Delegations leave peace talks between representatives from Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey. – Onur Coban/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The first face-to-face peace talks in more than two weeks between Ukraine and Russia concluded after five hours on Tuesday in Turkey with both sides reporting progress in the negotiations.
In an unexpected move, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Col. Gen. Alexander Fomin told reporters following Tuesday’s talks that Russia’s military activity is being dramatically curtailed near the Ukraine capital Kyiv and in Chernihiv in an attempt to increase “mutual trust and create conditions required for further negotiations.”
Formin said the “ultimate goal” of the talks is reaching a peace treaty.
Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said Tuesday’s talks were “constructive.”
“We have received proposals from Ukraine to consider their clearly formulated position on inclusion in the treaty,” Medinsky told reporters following the session.
Ukrainian negotiator Alexander Chaly said the next talks in about two weeks could involve other countries in the negotiation process.
David Arakhamia, another Ukrainian negotiator, added, “We believe that enough material has already been developed to involve the presidents of Ukraine and Russia in the talks.”
Medinsky noted that Tuesday’s “substantive conversation” could clear the way for a meeting between the heads of state.
“The proposed format is like this: first an agreement will be drafted, then the agreement will be approved by the negotiators and signed by the foreign ministers at a meeting, and then the possibility of a meeting between the heads of state will be discussed in order to sign this agreement,” Medinsky said.
The in-person talks were held in Istanbul and Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan addressed the opposing parties before the negotiation session started.
“It is in the hands of the parties to stop this tragedy,” Erdogan said in his opening remarks, which were carried live on Russian TV.
Erdogan said Turkey sees both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “valuable friends.”
Also participating in the negotiations was Roman Abramovich, the billionaire Russian oligarch whose assets have been frozen by sanctions imposed by the West due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Previous in-person peace talks have been held in Belarus and representatives of both parties have also been communicating via video conferencing.
Russia initially only presented Ukraine with ultimatums but has changed its strategy as its troops have met tough resistance from Ukrainian forces, which have managed to re-take some towns and villages.
Prior to Fomin’s announcement that Russia was de-escalating its military activities in Kyiv and Chernihiv, a U.S. defense official said Monday that Russian troops around Kyiv have stopped making advances toward the city, though they continue using long-range fires. Russian troops remain 15-20 miles north/northwest of the city and about 35 miles east.
“Static situation on the ground there, except for the fact that we continue to see Ukrainians defend the city and try to push Russians back as well,” the U.S. official said on Monday.
Before Tuesday’s negotiations, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned the Ukrainian delegation to be on guard for sabotage, including poisoning.
“I advise to everyone who’s going to any negotiations with Russia, not to eat or drink anything, and also not to touch any surfaces,” Kuleba said.
Marti Hines, far left, poses with Selma Blair, center, and a friend in this undated photo. (Courtesy Marti Hines)
(NEW YORK) — When Marti Hines woke up one morning four years ago while on vacation and was unable to move the left side of her body, she said it did not even cross her mind that she, at age 34, could have multiple sclerosis (MS).
Even after an MRI found over 20 lesions on her brain and spinal cord and she was formally diagnosed with MS, Hines said she spent close to six months in “anger and denial,” not willing to believe she had the disease, a chronic disorder of the central nervous system that can cause problems with vision, balance and muscle control.
“Being a Black woman at 34, it just added to me not being able to take in this information,” Hines, now 38, told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “Nothing seemed to make sense.”
When she looked online for information about MS, Hines said the results not only terrified her, but also did not seem to reflect her, a young, Black woman who was healthy and active and had a busy career as a filmmaker and event planner.
“It’s a pretty terrifying thing to try to deep dive and look into, so I was very scared,” said Hines. “And then as I was getting on that road of acceptance, and trying to find resources, I really noticed I wasn’t finding a lot of myself.”
In the same month that Hines was diagnosed, August 2018, actress Selma Blair was also diagnosed with the same disease, while in her 40s.
When Blair shared her diagnosis publicly, Hines said she was still in her own “denial” about having MS.
Over the years though, Blair speaking out about her battle with MS has helped Hines, and she believes countless other people with MS, women in particular.
“I appreciate the awareness that she brought to the disease,” said Hines, who says she has since met Blair at MS-related events. “I feel like this illness has a face now. You can say you have MS and people have some kind of touchpoint to it. I think it’s amazing that she has been so open and vulnerable.”
A changing face of a disease that strikes young women at higher rates
Blair and other actresses who have spoken publicly about battling MS in recent years, from Christina Applegate to Jamie Lynn Sigler, have begun to change the perception of MS, according to both patients and experts.
