Letitia Wright dropped some hints to Varietyabout the upcoming sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and how all involved are honoring the original film’s star, the late Chadwick Boseman.
Wright plays Shuri, the genius sister to Boseman’s King T’Challa, and rumor has it she’ll be taking on the mantle of Black Panther, as Boseman will not be recast.
Wright suffered an injury on the set of the film that was severe enough to cause changes to production to the Marvel Studios film. She says cast and crew soldiered on, as a tribute to Boseman, who died in 2020 at age 43 after a private battle with colon cancer.
“We committed everyday to working hard, no matter what circumstances we faced,” Wright told Variety from a red carpet event at the Cannes Film Festival. “And we faced a lot of circumstances. A lot of difficult situations, but we came together as a team.”
She added, “It is an incredible honor for Chadwick Boseman, it’s jam-packed with exciting stuff.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will hit theaters on November 11.
Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, parent company of ABC News.
Evanescence guitarist Jen Majura is no longer in the band.
The “Bring Me to Life” rockers shared the news in a social media post over the weekend, which reads, “It has been a very special chapter in the band with our dear friend Jen Majura, but we have decided it’s time to go our separate ways.”
“We will always love her and support her, and can’t wait to see what she does next!” the statement continues. “We are so grateful for the good times and great music we made all around the world together.”
Several hours later, Majura issued a tweet suggesting that the parting of the ways wasn’t an exactly a mutual decision.
“I feel the need to address that none of this was my decision!” Majura wrote, though she added that she has “no hard feelings against anybody” and that she wishes her now-former band “all the best.”
“I am allowed to carry beautiful memories of these past years, I am grateful,” she wrote.
Majura joined Evanescence in 2015 and played on their 2021 comeback album, The Bitter Truth, as well as their 2017 compilation, Synthesis, which featured alternate versions of the band’s past songs rerecorded with orchestral and electronic elements.
As for who will take Majura’s place, Evanescence will be announcing “exciting news about the new lineup…in the next few days.”
Evanescence is set to launch a European tour in June. They’ll return to the U.S. for a couple festivals in July, followed by a tour with Korn kicking off in August.
Marvel movie star Chris Prattannounced over the weekend that he and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, welcomed their second baby together.
“We are so excited to announce the birth of our second daughter, Eloise Christina Schwarzenegger Pratt,” he posted to Instagram on Sunday, adding, “Mama and baby are doing well. We feel beyond blessed and grateful.”
Katherine announced back in December that she and Pratt were expecting their second child. The couple also has a 1-year-old daughter, Lyla.
Pratt has a 9-year-old son, Jack, from his first marriage to actress Anna Faris.
(NEW YORK) — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” into neighboring Ukraine began on Feb. 24, with Russian forces invading from Belarus, to the north, and Russia, to the east. Ukrainian troops have offered “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
The Russian military has since launched a full-scale ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region, capturing the strategic port city of Mariupol and securing a coastal corridor to the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
May 23, 10:08 am
Zelenskyy calls for preventative sanctions in virtual address at World Economic Forum
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke Monday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling on the West to recognize as a mistake the refusal to impose preventive sanctions on Russia and take decisive steps in that direction.
“We must not react, but act preventively,” Zelenskyy told the forum in a virtual address. “And not only adapt what we have to the new realities, but create new tools. … Do not wait for fatal shots. Do not wait for Russia to use chemical, biological or, heaven forbid, nuclear weapons. Do not give the aggressor the impression that the world allegedly will not offer sufficient resistance. Protect immediately to the maximum freedom and a normal, useful world order.”
Zelenskyy said there are still no such sanctions against the Russian Federation, and listed them:
Complete embargo on Russian oil.
Complete blocking of all Russian banks.
Complete rejection of the Russian IT sector.
And complete cessation of trade with the aggressor.
Zelenskyy also called for freezing and confiscating Russian assets around the world and sending them to a special fund to pay compensation and restore Ukraine.
“There should be a precedent for punishing the aggressor. … Russian assets scattered across different jurisdictions should be found, arrested or frozen, and then confiscated and sent to a special fund, from which all victims should receive compensation,” Zelenskyy said.
He warned it will not be easy, but added that various aggressors will definitely not be motivated to do what Russia has done and continues to do in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said he believes the world is at a turning point and that the future of not only Ukraine, but the whole world, depends on the resistance to brutal force.
“This year, the words ‘turning point’ are not just a rhetorical figure of the speech,” Zelenskyy said. “Now is really such a moment when it is decided whether brutal force will dominate the world. If it dominates, then our thoughts are not interesting to it, and we can no longer gather in Davos. For what? Brutal force is looking for nothing but subjugation of those whom it wants to subdue, and it does not debate, but kills immediately, as Russia is doing in Ukraine right now — at this time when we are talking to you.”
May 22, 3:21 pm
Lithuania becomes first EU country to suspend all Russian energy imports
Lithuania is suspending all imports of Russian oil, natural gas and power, the country’s energy minister Dainius Kreivys announced in a statement Sunday, making it the only country in the European Union to suspend all imports on Russian energy.
Lithuania is now receiving liquified gas from the U.S. after becoming the first EU country to suspend Russian gas imports in April, Kreivys said. The country is now generating electricity via local power generation and local EU imports via existing connections with Sweden, Poland and Latvia.
It is unclear what alternate source of oil Lithuania will rely on, but Kreivys’ statement indicates that its sole importer of oil, Orlen Lietuva, refused to import Russian oil more than a month ago, Kreivys said.
The move is an expression of solidarity with Ukraine, Kreivys said, adding that it cannot allow its money to finance a Russian war machine.
The EU stated in March that it would end its dependency on fossil fuels imports from Russia and made plans to phase out Russian oil, gas and coal. The European Commission presented details on how it plans to achieve that last week.
May 22, 2:54 pm
50 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers killed every day, Zelenskyy says
While Ukraine has rarely reported on its combat losses since the Russian invasion began in late February, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced during a press briefing Sunday that 50 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are being killed every day.
The last time Zelenskyy revealed military death toll figures was in April, when he said that around 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in action and around 10,000 wounded. Zelenskyy did not provide a total figure for combatants killed in action on Sunday.
Since the start of the invasion, most Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 have been banned from leaving the country. On Friday, a petition calling for the government to cancel the ban was registered with the president’s office.
The petition surpassed the 25,000-signature threshold that requires the president to address it on Sunday. Zelenskyy acknowledged the petition during Sunday’s briefing.
“How would I explain that to relatives of our defenders who are fighting at the most difficult positions in the East, where 50 to 100 troops lose their lives every day?” he said.
Ukraine’s parliament voted to extend martial law through Aug. 23. Zelenskyy’s office has a few weeks to consider the petition.
May 22, 12:41 pm
Zelenskyy welcomes president of Poland amid Ukraine’s bid to join EU
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy extended a warm welcome to Polish President Andrzej Duda on Sunday amid his bid to have his country join the European Union.
During a parliamentary session, Zelenskyy expressed his gratitude to all Poles for their support, making it clear that he’s pushing full steam ahead to ensure Ukraine is granted candidate status.
“I am sure that all the necessary decisions will be made first for the status of a candidate for Ukraine, and then for full membership,” he said. “In particular, thanks to Poland’s many years of protection of Ukrainian interests on the European continent.”
Shortly after Zelenskyy and Duda addressed lawmakers, the parliament session was briefly interrupted when air sirens sounded in Kyiv, and members of parliament were moved to a shelter. The Ukrainian regional military administration later confirmed a Russian missile was intercepted over the Kyiv region.
France’s Minister for European Affairs Clément Beaune in his interview with France TF1 radio said on Sunday that it could take 15 to 20 years for Ukraine to become an EU member state, adding that Kyiv could enter the European political community proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron in the meantime.
May 22, 12:07 pm
Recent attacks have killed more than 200 Ukrainians, Russian military claims
The Russian Defense Ministry provided updates to what it described as the “special military operation in Ukraine” on Sunday, saying that hundreds of Ukrainians were killed in recent attacks.
High-precision air missiles and other attacks launched in Donetsk, Lugansk and Krasnyi on Sunday hit command posts, areas where Ukrainian manpower and military equipment are concentrated and ammunition depots, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
The attacks killed more than 210 Ukrainian nationals and destroyed as many as 38 armored motor vehicles, the ministry claimed.
Russian air defense also shot down 11 Ukrainian aircraft and intercepted “multiple launch rockets” in the Kharkov region, according to the defense ministry.
The ministry claimed that, in total, 174 Ukrainian aircraft and 125 helicopters, 977 unmanned aerial vehicles, 317 anti-aircraft missile systems, 3,198 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 408 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,622 field artillery and mortars and 3,077 units of special military vehicles were destroyed during the operation.
Olivia Rodrigo spent the weekend celebrating the one-year anniversary of her smash debut album SOUR, which arrived May 21, 2021.
“It is impossible for me to sum up in words how much this album means to me and how grateful I am to have gotten the privilege to make it and watch it exist in the world,” Olivia wrote on Instagram, thanking her musical collaborator, Dan Nigro, for “believing in me more than anyone.” She also thanked “everyone who has embraced my 17-year-old lamentations and forever changed my life in the process.”
Olivia’s words captioned a slideshow of photos and videos of scenes from the past year, including her winning night at the Grammys, her original diary entry in which she wrote that she “got my drivers license today,” a clip from her video, and scenes of fans in the audience singing along with her.
In addition, Olivia created an Instagram Reel that takes fans backstage at her show at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. In the video, she reflects on her incredible year, noting, “I always had this hypothesis that music that was super-vulnerable and honest would always cut through, no matter what it was about or who was singing it.”
“I think for me, SOUR just kind of reaffirmed that belief and made me believe in, like, the universality of music,” the 19-year-old star added.
This week, Olivia wraps up the North American leg of her SOUR tour in San Francisco. She’ll start the European leg in June.
Paramount Pictures has dropped the first teaser-trailer for the series’ seventh chapter, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, and to say it’s action-packed is an understatement.
The snippet teases chases on horseback in the desert, in cars on the streets of Europe, and of course, many shots of Tom Cruise‘s super spy, Ethan Hunt, running.
“Your days of fighting for the so-called ‘greater good’ are over,” Hunt is told by his one-time boss Kittridge, played again by Henry Czerny, who appeared in 1996’s very first M:I movie.
“This is our chance to control the truth,” he says, before adding, “You need to choose a side.”
By the look on Hunt’s face, he chooses to go rogue, again.
The teaser also features its share of brutal hand-to-hand fighting, with Esai Morales — apparently the heavy — as well as Guardians of the Galaxy vet Pom Klementieff, and her Marvel movie colleague Hayley Atwell getting in on the action this time around. The film also stars returning M:I players Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby.
The teaser is capped by the feat Cruise has called the most dangerous he’s ever done: Driving a speeding motorcycle off a cliff, launching the actor into the air for a skydiving stunt.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One opens July 14, 2023.
Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: the Series has been picked up for a fourth season ahead of the season three premiere, the streamer announced on Friday. Disney also announced July 27 as the premiere date for season three, which will follow the students of East High to sleep-away camp for a summer of “campfires, summer romances and curfew-less nights.” Disney also shared a first-look clip with original HSM cast member Corbin Bleu, appearing as himself in a guest role. He joins series regulars Olivia Rodrigo, Joshua Bassett, Kate Reinders, Sofia Wylie, Matt Cornett, Dara Renee, Julia Lester, Frankie Rodriguez, Larry Saperstein and Mark St. Cyr. Disney is the parent company of ABC News…
Euphoria‘s Alanna Ubach has joined the cast of Seth MacFarlane’s Peacock comedy series Ted, based on his popular film franchise, according to Deadline. Ubach will play Susan Bennett, a “selfless and almost pathologically sweet woman” who “sees the world through naive, rose-colored glasses.” In addition to MacFarlane, who reprises his role as the voice of the titular foul-mouthed teddy bear, Ubach joins series regulars Georgia Whigham, Max Burkholder and Scott Grimes…
Colin Cantwell, the concept artist who designed the iconic Star Wars spacecraft, including the X-wing fighter, TIE fighter and Death Star, died Saturday at his Colorado home, Sierra Dall, his long-time partner, tells The Hollywood Reporter. He was 90. Cantwell’s other film credits include special photographic effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, technical dialogue for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and computer graphics design consultant for WarGames. Stars Wars is a property of Disney, the parent company of ABC…
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness spent a third week at #1 at the North American box office, holding off Downton Abbey: A New Era with an estimated $31.6 million haul. That pushed the Doctor Strange sequel’s worldwide gross to just over to just over $800 million.
