The Senate confirmed Antony Blinken to be President Biden’s Secretary of State, the fourth in the line of succession to the presidency, who Biden has tasked with leading the effort to bring the U.S. back to the global stage and rebuild alliances that suffered under the Trump administration.

The Senate voted 78-22 for Blinken’s confirmation, making him the 71st secretary of State and the fourth member of Biden’s Cabinet to be confirmed.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was confirmed on Monday while Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines were confirmed last week.

Blinken’s confirmation vote comes as the Senate is set to begin deliberations over the second impeachment trial against former President Trump, in which Senate leaders have worked to balance the trial of the former president over the need to confirm Biden’s Cabinet picks.

Trump was impeached in the House last week on one article of inciting an insurrection related to the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6 in an effort to overturn Congress’s official Electoral College count affirming Biden as the winner of the presidential election.

Blinken assumes leadership at the State Department amid Biden’s commitment to bring the U.S. back to the global stage by strengthening alliances and America’s involvement in multilateral institutions that Trump criticized and withdrew U.S. participation from.

He’s also tasked with increasing morale at the State Department that Democrats say has suffered greatly under the Trump administration with the departure of experienced professionals in leadership roles, vacancies of senior positions, personal attacks on diplomats and staff and unaddressed reports of political retaliation against career employees.

“The State Department is suffering from a historic crisis stemming from low morale, the departure over the past four years of many of our most experienced diplomats and the lack of accountability for the political leadership at top over the last four years,” said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Mr. Blinken’s experience and expertise is necessary to begin to repair the damage and rebuild the state department,” he added.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who spoke ahead of Blinken’s confirmation vote, offered support for Blinken as the “right person” to lead the department in the post-Trump years.

“Mr. Blinken is just the right person to rebuild and reassert America’s national security prerogatives on the global stage and reestablish the first instrument of American power: diplomacy,” Schumer said on the floor.

“For four years the failed diplomacy of the Trump administration weakened our alliances, strengthened and emboldened our adversaries and tarnished America’s reputation abroad,” Schumer said.

Blinken served as deputy secretary of State during the Obama administration and is a longtime adviser to Biden, having served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was chairman. Blinken also served in senior positions on the White House’s National Security Council when Biden was vice president.

In addition to his own service, Blinken’s father served as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, his uncle as U.S. ambassador to Belgium and his wife as assistant secretary of State for educational and cultural affairs during the Obama administration.

Blinken counts this, and his family history of finding refuge in the U.S., as inspiring his commitment to public service. His grandfather fled pogroms in Russia, his grandmother fled Communist Hungary and his stepfather survived the Nazi concentration camps.

During his confirmation hearing last week, Blinken committed to cooperating more closely with Congress on U.S. foreign policy decisions and further said increasing diversity at the State Department is one of his most primary responsibilities, committing to the president’s push for promoting racial and gender equity.

“I will view it as a significant measure of whether I succeeded or failed, however long I’m in the job, whether or not we have finally put in place the real foundations to make sure that we have a workforce and State Department that looks like the country it represents,” Blinken said during his confirmation hearing last week.

The newly confirmed secretary is tasked with taking a stronger position against adversaries like China, Russia and North Korea and navigating a pathway to diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program that Republicans oppose and senior Democratic leaders are cautious about.

Menendez offered full-throated support of Blinken’s confirmation but had earlier raised his “fear” over the Biden administration’s pursuit of rejoining the Iran nuclear deal that Trump withdrew from in 2018, if it fails to address Tehran’s other malign activity.

Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he supported Blinken’s confirmation despite being on opposite sides of the issue with Iran.

“Iran is a very wide disagreement that we have. In my judgement the JCPOA [Iran nuclear deal] was a colossal failure and a real blunder for American policy overseas. In talking with Mr. Blinken, he does not share that view,” Risch said in his remarks on the Senate F

“Again, this is one issue out of the many, many issues we discussed. There was very little, in fact no daylight between us on some of them,” he added.

Yet Republicans largely offered support to Blinken’s confirmation and offered cooperation on areas of agreement and engagement on conflicts.

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Palm Beach County Vice Mayor Robert Weinroth has called on county and state health officials to fix the “glaring” inequities in the county’s COVID-19 vaccination program.

Since Dec. 29, just 7 percent of the county’s Black and Hispanic eligible population had been inoculated compared to 70 percent of whites, according to statistics presented to the Palm Beach County Commission on Tuesday. Consistent with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ order, Palm Beach County is only vaccinating long-term care facility staff, persons 65 years of age and older, and healthcare personnel with direct patient contact.

“Seventy percent versus 7 percent? I think we can do much better,’’ he said. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that we have a whole underserved population.’’

Palm Beach County has vaccinated 130,027 people. That’s 8.7 percent of the county’s population, a higher percentage than Miami-Dade (5.7 percent) and Broward (6.4 percent) counties.

Weinroth challenged county managers and state health officials to “re-double the efforts as far as these underserved communities are concerned because it really is a glaring disparity we cannot accept. Shame on us for allowing this to continue this way.’’

Efforts have been made by churches to offer vaccinations to underserved communities. While the vice mayor applauded those efforts, he said more needs to be done by local government to wipe out the virus.

