President prunes forest reforms

摘要

Brazils vast forests lost some legal protections last week, but less than environmentalists had feared. On 28 May, President Dilma Rousseff vetoed a dozen sections of the revamped forest code passed a month earlier by the lower house of Brazil's National Congress (see Nature ).Although Rousseff denied environmentalists' push for a full veto, she removed many of the bill's contentious provisions, including one that would have effectively granted an amnesty for any illegal deforestation conducted before July 2008.