The Senate voted 99-0 on Monday to confirm Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as President Trump's secretary of state. Rubio will be instrumental in making good on many of Trump's grandest campaign promises — from ending the war in Ukraine to countering China's growing influence to implementing a ceasefire deal in Gaza. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted unanimously earlier Monday to recommend Rubio's confirmation, and Democrats cleared the way for an expedited process. It's a resounding show of Senate bipartisanship for one of their own. The 53-year-old Floridian has served in the Senate since 2011. He ran for president in 2016 before dropping out and endorsing Trump. He was on Trump's 2024 vice presidential shortlist.

Rubio, who would be the first Latino secretary of state, opposes normalizing relations with Cuba and is a noted China hawk. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tapped the state's attorney general, Ashley Moody, to replace Rubio in the Senate, as Axios first reported. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which will enter into its fourth year next month, will be one of the Trump administration's greatest foreign policy challenges. Trump and his allies have criticized how the Biden administration has handled the conflict. The GOP has been fractured in the past year over whether the U.S. should continue sending aid to Ukraine. Rubio testified last week that both Russia and Ukraine need to make concessions to end the conflict. Rubio voted against $95 billion in Ukraine aid in April, and has called for Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war with Russia — even if that means Russia keeps some of the territory from the invasion.

Trump Vexes New Zealanders By Claiming One Of Their Proudest Moments For America
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Among other false and misleading claims in U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration addresses on Tuesday, his declaration that Americans “split the atom” prompted vexed social media posts by New Zealanders, who said the achievement belonged to a pioneering scientist revered in his homeland.

Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United Kingdom.

The achievement is also credited to English scientist John Douglas Cockroft and Ireland’s Ernest Walton, researchers in 1932 at a British laboratory developed by Rutherford. It is not attributed to Americans.