Brazil senate committee votes for Rousseff impeachment trial

Brasilia: A Senate committee recommended on Friday that Brazil's President Rousseff be put on trial by the chamber on charges of breaking budget laws in an impeachment process expected to lead to her suspension from office next week.
The committee voted 15-5 for the impeachment trial. If she loses in the vote in the plenary on Wednesday, as expected, Rousseff would be suspended automatically and Vice President Michel Temer will replace her as acting president.
Meanwhile, Rousseff vowed to resist her removal from office until the end.
"I will resist until the last day," Rousseff said at an event where she announced the delivery of low-cost housing.
The president said she would not resign because she committed no crime and called her looming ouster a "coup d'etat."
The Supreme Court has rejected government requests to halt the impeachment process.
Rousseff has struggled to survive politically in the face of Brazil's biggest ever corruption scandal and its worst recession since the 1930s.
Her removal would mark an end to 13 years of leftist rule by the Workers Party that began in 2003 under her mentor, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Rousseff's supporters on the Senate committee called for annulment of the impeachment proceedings because the man who launched them last year, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, was removed from office on Thursday by the Supreme Court for obstructing the investigation of corruption accusations against him.
Workers Party Senator Lindbergh Farias said the ouster of Rousseff was aimed at undoing Lula's work to help the poor, and at rolling back workers' benefits, privatising state companies and realigning Brazil's foreign policy with the United States.