Prince William says Kate Middleton has ‘long way to go’ after finishing chemotherapy
(NEW YORK) — Prince William spoke out for the first time Tuesday after his wife Kate, the princess of Wales, announced in an emotional video message that she had finished chemotherapy after her cancer diagnosis.
William spoke during a solo appearance in Wales, where he greeted well-wishers with cards and messages of support for Kate and shared an update on what’s ahead for his wife.
“It’s good news but there is still a long way to go,” William told fans, according to reporters covering the prince’s visit.
William also expressed appreciation for the support, saying, “thank you very much,” and “very much appreciated.”
Kate, 42, who shares three children with William, also acknowledged in her video message Monday that while she is relieved to have finished chemotherapy, her recovery is not over.
“Doing what I can to stay cancer free is now my focus. Although I have finished chemotherapy, my path to healing and full recovery is long and I must continue to take each day as it comes,” she said. “I am however looking forward to being back at work and undertaking a few more public engagements in the coming months when I can.”
Kate has remained mostly out of the public eye for the past year.
In January, she was hospitalized for what Kensington Palace described at the time as “planned abdominal surgery.”
Three months later, in March, Kate announced that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
She has not revealed publicly what type of cancer she faced, nor exact details of her treatment beyond that she was undergoing “preventative chemotherapy.”
William also took time off from public duties earlier this year to support Kate.
When he visited a food charity in mid-April, in his first royal engagement since Kate announced her cancer diagnosis, William received cards of well-wishes for not only Kate but also his father, King Charles III, who was also diagnosed with cancer this year.
“Thank you very much. That’s very kind,” William told one volunteer who handed him the cards.
(KYIV, Ukraine) — Solomiya Fomeniuk, 16, recalled the Russian missile strike on the Okhmatdyt pediatric hospital in Ukraine earlier this month with horror, but also as a case of miraculous survival.
The girl was one of five children in the dialysis department at the moment of the attack on July 8. Two people — a doctor and a teacher — died as a result of the strike. A 7-year-old boy died later after he was transported away from the site, officials said.
Solomiya is disabled due to spinal hernia. The girl was admitted to the Kyiv hospital in late May 2022 after kidney failure.
“It’s the best clinic in Ukraine with a dialysis department and the only one where we can actually live to receive treatment regularly,” Solomiya’s mother, Oksana Fomeniuk, told ABC.
July 8 started as usual, she said, adding that even when the sirens went off, it didn’t initially scare the parents nor hospital staff.
“We’ve been here for a while, there were at least two impacts nearby during the past two years, but we always thought that a hospital is a safe place,” she said. “We are always anxious of course, but the kids learned to be courageous and patient since dialysis lasts for 4 to 5 hours and they can’t move during the procedure”.
However, when the first missiles hit the ground a couple kilometers from the hospital Oksana and others quickly went down to the shelter while doctors and nurses decided to go into the room to switch the kids off from the dialysis equipment and take them downstairs too. At that moment the missile hit.
“The first thing I saw was a piece of ceiling above me,” Solomiya recalled. “The equipment around prevented it from falling on me. I even raised my hands to try to hold it. I couldn’t breathe, there was dust and hot air around. And this smell…”
The girl saw two injured female doctors and a nurse lying on the floor bleeding, she said.
“One doctor, Anastasia, shook up from our cries, stood up and came up to pull me from the rubbles,” Solomiya said. “She is so tiny herself, but somehow managed to carry me to the window where men who ran from the street were already helping.”
Most of all the girl was worried about her mom, she confessed. Oksana herself barely got out of the rubble as the missile hit right at the foundation of the building.
“I smelled death,” she said. “I was in the rubble by the knees and couldn’t breathe because of the dust and the smell of the fuel.”
Oksana managed to run out through the back door.
“The second thing that shocked me was the scale of the damage,” she said. “Everything was in a black smoke, the building was destroyed, others half damaged. And all I could think about was where my Solomiya were.”
Oksana saw pieces of furniture and mattresses around, a body inside the premise, children coming out of the building through the broken windows, nurses carrying them out — and said she couldn’t believe that her daughter was alive.
“The nurse was running and shouting that Solomiya was OK and she was taken to another building, but I only believed that when I saw her there. I’m telling you, God saved us. Because if my girl were in another bed, as before, she could have died.”
Svitlana Lukyanchuk, a 30-year-old nephrologist, was later identified as the woman who had died in the room. The head of the dialysis department, Olha Babicheva, was also severely injured, officials said.
Young surgeon Oleh Golubchenko also said he believed he was lucky to be alive. Photos and videos of him in a white bloody uniform as he helped to search the debris went viral.
“My grandma carefully washed and whitened the robe right on the day before. I think I haven’t even thrown it away yet,” Golubchenko said, laughing both bitterly and with relief.
He had been performing a halo rhinoplasty on a 5-month-old patient on the morning of July 8.
“It’s a complicated procedure, but very interesting for me as a specialist. I pre-planned everything on the weekend, designed a model of the expected result,” Golubchenko told ABC.
