Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that discussions over ending the war in Ukraine have entered a productive phase, while claiming ‘a tremendous amount of progress’ had been made.

Following a round of talks with a Ukrainian delegation in Geneva, Switzerland, Rubio told reporters negotiators had ‘a very good day today.’

‘We had a very good day today. I think we made a tremendous amount of progress, even from the last time I spoke to you,’ Rubio said.

‘We began almost three weeks ago with a foundational document that we socialized and ran by both sides, and with input from both sides,’ he said.

Rubio described how negotiators had been refining the 28-point peace framework that outlines potential conditions for a ceasefire and long-term settlement for Ukraine and Russia.

‘Over the last 96 hours or more, there’s been extensive engagement with the Ukrainian side including our Secretary of the Army and others, being on the ground in Kyiv, meeting with relevant stakeholders across the Ukrainian political spectrum in the legislative branch and the executive branch, and the military and others to further sort of narrow these points.’

‘We arrived here today with one goal: to take what – it’s 28 points or 26 points, depending on which version, as it continued to evolve and try to narrow the ones that were open items. And we have achieved that today in a very substantial way,’ he said.

The weekend talks centered on a 28-point plan, which is a framework drafted by the U.S. outlining steps for a possible ceasefire and political settlement.

The document is said to cover security guarantees, territorial control, reconstruction mechanisms, and Ukraine’s long-term relationship with NATO and the EU.

The plan has reportedly evolved through several iterations, narrowing disputes point by point as both sides weigh concessions.

‘Now, obviously, like any final agreement, it’ll have to be agreed upon by the presidents, and there are a couple of issues that we need to continue to work on,’ Rubio clarified.

While declining to specify unresolved issues, Rubio described the moment as ‘delicate.’

‘This is a very delicate moment, and it’s important – like I said, there’s not agreement on those yet.  Some of it is semantics or language; others require higher-level decisions and consultation; others, I think, just need more time to work through,’ he said before touching on some issues.

‘There were some that involved equities or the role of the EU or of NATO or so forth, and those we kind of segregated out because we just met with the national security advisors for various European countries, and those are things we’ll have to discuss with them because it involves them.’

‘I don’t want to declare victory or finality here. There’s still some work to be done,’ he added.

Suggesting there is intent to ensure Ukraine’s security, Rubio said that they all ‘recognize that part of getting a final end to this war will require for Ukraine to feel as if it is safe, and it is never going to be invaded or attacked again.’

‘I honestly believe we’ll get there,’ he said, and when asked about next steps, Rubio said a possible call between Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy could happen, adding, ‘I don’t know. It’s possible. I’m not sure.’

‘The deadline is we want to get this done as soon as possible. Obviously, we’d love it to be Thursday,’ he added.

Former President John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, announced on Saturday — exactly 62 years after he was assassinated — that she has terminal cancer.

The 35-year-old said she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, soon after the birth of her daughter in May 2024, and that doctors recently told her she probably has about a year to live.

‘My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,’ she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker. ‘My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears.’

She said she ‘didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.’

She said the diagnosis was shocking because she felt perfectly healthy.

‘I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,’ she wrote of the first talk of leukemia. ‘I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.’

She said the cancer is mostly seen in older patients and doctors frequently asked her if she had spent much time at Ground Zero in New York City, which she had not.

Schlossberg, who is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s oldest surviving daughter, described in heartbreaking detail her months on end of different treatments to beat the cancer.

She went through a round of chemotherapy to ‘reduce the number of blast cells in my bone marrow,’ then received a bone-marrow transplant with the help of her sister.

She said after she went into remission and went home she had no immune system and had to get all of her childhood vaccines again.

Then she relapsed, her doctor telling her that leukemia with her mutation ‘liked to come back.’

At the beginning of the year, she joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, ‘a type of immunotherapy that has proved effective against certain blood cancers.’

That was followed by another round of chemotherapy and a second blood transfusion from an unrelated donor.

‘During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,’ she wrote.

She also wrote of her concerns after her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she called an ’embarrassment,’ was nominated as secretary of Health and Human Services.

‘Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,’ she wrote. ‘Doctors and scientists at Columbia [Presbyterian hospital], including [her husband] George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs.’

She praised the rest of her family, whom she said sat at her bedside while she endured treatments and took care of her children.

Of her husband, urologist George Moran, she wrote, ‘he is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.’

Her brother Jack Schlossberg, who is running for congress in New York, wrote on his Instagram on Saturday, ‘Life is short, let it rip.’

Her mother’s cousin, Maria Shriver, shared her essay on Instagram, writing, ‘If you can only read one thing today, please make take the time for this extraordinary piece of writing by my cousin Caroline’s extraordinary daughter Tatiana. Tatiana is a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend.’

Tatiana added in her essay, ‘For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.’

Robert F. Kennedy Sr., her mother, Caroline Kennedy’s uncle, was assassinated five years after JFK, and along with having two siblings who died in infancy, Caroline’s only surviving brother, JFK Jr, died in a plane crash in 1999.

Schlossberg’s grandmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, also died of cancer in 1994, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma when she was 64.

She finished her essay by saying that she lives to be with her children now.

‘But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go,’ she admitted. ‘So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time.’

She added, ‘Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember.’

Congress is once again on the edge of considering a bone-crushing sanctions package against Russia, but procedural disagreements threaten to derail the process.

Senators Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have been working on a sanctions package that would hit Russia and its energy trade partners where it hurts in a bid to cripple the Kremlin’s war machine.

Movement on their legislation, which has over 80 co-sponsors in the upper chamber, has lurched and stalled over the last several months as President Donald Trump and his administration work to hammer out a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine to see an end to the war.

Now, the president seems ready to get the package through Congress.