Still, the aforementioned Downton Abbey: A New Era enjoyed a strong second-place debut, grabbing an estimated $16 million, a possible sign that older audiences are finally returning to movie theaters. The film — starring Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Michelle Dockery, and Maggie Smith — delivered an estimated $35.7 million overseas, bringing its first-week global tally to $51.7 million.
The Bad Guys took third place, adding an estimated $6.1 million in its fifth week of release. The animated feature has now collected $74 million domestically to go with $107.8 million internationally, for a total gross of $182 million.
Fourth place belongs to Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which delivered an estimated $3.9 million in its seventh week in theaters. The film has earned a total of $181 million in North America and $194 million overseas, putting its current global tally at $375 million.
Rounding out the top five is another newcomer, Ex Machina director Alex Garland’s latest indie film, Men, debuting with an estimated $3.3 million.
Saturday Night Live closed out its 47th season this weekend by saying goodbye to cast members Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney, who each got their own sendoff.
Saturday’s show opened with McKinnon reprising her alien abductee Ms. Rafferty, leaving Earth permanently aboard her abductors’ spaceship.
“Well, Earth. I love you, thanks for letting me stay awhile,” McKinnon’s Rafferty said, fighting tears, before delivering the sketch comedy show’s familiar opening line, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
During the show’s “Weekend Update” segment, Davidson, who announced his departure ahead of the finale, delivered a heartfelt message of gratitude to the show, particularly to executive producer Lorne Michaels.
“I appreciate Saturday Night Live always having my back,” he said. “Thank you, Lorne, for never giving up on me or judging me, even when everyone else was, and for believing in me and allowing me to have a place that I could call home, with memories that will last a lifetime. So thank you, guys.”
In another “Weekend Update” skit, Bryant and Bowen Yang reprised their flamboyant ‘trend forecasters’ characters, which ended with Bryant announcing that “My best guys kissing me” is in, after which Yang and Update co-anchor Michael Che gave her a kiss and a shout-out, along with a bouquet of flowers.
Mooney’s sendoff was a bit more subtle. A 9 to 5 parody, also featuring SNL alum Fred Armisen, saw their characters jumping out of the window of an office building.
Russian Doll star Natasha Leone hosted, along with musical guest Japanese Breakfast.
(NEW YORK) — When the war in Ukraine broke out in February, Trevor Reed said he believed it meant he likely would never come home.
The American former Marine by that time had been imprisoned in Russia for nearly three years, held hostage after being convicted on trumped up charges. For 985 days, Reed was held in a series of Russian prisons, thrown in isolation cells as small as a closet for 23 hours a day, placed in a psychiatric ward and sent to a forced labor camp he described as looking and feeling like something “out of medieval times.”
But within two months, Reed was home in the United States, freed on April 27 as part of a prisoner swap agreed between the Biden administration and the Kremlin. Reed was freed in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot from Russia who was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
Now back in America and with his family for the first time, Reed is trying to adjust to normal life.
“I’ve been hanging out with the family a lot, been trying to get used to being free again,” the former U.S. Marine told ABC News in one of his first interviews since being released. “That takes a little bit of time, that process. But I feel better every day.”
For more of the ABC News interview with Trevor Reed, watch the full interview on ABC News Live at 8:30 p.m. ET.