The surgeon, anesthesiologist Yaroslav Ivanov, second surgeon Ihor Kolodko and nurse Olha Baranovych were halfway through the surgery when the siren went off in Kyiv.
“We don’t start operations during the air raid alert, but if we have already started we have to continue because you can’t move the patient quickly, especially a kid. So we carried on, stayed calm and even joked,” Golubchenko recalled.
When the missile hit the nearby building the wave threw him a couple of meters away from the operating table. “I was shocked for a few seconds and then saw everyone on the floor, bleeding. I shouted, ‘Is everyone alive?’ Olha, the nurse, was apparently severely injured, I saw her face really damaged. Yaroslav was bleeding too but got up.”
The doctors rushed to their little patient covered by surgical gowns. The boy was intubated, so Golubchenko couldn’t check if he was actually OK.
“I ran in the corridor to find an Ambu bag. The boy’s mom was there, shouting hysterically … I found the bag, the anesthesiologist disconnected the boy and quickly carried him away, I followed him … on my way I stopped to help another nurse as she was bleeding, so I bandaged her … There was such a chaos, total mess,” he said.
When Oleh went outside, the first person to call him was his friend, Rostyslav, who is also a surgeon, as he heard of the strike.
“I asked him to pick my patient and finish the surgery,” Golubchenko said. “He literally was here in 15 minutes and took the boy.” Taras, the boy who had been in surgery, and his parents are well now, Golubchenko said.
Only later did Golubchenko notice that he himself was covered in blood.
“I just felt something warm on my back and legs. Those were all small wounds from the glass. The doctors took everything away and said I had a concussion. I think I escaped with a fright. Big fright,” the surgeon said, sighing. “You know, before the surgery, the patient’s father asked me whether I believed in God. What a question! But now my outlook has transformed. I’m telling you, I went to the church the following day and prayed as I could.”
It’s painful for Golubchenko to see his department damaged as it had been just renovated. It was even more painful for many Ukrainians. Okhmatdyt, which in Ukrainian means protection of motherhood and childhood, is the best pediatric hospital in Ukraine. The doctors say they received incredible support from the management, while parents admit everything was done from the heart here, with great love to kids so that they experience as much fun and comfort here as possible.
In just one day, people and businesses raised more than $7 million for Okhmatdyt through the joint project of the UNITED24 presidential fundraising platform and Monobank. Germany accepted kids from the Kyiv hospital and pledged about 10 million euros for the reconstruction of the hospital.
Oleh Holubchenko said he himself received calls from his American colleagues who have helped a lot, in particular Smile Train, the world’s largest cleft-focused organization, and American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association
Fomeniuk and her daughter, Solomiya, said their hopes for Solomiya’s kidney transplantation, which they have been waiting for since last fall, have now now faded a bit due to the strike. But they still showed their support for the hospital and optimism for the doctors, who they hope keep going.
The attack on Okhmatdyt on July 8 was one of more than 1,800 such strikes in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to the World Health Organizaition.
Oksana confessed she sometimes thinks that horrible strike didn’t actually happen and it was just a horror movie because it doesn’t seem real.
“The missiles flying in Kyiv are not something normal by default,” she said. “When kids who are fighting for their lives have to suffer even more during the attacks is something totally, totally over the line.”
(WASHINGTON) — The grisly discovery of six murdered hostages in a tunnel under Gaza over the weekend has sent U.S. officials scrambling to devise a new strategy to advance the already beleaguered negotiations aimed at securing a cease-fire deal and allow dozens of detainees to return home.
“Our team is still working to try to get this to closure,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said Tuesday. “Not that we didn’t have a sense of urgency before — we certainly did, but the killings over the weekend, the executions is the only way to put it, just underscores how important it is to keep that work alive and keep going.”
The Biden administration is now crafting a new framework for a hostage release and cease-fire agreement with its partners Qatar and Egypt and expects to present a finalized, all-encompassing proposal to Israel and Hamas in the coming days, according to a U.S. official.
But Kirby refuted reports that it would be presented to both sides as a “take it or leave it” option and declined to say what would happen if both Israel and Hamas didn’t accept the forthcoming proposal.
“I’m not using that phrase,” he said. “I am simply going to refuse to speculate about what might happen or what might not happen.”
On Monday, the Israeli Ministry of Health said that after examining the bodies of the six recovered hostages, it determined they were shot at close range and killed shortly before they were recovered.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Hamas’ armed wing blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the deaths, saying his “insistence on freeing the prisoners through military pressure instead of concluding a deal will mean their return to their families in coffins, and their families will have to choose between dead or alive.”
Sources told ABC News that although the Israel Defense Forces was not conducting a rescue operation at the time the hostages are thought to have been killed, specialized units were operating under Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, nearby where the hostages were being held.
“I think when you see an order like that, it shows just what a depraved group we are dealing with in Hamas, when they make clear that they will execute innocent human beings rather than let them be rescued,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.
