Biden orders flags to fly at half-mast for Albright's death

Washington, 23 Mar US President Joe Biden ordered this Wednesday that flags fly half way up to the White House and all federal buildings in the country due to the death of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In a presidential proclamation, the president ordered that the flags fly at half-mast for four days, until March 27, not only in federal public facilities, but also at military posts, naval stations and government vessels. The US badges will not be fully hoisted either in the country's embassies and consular offices abroad. Albright, who was the first woman to hold the position of US Secretary of State, died Wednesday at age 84, her family said in a statement. The family explained that Albright, Secretary of State between 1997 and 2001, died of cancer surrounded by her loved ones. Biden recalled Albright on Wednesday as “a force”, whose hands “changed the course of history.” In a communicated sense, the president recalled the times when he worked with her in the 90s of the last century, when he was a senator. “As the world redefined itself after the Cold War, we were comrades and friends working to welcome the newly liberated democracies into NATO and confront the horrors of genocide in the Balkans,” the president said. Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in 1937 in Prague before World War II, and soon her father, a diplomat and academic, decided that the whole family should go into exile to London. After the end of the world war, they returned to their country of origin to flee again shortly after with the arrival of communism. In 1948, at the age of eleven, Albright came to the United States and, after studying at the prestigious universities of Wellesley and Columbia, he reached the front row of American politics. She worked for Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser during Jimmy Carter's presidency (1977-1981), and then worked as a professor at the prestigious Georgetown University in Washington. With Bill Clinton's arrival at the White House (1993-2001), Albright was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a position she held between 1993 and 1997, and later premiered as the first woman to head the State Department. Albright became the face of US diplomacy after the Cold War and, as Secretary of State, advocated the expansion of NATO and defended the need to intervene in the Balkan wars, while betting on reducing nuclear weapons arsenals. At the time of her death, the former Secretary of State was still a professor at Georgetown University and presided over the Albright Stonebridge Group, a powerful consulting group that she herself founded and where members of the Biden Government have worked. CHIEF ssa