Agence France-Presse: Brazil’s sprawling Amazon jungle this year lost 7,000 square kilometers (2,700 square miles) of rain forest, a huge area but also a whopping 45 percent drop from 2008 losses, an official reported Thursday. “It’s by far the best result we’ve seen since INPE began its study in 1988,” the director of Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, Gilberto Camara, told President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his environment minister at a meeting here. Camara said deforestation in …