The three women, now in their 30s and 40s, represent the most common population of MS patients — young and female — who have not always been the public face of the disease, even though it has long affected them disproportionately.
The average age of the start of symptoms for people with MS is between the ages of 20 to 40, and the disease is three times more common in women than men, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS), a nonprofit organization focused on raising MS awareness and increasing research.
“The label of MS these days doesn’t necessarily conjure up the same image as it did maybe 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Suma Shah, a board-certified neurologist at Duke University who specializes in MS. “We used to hear MS and think this is someone who’s going to have disability, who’s going to have a really rough disease course. We’re in a place now where we can’t assume that about the diagnosis.”
While there is no known cause of MS, it is believed to be an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks myelin, the tissue that surrounds nerves, including those in the brain and spinal cord, according to the NIH.
It is an unpredictable disease, one that causes different symptoms with variable timing and frequency in different people, from fatigue, numbness or tingling, weakness, dizziness and vertigo to, in the most severe cases, rendering a person unable to write, speak or walk, the NIH says.
Even for each individual patient, the symptoms of MS can vary at times, ranging from mild to the extreme pain of a flare-up of the disease, as Hines knows well.
“If you have MS, you’re just highly sensitive, so anything that messes with the balance that I try to keep myself at will trigger these symptoms, and then they kind of roll into a domino effect of one another,” said Hines. “It’s only been about three-and-a-half years since I’ve had MS, but I’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel good.”
Why it is women like Hines who are young and otherwise healthy who are disproportionately stricken with MS remains a mystery that researchers are still trying to solve, according to Shah.
“What we’ve looked at specifically are whether there are something genetic, specifically on the X chromosome, which women have two of, whether there’s something hormonal and then environmental factors,” she said. “I think it really is that perfect storm for one individual person of how genetics, hormones, and environmental factors all play in together to allow MS to flourish.”
“And in that young, early 20s, 30s period, we don’t know why. It may just be that again, that perfect storm of having the right genetics and the right hormone levels to allow it to flourish,” Shah explained.
For some women, the disease can strike suddenly, as with the case of Hines, who said she woke up one morning unable to move and received a diagnosis just hours later.
The more common path though is that it can take months or years for a woman to get a diagnosis of MS. In the case of Blair, she has said it took several years to get a diagnosis, a time during which she said she self-medicated and felt like she was “not taken seriously by doctors.’
“I was ashamed and I was doing the best I could and I was a great mother, but it was killing me,” Blair, whose son was 7 years old at the time of her diagnosis, told ABC News’ Robin Roberts in 2019. “And so when I got the diagnosis I cried with some relief. Like, ‘Oh, good, I’ll be able to do something.'”
Adding to the difficulty of diagnosing MS is that symptoms may start and then fade away and later return, or in other cases they may develop gradually over many years. The four main types of MS are named according to the progression of symptoms, according to the NIH.
With relapsing-remitting MS, the most common type of the disease, symptoms occur in attacks, called a relapse or exacerbation, followed by a period of remission that may last for weeks, months or years, according to the NIH.
People with secondary-progressive MS have usually had a history of MS attacks and their symptoms and ability to function worsen over time. In the two more severe and rare forms of MS — primary-progressive MS and progressive-relapsing MS — people’s symptoms worsen from the beginning, with no remission, according to the NIH.
There are no specific tests that diagnose MS, which means doctors often rely on ruling out other conditions with similar symptoms. MRIs can also identify lesions on the brain and spinal cord to help diagnose MS.
“It’s really hard because I think for an individual, the sooner you pursue diagnosis, the longer you have to live with seeing your body in your life through this new lens,” said Shah. “But from a medical standpoint, that allows us to start high efficacy-medication early so that we can prevent downstream disability.”
There is no cure for MS, but there are medications now available to help delay the progression of the disease and to decrease the frequency and intensity of symptoms, according to Shah.
“I tell people when I diagnose them, the way that they look on the day they meet me, that’s the goal, no more disability,” she said. “And we have really good medications that get us pretty close to that these days.”
Breaking the stigma of an ‘invisible disease’
What Blair, Applegate and Sigler have done in speaking out about their battles with MS is to put names, faces and experiences to what advocates and patients describe as an “invisible disease.”
“Despite the fact that an estimated million people live in the U.S. with MS and that three-quarters of them are women, so we’re talking about 750,000 women, it is a very invisible disease in many ways,” said Julie Fiol, associate vice president of healthcare access for the NMSS. “It’s invisible in that people aren’t aware of it, don’t quite know what it is when they hear it, and because the symptoms can be invisible.”
