Portugal avoided a possible collapse of its government after the country’s two leading parties ended on Saturday a month-long standoff over next year’s budget.
The deal is also likely to be welcomed by investors, who had pushed Portugal’s cost of borrowing to record highs late in September over concerns about the budgetary impasse and the government’s inability to cut its core deficit this year.
Portugal is among a handful of nations using the euro that have struggled to shake off investors’ concerns about their finances, especially after Greece’s near collapse this year, which required an emergency bailout.
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates had threatened on several occasions in recent weeks to resign if the Social Democrat opposition blocked next year’s budget proposal in parliament. The Social Democrats had vowed not to allow the government to introduce any further tax increases; Socrates had proposed these increases as part of an austerity plan intended to help reassure markets that -Portugal would meet its pledge to cut its budget deficit to 7.3 percent this year and 4.6 percent next year, down from 9.3 percent of GDP last year.
Under the 11th-hour deal, the Social Democrat leadership agreed that its lawmakers would abstain rather than vote against the budget plan. Parliament is scheduled to start its budgetary debate tomorrow.
“We have met the conditions for adopting a budget that will entail sacrifices from the Portuguese in order to ensure the financing of the country,” Portuguese Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos told the Portuguese national television on Saturday.
As part of the deal, the Social Democrats agreed not to oppose a general rise in value-added taxation of 2 percentage points, to 23 percent, in return for some changes to the government’s initial tax plans, including the exemption of food products from the higher value-added tax.
These concessions, however, will force the government to seek an alternative financing solution to keep its deficit-cutting plan on track.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS