The Senate quickly confirmed Marco Rubio as secretary of state Monday, voting unanimously to give President Donald Trump the first member of his new Cabinet on Inauguration Day.

The Senate on Monday unanimously confirmed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as America’s 72nd secretary of State, putting in place the first member of President Trump’s Cabinet on the day of his inauguration.

Rubio’s confirmation vote passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, 99-0. Rubio also was able to cast a vote for himself. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met on Monday with the family of Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish-American activist shot dead by the IDF in the West Bank earlier this year, the State Department announced.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that Blinken expressed condolences to the family and reiterated his belief that the September 6 incident should never have happened.

A Democratic politician said the investigation into the State Department’s funding of censorship projects was an election season distraction aimed at benefiting Republicans.

The House Committee on Small Business held a hearing Wednesday on the “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a reference to the US government’s funding of organisations which purport to fight disinformation, but which Republicans accuse of stifling conservative speech, including that of American journalists.

Last week, the Biden administration said it would allow the Azov Brigade, a Ukrainian military unit, to receive U.S. weaponry and training, freeing it from a purported ban imposed in response to concerns that it committed human rights violations and had neo-Nazi ties. 

A photo posted by the unit itself, however, seems to suggest that the U.S. was providing support as far back as December of last year. 

House Republicans are fuming at the Biden administration over reports that tens of millions of dollars of U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan may have ended up in Taliban hands.

During a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing last week, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., opened his chairman's remarks by listing off several State Department expenditures he found either egregious, lacking proper oversight or both.

JERUSALEM - The Islamic Republic of Iran retaliated against the Biden administration’s support of a mild U.N. watchdog agency rebuke of Tehran for its work on its covert illicit nuclear weapons program this week.

The U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said its inspectors had verified Monday that Iran has begun feeding uranium into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility. Cascades are a group of centrifuges that spin uranium gas together to enrich the uranium more quickly.