Rousseff to attend UN ceremony in New York

BRASILIA - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will travel to New York on Friday for the signing ceremony of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change, her office announced Wednesday.

During Rousseff's trip, Vice President Michel Temer, who has been pushing for Rousseff's impeachment, will temporarily assume the presidency.

Rousseff will use her platform at the UN to address the impeachment process against her, which she describes as a coup attempt.

She will have five minutes to speak at a UN ceremony, during which she is expected to lambast the "coup" and remind the world of Brazil's contributions to the climate change agreement.

Rousseff had expressed reservations about leaving Brazil and allowing Temer to take over, but local media said her collaborators seem to have advised her to tell attendees at the UN about the truth of the political crisis in the country.

A day before the announcement of Rousseff's trip to New York, Temer sent Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of his loyalists, to meet in Washington with Thomas Shannon, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs and a former American ambassador to Brazil, in order to present their side of the impeachment debate.

Adopted by the 196 Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement sets a target of curbing the global average rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 degrees.

The agreement will be officially signed at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday.