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Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Monday he will seek the Republican presidential nomination for 2016 contest, multiple news sources are reporting.

Rubio made the remarks in a conference call with donors, The Associated Press and The New York Times reported. Separately, Rubio's adviser told CNN the senator was running for president.

A formal announcement is expected later today.

The news is another chapter in what's been a fast and meteoric rise for the senator in national politics. Rubio served at the state level beginning in 2000 and by 2010, he had been elected to the United States senate.

Almost immediately, Rubio was seen as a Republican party leader, who, as the son of Cuban immigrants, could help turnaround the demographic ills of the GOP.

As he was described in a 2013 Time Magazine profile, "the charismatic conservative" had suddenly become the Tea Party's answer to President Obama. So much so, that in 2013 Rubio was picked by the party to deliver the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union Speech.

Although Rubio's speech was somewhat overshadowed by him awkwardly reaching for a drink of water, it also introduced Rubio as a Hispanic Republican with moderate views on immigration and with a uniquely American story.

"My parents immigrated here in pursuit of the opportunity to improve their life and give their children the chance at an even better one," Rubio said. "They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn't inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams."

As The Wall Street Journal reports, since that speech, Rubio has quietly moved into the upper tier of 2016 Republican contenders.

The paper adds:

"[Rubio] gave a well-reviewed performance at a recent gathering of donors organized by the conservative Koch brothers. He has raised eyebrows by securing the services of Jim Merrill, who directed both of Mitt Romney's presidential runs in New Hampshire, and the support of George Seay, a Texas financier who raised money for then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry last time around. He has laid a substantive groundwork with a series of detailed policy speeches over the past year."

With his announcement, Rubio joins a rapidly growing list of presidential hopefuls — on the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced her run over the weekend. And on the Republican side, Sen. Ted Cruz, another Cuban-American candidate, and Sen. Rand Paul have made their runs official. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has formed an "exploratory committee" for a presidential run.

2016 Republican presidential nomination

2016 Presidential Race

Sen. Marco Rubio

At 16, Liz was beaten and repeatedly raped, then thrown unconscious into a pit latrine in Busia County, in Western Kenya. The local police doled out their own brand of 'punishment' — they ordered the assailants to cut the grass at the police station.

But after millions of people around the world petitioned for a stronger punishment, a trial began last year. And on Monday, three of her assailants were sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The attack happened in June 2013, when Liz (a pseudonym used by the Kenyan press to protect her identity) was walking home from her grandfather's funeral. She was ambushed by six men — some of whom she knew, and at least one of whom was close to her age. The injuries she suffered to her back were so severe that she needed to use a wheelchair to get around, and the gang rape was so violent that she developed obstetric fistula, an injury to her vaginal wall that left her incontinent.

Liz was found crawling out of the latrine and crying for help. When she identified her assailants, the police rounded them up and ordered them to cut grass as their only punishment. Then the police let them go — even though under Kenya's Sexual Offenses Act, they should have received no less than 15 years in prison.

It would normally have ended there.

The civil rights nonprofit Rural Education and Economic Enhancement Program, or REEP, has documented more than 8,000 cases of sexual violence against minors in Busia County alone. In many cases, the Kenyan police had taken no action at all, says Mary Makokha, REEP's director.

"I know children who have been sexually abused, and the case is dismissed, like, 'Oh, you are old enough,'" she says. "And sometimes the parents of the victim are told, 'Ach, go sort this at home.'"

"And it ends like that."

But Liz's case caught the attention of a reporter at Nairobi's Daily Nation. The story sparked an international petition, called Justice for Liz. In two years, it garnered nearly 2 million signatures demanding that the police treat the case as a serious crime and not a misdemeanor.

Africa

Protesters Call For Justice In Brutal Gang Rape In Kenya

When the police refused to re-arrest the assailants, and some people in the community threatened Liz's family and they had to go into hiding, women's groups rallied in the streets of the county capital. Liz's story had become a watershed to bring the Kenyan government's attention to the victims of sexual violence.

Nairobi's chief prosecutor finally agreed last June to take Liz's case to court, as well as investigate 70 other cases of rape of minors in Busia.

For Makokha, who has been an advocate for women and girls since 1998, it felt like a miracle. "Cases that had been pending in court, people who had defiled the children and had never been arrested — within one month, more people were arrested than had been arrested in a year," she says.

"The tide has changed in Busia," says Kim Brown of Equality Now, a human rights organization assisting special prosecutors. She adds that "you see a new level of seriousness" about handling rape cases.

But the other assailants responsible for Liz's injuries are still at large — and they still have support of people in the community.

When three of her attackers were sentenced Monday, Liz wasn't there. Funded by well-wishers in Nairobi, she's out of the wheelchair, had surgery to fix the fistula and is back in school. She and her parents and siblings have moved to a new town.

It's a "victory for people power," said Sam Barratt, campaign director for Avaaz, in a statement.

"Liz's case had to be brought kicking and screaming into the courtroom," he said. "It proves that Kenyan courts can serve justice to survivors of rape, but only when the horror of the case creates a barrage of global outrage."

rape

Kenya

In war and in diplomacy, Great Britain has always been a global leader. Next to the United States, it had the largest footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade.

But now, something has changed. The United Kingdom is pulling back from the world stage.

Take recent meetings of European leaders, for example. This may be the most unstable time in Europe since the end of the Cold War, as Russia has seized Crimea and is supporting a war in Eastern Ukraine.

But when leaders met to negotiate a peace treaty in February, the German chancellor and French president led the talks between Russia and Ukraine. Britain's prime minister wasn't at the table.

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And, Britain won't be there on Monday when the foreign ministers of those countries meet in Berlin to assess the fragile truce in eastern Ukraine.