When Moyna John, a 30-year-old mother, was diagnosed with MS over two years ago, she said even people close to her struggled to understand her illness at first because she wasn’t in a wheelchair, for instance.
“Some people close to me were like, ‘Well, you look fine,'” recalled John. “People within the chronic illness community in general hate hearing the, ‘but you don’t look sick’ phrase, because it’s not a compliment. We are sick.”
John, of Queens, New York, said that aside from the physical symptoms she deals with as part of her MS battle — from brain fog and fatigue to blurry vision and pain — there is a constant mental health struggle as well.
“This diagnosis came and completely derailed me. I was super depressed trying to figure out what life would be like now and how I would be an adequate mother and adequate wife and all these things,” said John, whose son is now 4. “I still deal with a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, and that’s something that I have to navigate on a regular basis.”
John said that part of her acceptance of MS has been her work to make the disease less invisible for others, particularly for Black women.
“When I started to look into it, I thought this doesn’t seem to be something that affects women that look like me … I didn’t see young mothers. I didn’t see Black people at all,” she recalled. “I went to a support group and everyone was older, everyone was white, their symptoms were a lot more severe, and it kind of sent me spiraling.”
John began to share her journey on social media, where she said she found that, “Having some sort of community is beautiful.
“I feel like a lot of people don’t realize how much having someone who looks like you matters. It can be really isolating, feeling like you’re the only person dealing with this,” she said. “I think me sharing about me being a mom kind of helps people to think, wow, you can live a life that is busy and still exist.”
Likewise, Hines said she found so much support from the online community of people with MS that she started a YouTube channel, Marti’s MS Life, to document her own journey and create another space for women to talk openly.
“Most people can’t really understand what it means to be in pain every second of every day. Not being able to understand that makes the sick person feel even more isolated. You don’t want to be the person who has the cloud over them,” said Hines. “Everyone asks how you are and you just say, ‘I’m fine,’ because you probably wouldn’t talk to me anymore if I told you how I was.”
Sarah Walsh, a 37-year-old mom of two in Los Angeles, was diagnosed with MS three years ago, just after her oldest child’s first birthday.
She said that because people can’t physically see her MS symptoms, like pain and fatigue and vision loss, she makes sure to talk with friends, family, colleagues and strangers about the disease.
“It may be counterintuitive to people, but I kind of wear it as my badge of honor,” said Walsh. “I’m very transparent about it, like, ‘I’m Sarah and I have MS,’ and I don’t tell people to feel bad, it’s more that I just want people to know.”
Walsh said she also talks openly about her MS because “the burden is too great to do it on your own.”
“I feel like if I had stayed quiet about it, it would have done something to me in a negative capacity mentally,” said Walsh. “What’s helping me stay positive is to talk about it, to be supported.”
She continued, “I just never want the MS to beat me. That’s my goal. I’m very adamant about that. It won’t be the only thing that’s left at the end of day.”
Sometimes you’ve got to think quick on your feet, a lesson Tyler Hubbard and his wife Hayley learned during a cheeky situation.
The country couple recently took to Instagram in a fit of giggles, telling viewers that they had forgotten to bring masks as they got in an Uber and had to get resourceful (masks are required when riding in an Uber). To rectify the situation, the two quickly made makeshift masks — out of pairs of underwear.
“We forgot our mask, so we had to get creative here to get in the Uber. Luckily we just went shopping for underwear,” Tyler says with a pair of yellow undergarments over his nose and mouth, he and Hayley laughing all the while.
“Gotta get creative sometimes. This is honestly the softest mask I’ve ever worn. Shout out @alo for the airbrush invisible thong,” Tyler jokes in the caption. “I’m still crying,” Hayley comments with a pair of crying laughing emojis.
Plenty of the couple’s friends also chimed in on the hilarity in the comment section, with Russell Dickerson quipping, “that’s where mine went!” while Chris Lane simply replies with several crying laughing emojis. “So resourceful,” applauds Lindsay Ell.
Katy Perry says she hasn’t had any trouble finding inspiration since welcoming her one-year-old daughter Daisy Dove. The “Roar” hitmaker reveals that the toddler is now her “everything muse.”
“I put her in a gingham dress, and she loves coming out and presenting it. And everyone obviously has a reaction, and she loves the reaction,” she told Page Sixof her little one’s burgeoning personality. “She’s always twirling … and she’s into putting on our shoes. I have hundreds of pairs of shoes, of course, because I’m a shoe designer. But she puts them on and she likes to slide around the house.”
