dutch referendums in 2005.

European and African leaders were seeking to open a new era of closer relations, but their summit closed on Sunday with squabbling over trade and human rights. Old divisions surfaced at the first summit in seven years between the continents as leaders swapped accusations over the crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur.

Most African leaders on Sunday rejected new trade deals demanded by the European Union, dealing a blow to efforts to forge a new economic partnership at the first European Union (EU)-Africa summit in seven years. The EU wants to replace expiring trade accords with so-called Economic Partnership Agreements or temporary deals.