He said that when he was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 2019, he was a healthy 175-pound student majoring in international security studies. When he was released, he said his weight had dropped to 131 pounds, he was ill, coughing up blood and feared he had contracted tuberculosis.
“He looked terrible. He looked really thin and he had dark circles under his eyes, and he just didn’t look like the Trevor that left for Russia,” Reed’s mother, Paula Reed, told ABC News. “So, that was hard to see him looking that way.”
Long ordeal began with 2019 arrest
The 30-year-old Texas native’s ordeal started in 2019 when he was visiting his Russian girlfriend, a recent law graduate, in Moscow. Reed, who had been studying Russian, was coming to the end of his time in the country and attended a party with his girlfriend’s friends, where plied with vodka shots he became drunk.
On the drive home, Reed became unmanageable, according to his girlfriend, Alina Tsybulnik, and jumped out of the car. Unable to get him back in and fearing for his safety, Tsybulnik and her friends said they called the police to ask them to take Reed to a drunk tank to sober up.
Two police officers agreed and after taking Reed to the station told his girlfriend to come pick him up in the morning. Reed, who says the last thing he remembers was being in the park, said when he woke up in the lobby of the police station the next morning initially he was free to leave.
But as he waited for his girlfriend to arrive to pick him up, a shift change occurred and the police brass on the next shift decided to hold him. Then, he said, agents from Russia’s powerful domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB, arrived and interrogated him.
“I pretty much knew as soon as I saw FSB agents where this case was was headed,” said Reed.
“The main thing that they wanted to know was about my military service,” Reed added. “They didn’t ask me at all, not one question about if I had committed a crime, if I had done something wrong. They did not ask me anything related to that at all. They wanted to know about my military service primarily.”
After the agents’ arrival, the police abruptly accused Reed of assaulting the police officers who had taken him the night before, charging him with endangering their lives.
He was arrested on the spot.
‘Kangaroo court’
Reed was put on trial, in what he described as a “kangaroo court” and which the U.S. embassy denounced as absurd. At a hearing attended by ABC News, the two police officers Reed was alleged to have assaulted struggled to remember the incident and repeatedly contradicted themselves, at one point becoming so confused that the judge laughed at them.
Reed told ABC News that during an interrogation with the two officers, they admitted to him they had been ordered to make the false allegations against him.
“I asked, you know, one of those officers, I said, ‘Why are you guys doing this? Why did you write this, like, false, you know, accusation against me?’ And he looked around at the door to make sure that there was no one there, and he looked at the other police officer, and he said, “We didn’t want to write this. They told us to write this.'” Reed said.
Despite believing the trial was predetermined, Reed battled to prove his innocence, repeatedly appealing rulings. He accused Russian authorities of trying to pressure him into dropping his resistance, including, at one point, sending him to a psychiatric treatment facility to “scare me.”
“That was pretty terrible. You know, blood on the walls. There’s a hole in the floor for the toilet,” said Reed, adding that human feces were all over the floor of a cramped cell he shared with four other prisoners, who suffered from serious psychological conditions.
“I thought maybe they had sent me there to chemically disable me, to give me sedatives or whatever and make me unable to fight,” Reed said.
After over a year in a pre-trial detention center that he described as “extremely dirty” and infested with rats, in mid-2020 Reed was convicted and sentenced to nine years in a prison camp. He was transported to a prison in Mordovia, around 300 miles of Moscow, a former Gulag camp built just after World War II.
But there, Reed said he refused to work or kowtow to prison rules.
“Ethically, I thought that would be wrong to work for a government who was kidnapping Americans and using them as political hostages,” Reed said. “I couldn’t justify that with myself.”
As punishment, he said he was placed in solitary confinement for 15-day stretches at a time, sleeping in the cold cell at night on the floor, trying to stay warm by huddling next to a hot-water pipe.
“I mean, it was difficult, but I wasn’t going to let that change my actions,” Reed said.
Won prisoners’ respect
Reed said that even as the guards in the camp “hated him” for not complying with their orders to work, his resistance attracted the admiration of fellow prisoners.
