Brazil’s Congress overrode a series of vetoes from Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, escalating a battle that is grinding his government to a halt and threatening key priorities ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Both the lower house and Senate voted Thursday to overturn Lula’s blocking of key sections of a bill that loosened environmental licensing rules, legislation critics including United Nations climate experts say would undermine ecological protections. The move came less than a week after the UN’s annual climate conference ended in the Amazon rainforest.