Two U.S. officials familiar with ongoing cease-fire talks said representatives from Hamas did not warn mediators that it would begin executing detainees to thwart Israel’s attempts to recover them by any means other than negotiating their release.
However, a Hamas spokesperson said Monday that guards had been operating under instructions to kill hostages in their custody if Israeli forces neared their locations since June, when the IDF successfully freed four hostages in a raid that killed dozens of Palestinians.
High stakes, little leverage
Despite stuttering progress, the Biden administration argues that negotiations were picking up steam in recent days.
“We did have constructive talks last week in the region to try and reach agreement on the final gaps,” Miller said Tuesday. “We made progress on dealing with the obstacles that remain, but ultimately, finalizing an agreement will require both sides to show flexibility.”
But despite immense pressure from the Israeli public, Netanyahu indicated on Monday that he would not back down from his demand that the IDF must maintain a presence in the strategic Philadelphi corridor between southern Gaza and Egypt — a major sticking point in the talks.
Kirby hit back at the prime minister, saying his insistence ran counter to agreements the Israeli government had already made.
“I’m not going to get into a debate with the prime minister,” Kirby said, asserting that multiple draft agreements agreed to by Israel over the last several months called for the removal of the IDF from all densely populated areas of Gaza, including the Philadelphi corridor.
“That’s the proposal that Israel had agreed to and again,” he said.
Pressure builds on Biden after Israeli strike kills dozens of civilians in Rafah
While the United States has considerable diplomatic sway over Israel, it has much less leverage over Hamas. Through the negotiations, the administration has had little insight into the thinking of its leader, Yahya Sinwar, whom Secretary of State Antony Blinken describes as “the primary decider” in cease-fire negotiations.
Experts see Hamas’ apparent brutalist shift and the execution of hostages near the Philadelphi corridor as a play to push IDF troops away from the area, which could allow the group to rearm. Israel has not indicated that it will continue to pursue rescue missions or alter any operations along Gaza’s southern border.
The prospect of a broader conflict in the Middle East could also hinge on progress in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Iran has blamed Israel for carrying out an attack in Tehran that killed Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in late July and vowed to retaliate. Israel took responsibility for a strike in July that killed Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr, but has not said if it was also behind the attack that killed Haniyeh in Tehran.
It’s not clear why Iran has not yet carried out its threat, but U.S. officials believe Tehran may be wary of thwarting Gaza cease-fire negotiations.
The hostages still in Gaza
Even before the killing of the six hostages, U.S. and Israeli officials had already assessed that a deal might free a relatively small number of detainees — assessing that fewer than 50 were still living. Officials say there are now 97 hostages remaining in Gaza.
Even before the discovery of the slain hostages, U.S. officials told ABC News that only around a dozen hostages might initially be freed if Israel and Hamas agreed to the framework that was partially outlined by President Joe Biden in May. At least three of the detainees who were discovered dead in the tunnel — including dual American Israeli citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23 — would have been among them, they say.
Twelve American citizens were taken during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Two were released in late October, and two more were freed in November as part of a cease-fire deal.
Of the eight Americans who remain detained in Gaza, four have been declared dead. U.S. and Israeli officials believe that four others — Edan Alexander, 19; Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36; Omer Neutra, 22, and Keith Siegel, 65 — could be alive.
(LONDON) — Police investigating the deadly attack on a children’s Taylor Swift-themed event in a seaside town of Southport, United Kingdom, said a third child died following the attack, as the musician said she was “in shock.”
“The investigation is in its early stages and the motivation for the incident remains unclear,” Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said on Monday.
Officers responded just before noon local time to reports of a stabbing at a property on Hart Street in Southport, a seaside town about 20 miles north of Liverpool, according to Merseyside Police.
Two children — a 6-year-old and 7-year-old — were killed and nine others were injured on Monday in the stabbing attack at an event at a dance school in the seaside town, police had said.
A third child, a 9-year-old girl, died on Tuesday morning in the hospital, police said. She was one of six wounded children who had been in critical condition, along with two adults, who were also stabbed, police said.
“We believe that the adults who were injured were bravely trying to protect the children who were being attacked,” Kennedy said Monday.
Merseyside Police said the children were attending a Taylor Swift-themed event at a dance school. A flyer for the two-hour event called it a “Taylor Swift Yoga and Dance Workshop.” The event was for children between 6 and 11 years old, according to post on the organizer’s Instagram.
The “horror” of the attack was “washing over me continuously,” Swift said in a post on Instagram. She said she was “completely in shock.”
“The loss of life and innocent, and the horrendous trauma inflicted on everyone who was there, the families and first responders,” she said. These were just little kids at a dance class. I am at a complete loss for how to even convey my sympathies to these families.”
A 17-year-old boy from Banks, a coastal village in Lancashire, just outside Southport, was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, police said.
The suspect, whose name was not released, was born in Cardiff, Wales, police said.
The “full circumstances” were still being investigated, police said, adding that the attack wasn’t being investigated as terror-related. Police were not searching for additional suspects, they said.