A man who escaped prison in Brazil has been re-arrested after a dramatic police car chase in Sao Paulo.
When the prisoner’s car was stopped by police for a minor traffic violation, he sped off in an attempt to avoid arrest.
He reportedly struck at least nine cars and four motorcycles as he tried to get away.
At least three people were injured during the chase, including the driver.
Police fired shots at the car, as drivers abandoned their vehicles.
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Police in Brazil say they have caught an Italian man who managed to amass $US259,000 ($A273,784.36) in traffic fines and other penalties linked to his van.
Police say they arrested 62-year-old engineer Roberto Cintio at his office after a 10-day investigation.
Most of Cintio’s fines were for speeding, which are levied in Brazilian cities by radar cameras without a police stop of the vehicle. Other fines were for parking, not paying vehicle property taxes and other infractions.
A police statement issued on Tuesday says Cintio likely evaded police by using false IDs. It says several blank identification cards were found with him.
There was no indication how long it took Cintio to build up the fines on his 9-year-old General Motors van.
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Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista said on Wednesday he is planning an electric car factory with an investment of around $1 billion that will produce 100,000 vehicles per year within four years.
“It’s going to be a domestically made car with foreign know-how, from Europe and Japan,” said Batista, an industrial magnate who this year was ranked by Forbes as the world’s eighth richest person. “The trend toward electric cars is irreversible.”
Batista said the facility would be constructed within the Acu port complex in the state of Rio de Janeiro being built by his logistics firm LLX (LLXL3.SA). This would create synergies by lowering the cost of importing products and reducing power costs, he said.
Brazil has one of the fastest-growing automotive markets in the world, and has been one of the few bright spots for auto-makers as economies in developed nations have struggled to emerge from recession.
But Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been lukewarm about electric cars, questioning whether they can be produced economically at commercial scale.
This may be in part because of Brazil’s booming biofuels sector that has benefited heavily from the widespread use of “flex-fuel” cars that can run on any combination of ethanol or gasoline.
“Just because of the logistics in Acu, we save $200 per car,” said Batista, owner of the EBX conglomerate that has subsidiaries involved mining, oil, electricity generation and logistics. “That’s a lot of money.”
He did not say which companies would be partners in the project.
Drivers would spend less than 10 percent charging the car than they would pay to fill tanks of conventional cars with gasoline or sugar-cane ethanol, Batista said. (more…)
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Brazilian police say that an attempt to hide a drug in a car has caused an explosion that peppered the walls of a gas station with rocks of crack cocaine.
Police say Monday that a man and woman apparently tried to hide 11 pounds (five kilograms) of crack inside their car’s natural gas fuel tank.
Police say that when they stopped to refuel their natural-gas powered car, the cylinder exploded.
Police say a 24-year-old woman suffered minor injuries. The 36-year-old man captured with her was also taken to a hospital for possible injuries.
By The Associated Press
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Twelve children were killed and 25 injured when a school bus collided with a truck in central Brazil.
The children, aged from six to 14, were returning home from Montividiu public school.
The accident occurred Monday when the truck driver lost control and rammed the vehicle into the bus coming from opposite direction, a Goias military police spokesman said.
Nine children, a woman and the drivers of both the vehicles died on the spot, police said.
The number of passengers on the bus has not been determined because it was the first day of school and a roster of riders had not yet been prepared, they said.
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