Katy’s fiancé Orlando Bloom isn’t safe from having his footwear pilfered by their daughter. “It’s just really sweet,” she said of her little one modeling “daddy’s shoes.”
The Grammy nominee recently celebrated buying back her footwear line, Katy Perry Collections, which she founded in 2017. She relaunched her line on Tuesday with a brand new spring collection — with Daisy’s help. Katy pays tribute to her daughter in an upcoming thong sandal, which features a daisy motif.
In addition, Katy says her little one also inspired her to begin designing a baby shoe line “for real.” Prior to welcoming Daisy, the “When I’m Gone” singer admits she only “dabbled” with the idea.
“She’s my everything muse,” the American Idol judge explained. “She’s my whole heart. I’m just so grateful; she is really my gift.”
The new Netflix film Metal Lords may be a coming-of-age film about teens who want to play heavy metal, but for executive music director Tom Morello, it’s also a good example of how music can help people through tough times, including the shocking loss of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.
While promoting the movie, Morello told ABC Audio that he isn’t “that comfortable” talking about Hawkins’ death, because, he notes, “It’s still pretty fresh.” However, he says the movie allows him to “reflect upon” what he calls “the redemptive power of music.”
“You know, for friends and musician friends — alive and who have passed — and how I’ve felt their music has helped and transformed me and how they have been helped and transformed by music — that’s something to reflect upon that, y’know, has some analogous connection to the movie,” Morello explains.
Metal Lords follows two high school friends, Hunter and Kevin — played by Adrian Greensmith and Jaeden Martell — who start a metal band together. In search of a bassist, they recruit school band cellist Emily, played by Isis Hainsworth. Teen drama ensues, lessons are learned and of course, there’s a Battle of the Bands…all set to a heavy metal soundtrack.
Metal Lords is directed by Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist filmmaker Peter Sollett, and was written by Game of Thrones co-creator D.B. Weiss. It premieres on Netflix April 8.
Thomas Rhett has been nonstop writing since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and fans will soon get to hear what he’s been working on.
The singer estimates that he wrote nearly 300 songs over the past two years and couldn’t wait to share them, inspiring him to release his new album, Where We Started.
“I couldn’t handle sitting back and watching 190 songs have to wait for four years to come out, so that is the reason that there is so much music coming out,” he explains of releasing Where We Started in between Country Again: Side A and Side B. “It’s not just because I’m just trying to put content out, it’s because these songs deserve a chance to be heard. Three albums in a year and a half, there’s a lot. But I’m here for it and I’m excited about it.”
Fans may have noticed that the singer’s sense of humor has been shining through more on socials, whether planking while signing copies of his album, to attempting to draw a neck tattoo of his wife Lauren on the cover of a vinyl copy of the album.
“I feel like I’m at a point where it’s like OK to be self-deprecating because my kids self-deprecate me all day long,” he jokes, adding that he’s a longtime fan of The Office and dry humor. “I got tired of the ‘hey, what’s up, y’all? I’m Thomas Rhett. My record comes out tomorrow. Y’all should get a copy.’ I wanted to make it more interesting than that. [My videographer and I] literally sat in a room with cameras and improvised for three hours and picked our favorite bits.”
Kelly Clarkson is not sweating over the fact she turns 40 next month. Instead, she says bring it on!
She told Peopleshe is “not concerned” about her upcoming milestone birthday and explained, “My life gets exponentially better each year. Which is what should happen, you should get wiser.”
The “Catch My Breath” singer, who turns 40 on April 24, added, “I’m really excited. Everything’s in a good place now.”
Kelly is also thinking about how she wants to ring in the big 4-0 and told the outlet she plans to do make a big deal about it. “I was gonna go low key and then, I just had a really fun time with my girlfriends in San Francisco,” she explained. “So I’m like, maybe I’ll do that again.”
Unfortunately, plans don’t include her jetting off to a tropical vacation anytime soon because her schedule won’t let it. “I’m waiting till the summer,” she said about when she will have “long enough” to celebrate the way she plans. “I’m actually doing [a] ‘celebrate my 40 years summer,’ whole thing,” she insisted. “So I’m just gonna be chilling. That’s my happy 40.”
Kelly has something else to celebrate — she is legally single after settling her often contentious divorce battle with ex Brandon Blackstock.
“I just got divorced, so I had to drop my married last name,” the Grammy winner told the outlet about recently changing her legal name. “I just kept my middle name for my personal life.” She adds she is “still Kelly Clarkson” to the masses because, as she joked, “I don’t think I can change Clarkson at this point. I’m 20 years in!”
