Flush with settlement cash, Brazilian states begin deforestation fight
bystanders and widely shared and viewed online. Police said the man was driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, without a licence and he resisted arrest and insulted officers. His case was turned over to prosecutors.
In Hong Kong, where police behaviour is a hot-button issue after months of anti-government protests, its force says it is investigating the death of a man who was immobilised facedown during his arrest in May by officers who were filmed kneeling on his shoulder, back and neck.
Police rules and procedures on chokeholds and restraints vary internationally.
In Belgium, police instructor Stany Durieux says he reprimands trainees, docking them points, “every time I see a knee applied to the spinal column”.
“It is forbidden to lean on a suspect completely, as this can crush his rib cage and suffocate him,” he said.
In Germany officers are allowed to briefly exert pressure on the side of a suspect’s head, but not on the neck, says the country’s GdP police union.
In the UK, the College of Policing says prone suspects should be placed on their side or in a sitting, kneeling or standing position “as soon as practicable”. Guidance on the website of London’s police force discourages the use of neck restraints, saying “any form of pressure to the neck area can be highly dangerous”.
Gendarmes in France are discouraged from pressing down on the chests and vital organs of prone suspects and are no longer taught to apply pressure to the neck, said Colonel Laurent De La Follye de Joux, head of training for the force. | AP
BRAZILIAN states are bolstering the fight against destruction of the Amazon rainforest with millions of dollars from an oil company’s corruption settlement that allows them to partially compensate for weakening environmental protections under President Jair Bolsonaro.
State environmental agencies will have a one-off windfall that Reuters calculates will total at least $27 million (R456m). The cash, which comes from a massive settlement payment from state-run oil firm Petrobras, will be spent on patrol officers, Jeeps, surveillance technology and other outlays to protect the rainforest, officials in all nine Amazon states told Reuters.
“It fell from the sky. You open and look at your bank balance and there’s money you didn’t even know that you had,” said Roberio Nobre, the head of the environmental agency in Amapa state, on Brazil’s northern border with French Guiana.
The amount of money going to the state environmental agencies has not been previously reported.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon climbed to an 11-year high in 2019 and continues to rise this year.
That has coincided with a decline in resources at Brazil’s federal environment agency Ibama. Its budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years and it now has less than half the 1 600 field agents it had in 2009.
“The transfer of money from the Petrobras Fund comes at an opportune time. The states can fill the vacuum and act as a counterpoint to the federal government,” said Ana Karine Pereira, an environmental policy professor at University of Brasilia.
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is formally known, was the centre of Brazil’s largest corruption scandal – the Car Wash probe – that involved bribes being paid to hundreds of politicians and business leaders to fix public construction contracts.
The oil company admitted wrongdoing related to record keeping and internal controls, ultimately agreeing to pay a $853m fine to settle charges that it violated US anticorruption laws.
For normally states, the money expanded budgets.
Pará is hiring an additional 100 environmental field agents to patrol for deforestation and other crimes, 10 times the number of agents they had before.
Several of the states have lengthy written plans for how the money will be used. | cash-strapped has radically