Questões Militares

                      Prison without guards or weapons in Brazil

      Tatiane Correia de Lima is a 26-year-old mother of two who is serving a 12-year sentence in Brazil. The South American country has the world’s fourth largest prison population and its jails regularly come under the spotlight for their poor conditions, with chronic overcrowding and gang violence provoking deadly riots.

      Lima had just been moved from a prison in the mainstream penitential system to a facility run ______(1) the Association for the Protection and Assistance to Convicts (APAC) in the town of Itaúna, in Minas Gerais state. Unlike in the mainstream system, “which steals your femininity”, as Lima puts it, at the APAC jail she is allowed to wear her own clothes and have a mirror, make-up and hair dye. But the difference between the regimes is far more than skin-deep.

      The APAC system has been gaining growing recognition as a safer, cheaper and more humane answer to the country’s prison crisis. All APAC prisoners must have passed through the mainstream system and must show remorse and be willing to follow the strict regime of work and study which is part of the system’s philosophy. There are no guards or weapons and visitors are greeted by an inmate who unlocks the main door to the small women’s jail.

      Inmates are known as recuperandos (recovering people), reflecting the APAC focus ______(2) restorative justice and rehabilitation. They must study and work, sometimes in collaboration with the local community. If they do not - or if they try to abscond - they risk being returned to the mainstream system. There have been physical fights but never a murder at an APAC jail.

                          Adapted from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44056946

                Lego wants to replace plastic blocks with sustainable materials

      The Lego Group wants to replace the plastic in their products with a “sustainable material” by 2030, the company announced.

      The world’s largest toy company will invest $1 billion in their new LEGO Sustainable Materials Centre in Denmark, which _______(1) devoted to finding and implementing new sustainable alternatives for their current building materials. Lego plans on hiring 100 specialists for the center. There is no official definition of a sustainable material.

      Legos _______(2) made with a strong plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene since 1963. The company uses more than 6,000 tons of plastic annually to manufacture its products, according to NBC News. Changing the raw material could have a large effect on Lego’s carbon footprint, especially considering that only 10% of the carbon emissions from Lego products come from its factories. The other 90% is produced from the extraction and refinement of raw materials, as well as distribution from factories to toy stores.

      The company _______(3) already taken steps to lower its carbon footprint, including a reduction of packaging size and an investment in an offshore wind farm.

                                  Adapted from http://time.com/3931946/lego-sustainable-materials/

                                (Título omitido propositadamente)

      Italian children have been told not to turn up to school unless they can prove they have been properly vaccinated. The deadline follows months of national debate over compulsory vaccination. The new law came amid a surge in measles cases - but Italian officials say vaccination rates have improved since it was introduced. Children must receive a range of mandatory immunisations before attending school. They include vaccinations for chickenpox, polio, measles, mumps and rubella.

      Children up to the age of six years will be excluded from nursery and kindergarten without proof of vaccination under the new rules. Those aged between six and 16 cannot be banned from attending school, but their parents face fines if they do not complete the mandatory course of immunisations.

      Italian media report that regional authorities are handling the situation in a number of different ways. In Bologna, the local authority has set letters of suspension to the parents of some 300 children, and a total of 5,000 children do not have their vaccine documentation up to date. In other areas there have been no reported cases, while still others have been given a grace period of a few days beyond the deadline.

      The new law was passed to raise Italy’s dropping vaccination rates from below 80% to the World Health Organisation’s 95% target.

                                    Adapted from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47536981