Short Stories

18/07/2026 – 25/07/2026 Director: Uwe Heitkamp Edition 28.2026 – Continuation Provide the residents of villages that are at risk of forest fires with the means to put them out. Don’t evacuate residents who don’t wish to be evacuated, as they want to make themselves useful. But when you have just a bucket of water in your hands, it is not …

by Uwe Heitkamp We meet Professor Emeritus Domingos Xavier Veigas of CEIF, the Centro de Estudos sobre Incêndios Florestais at the University of Coimbra in Lisbon during a press conference with Greenpeace. Now he may join the club – he is not working any more for the government. He works as a consultant for the EU. When, more than half …

by Uwe Heitkamp When, after two censuses held between 2006 and 2026 (a period of just 20 years), a national bird population is found to have declined from 17,419 to fewer than 2,000 individuals, then alarm bells should definitely start ringing. It is clear that something is seriously amiss in Portugal. SPEA, the bird conservation agency, is already sounding the …

Peace is quite simple. For some Christian and Muslim contemporaries, it simply falls from the sky. For others, the word itself requires a great deal of work and careful nurturing, as does practising it in life, filling it with positive memories. Within each of us, there lies a seed of peace. Many years ago, when I explored a country called …

By Uwe Heitkamp Are you interested in a game in which the deeper meaning lies in getting a ball, kicking it into a net and then shouting “Goal! Goal! Goal!”? Imagine trying to explain the game of football to an alien, and above all the meaning behind this sport. Because it is, after all, just a sport. Someone lands on …

A comment by Theobald Tiger Last week, a friend of mine was picked up from his home in an ambulance by the fire brigade and taken to the hospital in the middle of the night with a suspected slipped disc. Clearly an emergency. Now, there’s a certain way of dealing with emergencies and people. What just simply seems strange to …

You have to stand up to stupidity and arrogance when you feel that enough is enough. Don’t you agree? After a period of consultation and discussion, we at ECO 123 decided in 2010 to embark on a path to reduce our carbon footprint. We considered entrusting our money to a bank in Monchique. But they wanted to get rich at …

What is so-called “artificial intelligence” and what is it allowed to do? Steal drawings from existing works and distribute them under its own name? Is so-called artificial intelligence, to put it simply, nothing more than “copy paste”? “We are committed to the protection of human creativity and want to achieve fair conditions for authors and creatives in the age of …

MED Loulé Hello, cultural diversity! Over three days – Thursday 25, Friday 26 and Saturday 27 June – there will be concerts of world music in Loulé, performed on eight different stages. The historical part of the old town, with its narrow streets and squares, provides an unforgettable setting for the 21st edition of the MED Music Festival, featuring Sérgio …

This has been a dreadful week for journalists and breaking news. What is there to report? An outbreak of a new virus that originated in the Canary Islands is beginning to spread worldwide, which isn’t true. A mentally disabled president is on holiday in Beijing, which isn’t true either. This or that government has little money left in its state …