“I was consistently fighting and resisting the government there,” he said. “The prisoners inside of the Russian prison, the criminal element there, they respected that.”
He said he survived by maintaining his battle for justice while at the same time refusing to allow himself to hope he would ever go home.
Watch the ABC News Live special “985 Days: The Trevor Reed Interview” on Monday, May 23, at 8:30 pm ET/9:30 pm PT
Meanwhile, Reed’s parents continued to battle for his freedom. His father, Joey Reed, flew to Russia, spending over a year alone there to be at his son’s court hearings and lobby U.S. diplomats in Moscow. Stateside, he and his wife and daughter mounted an intensive campaign of government leaders on both sides of the political aisle to take up his cause.
Joey and Paula Reed took their fight all the way to the White House, eventually obtaining a meeting with President Biden which they credit as being decisive in persuading his administration to finally make the trade.
“My parents and my girlfriend, Alina, did everything,” Trevor Reed said. “They gave up their whole lives to help me.”
Prisoner trade
Reed said on the day he was traded, he was loaded onto a plane by 20 FSB agents but told nothing of the destination. But as the plane headed south and he saw he was flying over water, Reed said he realized it must be the Black Sea and he must be headed for Turkey. The aging Russian government plane was so dilapidated though, Reed said, that he feared they might crash before they made it to any swap.
On the tarmac in Turkey, he walked past Yaroshenko, he said.
“I remember looking at him and he looked over at me. I think both of us probably had that same feeling, that same thought of like, ‘that’s what that guy looks like,'” Reed said.
Treated by doctors on the plane back, Reed said he struggled to shake a new found anxiety around flying.
“Mostly I was hoping that the plane did not crash at that moment before I saw my family,” he said.
Wages fight for other hostages
Reed said that when he initially landed in the United States, his parents were there to meet him, but he said he couldn’t hug or touch them until he underwent a full medical examination to ensure he did not have tuberculosis or any other communicable diseases.
Since being medically cleared, he said he has tried to adjust to normal life, even having to remember some English, after speaking Russian for the past three years.
But Reed said he cannot stop thinking about the other former Marine held hostage in Russia, Paul Whelan, who was left behind. Whelan, who was seized in 2018 while attending a wedding in Moscow, is held on espionage charges that the U.S. government says were also fabricated to take him as a bargaining chip. Whelan is in a prison camp also in Mordovia, sentenced to 16 years.
Russia had previously floated trading Whelan for Yaroshenko and other Russians held in the United States and at one time it had been thought Reed and Whelan might be traded as a pair.
“I had a really strong feeling of guilt that I was free and that Paul Whelan was still in prison. I thought when I found out that it was an exchange that was happening, that they had probably exchanged Paul Whelan, as well. And I expected him to be coming home with me. And he — he didn’t,” Reed said.
“I thought that that was wrong, that they got me out and not Paul,” Reed said, choking up. “I knew that as soon as I was able to, that I would fight for him to get out and that I would do everything I could to get him outta there.”
Reed said he also feared for the WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was seized on drugs smuggling charges in February after Russian authorities alleged they had found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The State Department has designated Griner as wrongfully detained.
Russia has also floated the idea of trading the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout for Whelan and Griner. Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States, convicted on narco-terrorism charges.
Reed said the United States should trade Bout without hesitation to free Whelan and Griner.
“I think that they need to do that. If that’s for Viktor Bout, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s 100 Victor Bouts. They have to get our guys out,” Reed said.
“You’re getting two Americans who are going to have, you know, a huge amount of time left on their sentences for a guy who is getting out soon — who has already been in prison for 15 years,” he said.
He said if the freedom of the other American hostages means more prisoner exchanges, then the U.S. government shouldn’t balk at taking that path again.
When told that some have countered that prisoner exchanges only encourage countries to take more hostages, Reed scoffed at that notion.
“I would like to say that that’s completely inaccurate,” Reed said. “That’s not a concern at all because countries like Russia, China, Venezuela, Rwanda, Iran, Syria and places like that need absolutely no incentive to kidnap Americans.”