Fifty years ago this week, America‘s self-titled debut album and single “A Horse with No Name” reached #1, respectively, on the Billboard 200 and Billboard Hot 100.
America’s Dewey Bunnell, who wrote “A Horse with No Name,” tells ABC Audio that the song was inspired by his memories the southwestern U.S. when he was young. Bunnell and co-founding band mates Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek were the sons of U.S. military members stationed in the U.K., and formed the group after graduating from the same London high school.
“By the time I wrote that [my family] had been in England about four or five years, so I was really reminiscing about the U.S.,” explains Bunnell. “My dad [was stationed in California] for about a year, [and] we would do day trips into Southern California and over to New Mexico and then Arizona, and [we’d] go through the desert. And I loved the desert.”
Bunnell says the song’s music was influenced by the alternate guitar tunings devised by David Crosby and Joni Mitchell.
“I was playing around with those tunings and came up with one of my own,” Dewey recalls. “[A]nd I found the classic three chords that went together well, and I just started trying to paint a picture of that desert scene.”
Bunnell admits that the success of “A Horse with No Name” caught him off guard. He recalls that during America’s first U.S. tour in early 1972, he was surprised to hear the song all over the radio airwaves.
Shortly after returning to the U.K., the band received word that the single had hit #1 in the U.S.
“I mean, you don’t expect those things,” says Dewey, “and we celebrated accordingly.”
America currently touring the U.S. The band’s next show is Thursday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Grey’s Anatomy alum Jesse Williams is seeking a reduction on his $40,000 a month child support payment.
The 40-year-old actor, who shares joint custody of eight-year-old daughter Sadie and six-year-old son Maceo with ex-wife Aryn Drake-Lee, says that the payments are “no longer reasonable” now that he is no longer starring in the ABC medical drama, according to legal documents obtained by E! News.
“I am requesting the Court reduce the child support to a reasonable amount I can afford given the significant reduction in my income and the now fluctuating nature of my income,” Williams stated in the documents.
Williams appeared on Grey’s for almost 12 season before leaving in May 2021. He now stars in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out, currently in previews. It officially opens April 4 and runs through May 29. He will earn $1,668 per week for the project, according to the documents, and currently has nothing booked for afterwards.
“Given the significant reduction in my income, the $40,000 per month child support for our two young children is no longer reasonable, appropriate or sustainable,” the actor stated.
Williams added that his children would not be affected by the change as they live a modest lifestyle.
“They do not have expensive hobbies or attend expensive camps. They do not fly by private jet when we take vacations (which are already infrequent), and we do not have any vacation homes,” he stated. “I agreed to the child support solely due to my then significant Grey’s income.”
Williams and Drake-Lee wed in 2012. Their divorce was finalized in October 2020.
(NEW YORK) — Russian forces are continuing their attempted push through Ukraine from multiple directions, while Ukrainians, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, are putting up “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
The attack began Feb. 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation.” Heavy shelling and missile attacks, many on civilian buildings, continue in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, as well as major cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Mar 30, 5:27 am
Over four million refugees have fled Ukraine: UNHCR
More than four million people have been forced to flee Ukraine since Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24, according to the latest figures from the United Nations Refugee Agency.
The tally from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) amounts to just over 9% of Ukraine’s population — which the World Bank counted at 44 million at the end of 2020 — on the move across borders in 35 days.
More than half of the refugees crossed into neighboring Poland, UNHCR figures show.
Mar 30, 3:41 am
Russian authorities may ‘single out and detain’ Americans in Russia and Ukraine, US warns
The United States is warning that Russian authorities “may single out and detain U.S. citizens” in both Russia and Ukraine.
The warning came Tuesday as the U.S. Department of State issued new travel advisories for the two warring countries.
The State Department previously warned Americans in Russia that they could be targets for harassment by Russian authorities. But the latest advisory makes it explicit that U.S. citizens could be “singled out,” “including for detention.”
The State Department has also previously warned Americans against traveling to Ukraine to join the fight against Russian forces, pointing to statements from Russian authorities that anyone detained while fighting will not be considered a lawful combatant. That could mean mistreatment or worse, according to State Department spokesperson Ned Price.
“There are continued reports of U.S. citizens being singled out and detained by the Russian military in Ukraine and when evacuating by land through Russia-occupied territory or to Russia or Belarus,” the latest advisory for Ukraine states.
Both Russia and Ukraine have been on the State Department’s “Travel Advisory Level 4 – Do Not Travel” for months, as tensions ratcheted up and with little to no diplomatic presences on the ground.
