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The Brazilian government backed off a controversial proposal to authorize private companies to mine a sprawling Amazon reserve Monday after blistering domestic and international criticism.
President Michel Temer's office will issue a new decree Tuesday that "restores the conditions of the area, according to the document that instituted the reserve in 1984," the Ministry of Mines and Energy said in a statement.
Last week, environmental activist group Greenpeace said at least 14 illegal mines and eight clandestine landing strips were already being used by miners in the Denmark-sized reserve known as Renca in the eastern Amazon.
Greenpeace said this showed the risks faced by Renca even without Temer's earlier proposal for ending a ban on large-scale foreign mining in the mineral-rich region.
Temer's decree signed on August 25 on opening up Renca—rich in gold, manganese, iron and copper—was suspended days later after an international outcry.
Mining condoned by the government will not happen, but illegal mining will continue?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:13PM (3 children)
It's not "hijacking". Nobody was commenting about this Brazil nonsense anyway, so this submission has been put to good use discussing something relevant.
Besides, there's been a submission about these outages queued up for many hours [soylentnews.org]. Until that gets on the front page, like it should have been yesterday, we'll have no choice but to discuss these Slashdot and SourceForge outages in other submissions.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:18PM (2 children)
I agree. While there is a desire not to acknowledge the existence of the green site, frankly it would be interesting for us to watch and comment on it if it is crumbling to its demise.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:26PM (1 child)
There should be a general breaking-news submission pinned to the top at all times, where stuff like this can be discussed. The first level of comments would be sorted by descending by default, so that the latest discussion appears at the top.
Maybe the submission/queue approach works well for bland stories, where a delay of 2 or 3 days doesn't matter, but when it comes to important breaking news we shouldn't have to wait for the editors to get their shit together. We should be able to discuss breaking news right away.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 27 2017, @07:41PM
That's actually not a terrible idea, but there is already a mechanism for talking about whatever crap you want: journals. You will have to log in though.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]