“We also have to do something about people who don’t trust us. There is a tremendous lack of trust and we have to make people feel that this vaccine is not going to kill them. That’s what’s apparent in these numbers,’’ he said.

Weinroth joins Daniella Pierre, the President of NAACP Miami, as public figures who have recently been pushing for equitable vaccine access in South Florida. The region is home to the largest percentage of Caribbean-Americans and Black population in Florida. At a recent press conference, Pierre called for educational outreach in the Black community via avenues besides the typically used churches and supermarkets, which could include hair salons, laundromats, or public transit stations.

Additionally, Weinroth joined commissioners in calling for improvements to the appointment reservation system.

“I think we all agree it’s been a case of ‘whack a mole’ where people have been going in one direction and then rushing in another,’’ he said.

“We need to have one unified vaccination reservation system where people feel equity, feel fairness and feel that if they get on the list on a certain date, their place on the list will be preserved and someone is not going to jump ahead of them because a site opened up with a couple of hundred doses.”

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Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day. But for many of the people and nations commemorating it this year, it will be an Internet event. In Ukraine, 2021 has a special significance.

A foundation established to commemorate one of the most horrific massacres of the Second World War at Babyn Yar in Ukraine has unveiled its construction plans for one of the world’s largest Holocaust memorial centres, which is to include a synagogue, church and mosque, a research centre and two museums to commemorate both the atrocities at the site and the wider genocide against Eastern European Jews.

In an announcement to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center said it plans a dozen buildings at the site on the outskirts of Kiev to remember the 100,000 victims shot there by the Nazis, including Jews, Ukrainians, Roma and the mentally ill.

The new plan for a complex replaces an initial concept for one large museum at Babyn Yar, says Robert Jan Van Pelt, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who chaired the group behind the master plan for the museum at Auschwitz and is now a member of the architectural board for Babyn Yar.

The initial concept entailed a museum on the scale of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw in an imposing building designed by a star architect, Van Pelt says.

“For many reasons it appeared that in the end, it was the wrong program, and what the foundation has been doing in the past year is to rethink again from scratch,” he says. “This will be a number of smaller projects, that that will go over time—there will be a 10-, 15-, 20-year kind of horizon not necessarily to make a really big statement. This also allows us to work more experimentally.”

“One of the principles the architectural board has established now is that we’re not going to really penetrate the site, we do not want to excavate, we do not want to create a big building that sits heavily on it.” He says a synagogue that is scheduled to open later this year, designed by Manuel Herz, “touches very lightly” on the site of what the foundation describes as Europe’s largest mass grave.

Herz says he has obtained a construction permit for the synagogue and plans to start building soon, with completion due by late spring or early summer. The design resembles a flat vertical book that unfolds into a space of about 80 sq. m. Its inspiration, Herz says, is a pop-up book that reveals “a whole new world, a cabinet of wonder.”

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the murder of 33,771 Jews in just two days at Babyn Yar in September 1941, one of the earliest massacres of the Holocaust. But for Van Pelt, it is also important to commemorate Jewish life in Ukraine, given that the region was, he says, “the heartland of European Jewry for many, many centuries.” The site will also address the denial of Jewish history since 1945, he says.

“After 1945, the Soviet regime had a vested interest in suppressing the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union as a Jewish tragedy,” he says. “They always coded the murder of the Jewish simply as the murder of Soviet citizens. So the Soviet regime didn’t want to do anything with this site.”

It is the day we remember the millions of people who died during the Holocaust, under Nazi persecution, and in the genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Held every year, it falls on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where more than a million people died during the Second World War.

The theme for this year is ‘Be the Light in the Darkness’.

It encourages us all to reflect on the depths humanity can sink to, but also the ways individuals and communities resisted that darkness to ‘be the light’ before, during and after genocide.

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CHARLESTOWN, Nevis — A notice from the Premier’s Ministry in the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) encourages the beautification of public spaces.

“The Nevis Island Administration commends acts of volunteerism by civic minded individuals or groups in our communities,” said the notice. “We are mindful that such participation should be encouraged.

“The Administration, however, reminds the public that all plans for beautification or modification to public spaces or infrastructure must be in keeping with the law and must first be approved by the relevant ministries.

“Everyone is asked to be guided accordingly.”

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BASSETERRE, St. Kitts — Youth-oriented and youth-led organizations in St. Kitts and Nevis are strongly encouraged to register or re-register in some cases, with the Department of Youth Empowerment on or before January 31.

Fifty-three organizations completed the hassle-free registration in 2020. They had access to numerous opportunities: access to technical expertise; networking opportunities with other organizations and agencies; and access to materials and resources. In the past, organizations received assistance with cots, stoves, easels, and projectors.

“We know that there are several groups that exist that did not register with the department and we would love to welcome them under our tent,” said Maluska Douglas, who is spearheading the registration effort.

She said each registered group is now provided with a certificate from the Department of Youth Empowerment that they can proudly display. The certificate proves registration, which is required by some regional and international agencies.

Another benefit of registration is access to grant funding opportunities from various institutions. Registrants can also apply for duty-free concessions from the Ministry of Finance through the Department of Youth Empowerment.

Registration can be completed at the Department of Youth Empowerment located on the top floor of the Cable Building on Cayon Street. Information can be obtained by calling 467-1393, or on Facebook @SKBYouthEmpowerment.

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