Brazilian Anglicans condemn ‘strategy of death’

THE Amazon is being burned by “greed and hatred”, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil has said in a pastoral letter criticising the country’s President, Jair Bolsonaro. The fires (News, 30 August) were not the result of drought or natural hazards, but were being “orchestrated by people representing agribusiness, land-grabbers and prospectors, encouraged by the president’s irresponsible speeches and statements”, the 15 bishops wrote. They blamed a government policy to “scrap and dismantle” environmental protection agencies, and warned of a “systematic strategy of a death government resulting in a huge catastrophe and the unprecedented devastation of part of the Amazon biome”. The President has spoken of “harmonising” environmental protection with economic growth.

CSW raises alarm about Chinese human-rights lawyers

A CHINESE human-rights lawyer, Tang Jingling, has been released after being detained arbitrarily for ten days, Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports. He was recently released after a five-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power”. Among the lawyers and human-rights defenders detained in China is Wang Quanzhang, whose six-year-old son was forced to leave his new primary school this month after police visited the school on multiple occasions.

Chesterton’s library to move to London

G. K. CHESTERTON’s library has been acquired by the Indiana-based University of Notre Dame. The library, currently held by the Oxford Oratory, where it is said not to have enough space, will be opened to the public at the American Roman Catholic university’s London centre (the former United University Club) in Suffolk Street, near Trafalgar Square, next autumn. The author, who was an Anglican from 1901 until he was received into the RC Church in 1922, aged 48, received an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame in 1930.