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Here Comes the Troika is a satirical card game where players can stash away savings in Swiss bank accounts or fund useless airports or high-speed trains to nowhere. The winner is the one who can hide the most money in offshore accounts, win elections — and avoid the dreaded troika card.

Anti-austerity protesters throw Molotov cocktails in Greece and blockade parliament in Spain. The Portuguese are a bit more mellow. Ana Maria Pinto shot to fame for drowning out the country's president in song. She's now a regular at street protests, leading choirs of ordinary people venting their anger.

Thanks to a long history of migration, many Portuguese speak many different languages, and that's a big draw for European call centers. It's one of the few bright spots in Portugal's bleak economy.

Portugal's creditors are evaluating the country's latest austerity package, which includes 30,000 public sector layoffs, to determine whether Lisbon might need a second international bailout. The Portuguese government is raising the retirement age and lengthening work weeks to try to squeeze out more revenue, and repay its bailout loans.

How does a tiny spot on the Portuguese coast generate some of the world's most gnarly waves? Surf experts say there are a few factors that combined Monday to create what might have been the biggest wave ever ridden.

His secret: He told people what they wanted to hear.

As part of All Things Considered's Found Recipes series, cookbook duo the Brass Sisters share a friend's memories of his mother's Portuguese Sweet Bread. Her tradition involved a big enamel basin, a nip of whiskey and a little prayer that the bread would turn out right.

Portugal saw a spike in its death rate this winter, mostly among the elderly. The government blames the rise on a nasty flu strain. But critics say austerity measures are at least partly to blame, the result of higher medical fees and transportation costs.

Just 28 percent of Portuguese over age 30 have graduated from high school, making Portugal not only Western Europe's poorest country but also its least educated. The EU bailed out Portugal last year, but the low level of graduates complicates efforts to build a modern economy.

Public transit, schools and hospitals shut down across Portugal Thursday as hundreds of thousands of Portuguese walked off the job to protest austerity measures designed to ward off another EU/IMF bailout.