Brazil lost 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of Amazon jungle in September, but deforestation slowed by a third compared with the same month last year, according to official data released Wednesday.

Environment Minister Carlos Minc said the speed at which the vast Amazon rain forest was being stripped was down 32 percent, based on satellite imagery from the government's National Space Research Institute.

Brazil's government has made the fight against Amazon deforestation a priorities. Much of the fragile woodland is burnt down by ranchers and farmers, releasing into the atmosphere massive amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Brazil is expected to present the results of its efforts at a major UN climate change meeting in Denmark next month, which will try to come up with a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

Bulgaria claims back former king's forests

The Bulgarian farming ministry said Wednesday it had decided to claim back some 1,600 hectares of forest that were restituted to the country's former king Simeon Saxe Coburg in 1998.

The ministry said in a statement that it had filed a claim on the land in court, arguing that the restitution of part, if not all, of the forest in 1998 had been "unlawful".

It also said it would was seeking 5.0 million leva (2.5 million euros, 3.7 million dollars) in damages from the family of the former king, because they allowed the logging of some 30,000 cubic metres of wood from the forests since getting them back.

The restitution of royal property to the Saxe Coburg family has been a major bone of contention in Bulgaria.

A spokeswoman for Saxe Coburg, Tsvetelina Uzunova, told AFP that the former king was also keen for the court to decide whether the restitution had in fact been legal.

Simeon II was only six years old when he came to the throne after his father died in 1943. The royal family was exiled by the communists in 1946 and he spent the next 50 years in exile.

Saxe Coburg returned to Bulgaria in 1997 and in 2001 became the first European royal to be elected prime minister.

The king, who is now 72, his sister Maria-Louisa and other members of the royal family were handed back hundreds of hectares of land and forests and several royal residences and holiday villas that had been nationalised by the communists.

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