This absence goes beyond the crisis with Russia.

"I think Britain has taken leave from the world stage in an extraordinary and depressing way," says Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European Studies at Oxford University. "It's marginalized itself in Europe, and it's absented itself from most of the great issues on the world stage."

Boko Haram in North Africa, the nuclear deal with Iran, the civil war in Syria and more: These are all global crises, but ones where Britain plays a minor role, if any.

Syria is a useful case study. When President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons two years ago, Prime Minister David Cameron wanted the U.K. to launch airstrikes, but Britain's Parliament voted him down.

That was a painful lesson for Cameron, but it might have been predictable, given the last decade.

Iraq and Afghanistan are huge traumas for the U.K., as many people in Britain still believe the U.S. dragged the U.K. into those wars. And a few years ago, Britain helped lead the fight in Libya to oust Moammar Gadhafi, but that didn't go well either.

"Of course it achieved its immediate objective, and Gadhafi was overthrown," says Malcolm Chalmers, director of the the Royal United Services Institute. "But the outcome of that intervention is far from being a happy one. Libya is a failed state, with a civil war going on, with Islamist extremists gaining a safe haven there, which they didn't have before."

That might explain why Britain is sitting out military conflicts, but the country is also pulling away from diplomacy and international organizations such as the European Union. Cameron wants to let British voters choose whether to leave the alliance.

"What I'm doing is putting the country first and saying the people of the United Kingdom should be able to have a choice," Cameron says.

The U.K. is in the middle of an election campaign where international affairs barely come up at all — because the parties generally agree. They all want to shrink Britain's military budget, which worries American security experts.

"The shrinking size of Britain's defense forces and the shrinking size of Britain's ambition, if this continues much longer, will make them no longer able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us," says Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution. "And that's hugely valuable to the United States because our reflexes are so similar to Britain's."

Ordinarily the U.S. would try to amplify British voices arguing for a stronger international presence.

But in the U.K. these days, it's hard to find anyone making that argument at all.

British Prime Minister David Cameron

United Kingdom

Great Britain

In the past few years, students at hundreds of colleges and universities have started pushing their schools to divest from fossil fuel companies as a way to slow climate change.

The campaign has had some notable wins in the past year. But at tiny Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia, where the movement was born, students have been staging a sit-in for nearly a month to try to make their voices heard.

On the first day of an extended sit-in at the elite liberal arts college, dozens of students are crowded into a hallway outside the finance offices, learning a new protest song.

"We're asking for our school to sell its holdings in the top 200 coal, oil and gas companies," senior Sara Blazevic says. "Divestment is a way for our school, as a institution with a lot of social standing and a lot of clout, to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry."

That stigma is key. Climate change activist Bill McKibben, who visited Swarthmore on day eight of the sit-in, explained that divestment isn't meant to stop the flow of cash to well-capitalized energy companies.

"No one's under the illusion that if Swarthmore or any other college sells its shares in Exxon, that will immediately bankrupt Exxon," he says. "What it will do is begin the process, further the process, of politically bankrupting them."

By that, he means creating a world where campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies will carry the same stigma as cash from Big Tobacco.

"Making it much harder for them to dominate our political life the way they have," McKibben adds. "Because this is the richest industry on earth, it has way more political influence than it deserves."

Swarthmore's divestment movement began back 2011, says Sara Blazevic.

"When our campaign started, it was sort of scrappy," she says. "It didn't have a ton of support, we didn't have a network the way that the divestment movement has a network now, and then it grew really quickly."

Hundreds of schools now have divestment campaigns. They have been successful at about two dozen U.S. colleges and universities, most recently at Syracuse, the largest endowment to date to commit to fully divesting.

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Alumnus Will Lawrence of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network came back to Swarthmore to help the students effectively communicate their protest to the school's administrators. Emily Cohen/NewsWorks hide caption

itoggle caption Emily Cohen/NewsWorks

Alumnus Will Lawrence of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network came back to Swarthmore to help the students effectively communicate their protest to the school's administrators.

Emily Cohen/NewsWorks

Most other schools have said "no" to divestment, including Swarthmore in 2013.

"Primarily because we thought divestment would be too costly," says Gil Kemp, chair of the school's Board of Managers.

He says it would cost the school's roughly $2 billion endowment $11 to $15 million a year in returns. What's more, he argues stigmatizing fossil fuels won't reduce the amount of carbon released into the environment.

"Reducing our carbon footprint is a more effective way of dealing with this very real issue of climate change and global warming," Kemp says.

Divestment is a controversial tactic even among those working on climate change solutions.

Andrew Holland is an energy and climate fellow at the nonpartisan American Security Project in Washington D.C., which researches the impact of climate change on national defense.

"There are effective ways to fight climate change and there are ineffective ways to fight climate change," he says. "And I think that the divestment movement fundamentally is looking in the wrong direction."

Endowments at the 500 richest U.S. colleges and universities are worth nearly $500 billion. It's not known how much of that is invested in fossil fuels companies. But for some perspective, NYU, Bowdoin and Middlebury have all recently disclosed this information, and fossil fuels make up between 1.4 and 5 percent of their endowments.

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Financial experts say even full divesture would have little impact on the energy industry. And the moral argument doesn't hold water with Holland.

"Stigma doesn't work for the fossil fuel companies," he says. "These companies are already stigmatized. You're not going to stop Jim Inhofe or other hard right Republicans from taking money from fossil fuel companies because a bunch of professors at Stanford or Swarthmore determine they don't like ExxonMobil."

Plenty of student movements have begun and ended without the targeted industries batting an eye. Today, though, anti-fossil fuel activists claim kinship to the anti-Apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s, which also started on college campuses amid choruses of criticisms.

sit-in

swarthmore

divestment

fossil fuel