BRAZIL SENATE BRACES FOR ROUSSEFF IMPEACHMENT VOTE

BRASÍLIA: Brazil’s Senate was to vote on Wednesday ( Thursday in Manila) on stripping Dilma Rousseff of the presidency in a traumatic impeachment trial set to end 13 years of leftist rule over Latin America’s biggest country. Senators loyal to Brazil’s first female president debated into the night Tuesday in a final attempt to halt the apparently unstoppable momentum toward her dismissal. Despite the impassioned speeches, which followed 14 hours of testimony by 68- year- old Rousseff herself on Monday, her fate was apparently sealed. Rousseff, from the leftist Workers’ Party, is accused of taking illegal state loans to patch budget holes in 2014, masking the country’s problems as it slid into its deepest recession in decades. She told the Senate that she is innocent, saying the impeachment trial amounts to a right- wing coup d’etat. However, huge street demonstrations over the last

DRONE STRIKE KILLS 3 QAEDA SUSPECTS IN YEMEN

ADEN: A presumed US drone strike in southern Yemen killed three Al- Qaeda suspects on Tuesday, a security official and a tribal source said. The strike hit a vehicle carrying the three alleged jihadists in the eastern suburbs of Ataq, the capital of Shabwa province, the official said. Two of the suspects who were injured in the attack later succumbed to their wounds, a tribal source said, raising an earlier toll of one killed. The United States has carried out numerous drone strikes against Al- Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) operatives in Yemen. American officials said this month that the US military had killed three AQAP fighters in a strike, also in Shabwa. On Wednesday, drone strikes killed seven Al- Qaeda suspects in south and east Yemen. AQAP and the Islamic State group have exploited a power vacuum created by the conflict between the government and Iran- backed rebels to expand their presence in the Arabian Peninsula country.