Graham said that, over a round of golf last weekend, Trump told Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., ‘Move the bill.’

‘I think it’s very important we not screw this up,’ Graham said. ‘If you want [Russian President Vladimir] Putin at the table, there will be no successful 28-point plan or 12-point plan unless Putin believes that we’re going to continue to support Ukraine militarily and that we’re going to come after people who buy cheap Russian oil.

‘It’s important that the Congress pass this bill to give leverage to the president as he tries to negotiate with Putin.’

While the changes to the bill still remain under wraps, a White House official told Fox News Digital that both Congress and the White House are working together to ensure the legislation advances, ‘The President’s foreign policy objectives and authorities.’ 

‘The Constitution vests the president with the authority to conduct diplomacy with foreign nations,’ the official said. The current bipartisan sanctions legislation provides new sanctions authorities for the president to conduct foreign diplomacy.’

And Despite Graham and Blumenthal having worked on the bill together in the Senate for months, Thune believed it may be better if a sanctions package comes from the House.

He said that what is more likely to happen is that the House originates the legislation because it’s a revenue measure, which typically starts in the lower chamber.

‘We had one available to us in the Senate. We could do it here,’ Thune said. ‘But I think, too, if you want to expedite movement in terms of getting it on the president’s desk, it’s probably quicker if it comes out of the House, comes over to us, to take it up and process it on the floor.’

But there may be an issue with the House starting the process.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told Fox News Digital that, based on conversations with Thune, he understood that the legislation would originate in the Senate and then be shipped to the House. It was ‘news’ to him when Thune made the case that the House should be at the start of the legislative process.

He warned that, in the House, it would be ‘a much more laborious, lengthy process,’ and that he was of the notion that the Senate would send its bipartisan package to them, which would make it easier to pass.

‘The reason is because it’s a faster track to get it done,’ Johnson said. ‘If it originates in the House, then it goes to seven different committees of jurisdiction, which, as you know, takes a long time to process. And even if I can convince some of the chairmen to waive jurisdiction, not all of them will.’

But there are procedural hurdles that could bog down the process in the Senate, too.

So far, the original version of the bill has sat in the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs since April. It would have to be considered in committee, then discharged and then put on the floor — and at any point could be blocked along the way.

Still, there is hope that movement on the bill will come to fruition. And both Graham and Blumenthal have been tweaking the legislation in the background to best meet the White House’s desires.

Blumenthal told Fox News Digital after a recent meeting with Graham that the bill was largely the same but wouldn’t get into specifics on what the changes were.

He noted that Trump’s move to sanction two major Russian oil companies, which took effect Friday, was a good start.

‘I think we’re waiting to finalize the bill and see what the president thinks about it,’ Blumenthal said. ‘And, obviously, he’s imposed sanctions already on India, on two major Russian oil companies, so he’s in the right frame of mind.’

The conservative movement has found itself in a season of confusion in recent weeks. Former friends quarrel, familiar institutions are in turmoil, and some voices, both new and old, on the right have begun to wonder aloud whether the United States should still stand with Israel. 

That question deserves a resolute answer, and the answer is this: for our security, for democracy in the Middle East and for the very destiny of our nation, America must stand with Israel.

Americans should always be open to debate how we spend our money abroad and whether our foreign policy truly serves national interest. The rising generation in particular demands rigorous answers beyond empty platitudes.  

But lately, it seems that something deeper, something darker, has driven those questions. After decades of conflict in the Middle East, some are tempted to embrace isolationism, to treat moral clarity as naïveté, and to spurn our allies as unwanted burdens under the strain of massive national debt. For others, it is nothing more than antisemitism.  

The acceptance of antisemitic voices on the left and the right, from the halls of Congress to social media, represents a vile and dangerous trend in American politics, and it must be forcefully opposed wherever it appears. There is no place in the conservative movement for antisemitism.

For nearly 80 years, the bond between the United States and Israel has been more than a diplomatic arrangement. It has been a covenant of free peoples who share the same ideals: faith in God, belief in human dignity and gratitude for the blessings of liberty. Israel’s survival has never depended on our charity; it has depended on our partnership, and that partnership has made America safer and paid dividends. 

Centuries before the founding of modern Israel, our Founding Fathers championed the return of the Jewish people to Israel and made special provision for the Jewish faith in America. George Washington assured Jewish Americans that the fledgling United States ‘gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.’ John Adams supported ‘the Jews again in Judea’ as ‘an independent nation.’ Elias Boudinot, the president of the American Revolution’s Congress, boldly suggested that ‘God has raised up these United States… for the very purpose of… bringing his beloved people to their own land.’ Even the famously thrifty Benjamin Franklin once opened his coffers to help a local Philadelphia synagogue weather financial difficulty.  

But the case for Israel is far more than historic.

Today, Israel stands as an oasis of democracy in a Middle East where dozens of its neighbors are Islamic states or still practice monarchy. It is a cruel irony that, in a world of 46 majority-Muslim nations, the presence of a single majority-Jewish nation is seen by many of Israel’s neighbors as one too many. Thirty-one countries still refuse to recognize Israel on their maps. Some of those would love nothing less than to see Israel wiped off the map altogether. And yet Israel persists.  

Thanks to Israel’s courage and the decisive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States, we no longer live under a nuclear sword of Damocles wielded by a regime that chants ‘Death to America.’ From the Stuxnet cyber operation that crippled Iran’s enrichment program, to Israel’s assistance with U.S. airstrikes, and to many heroic covert operations, Israel has repeatedly helped delay Tehran’s progress toward obtaining nuclear weapons. Those actions protected not only Jerusalem and Tel Aviv – they protected Washington, New York and every American city within reach of Iran’s hatred. 

That may not matter much to a segment of the New Right that confuses isolation for safety. But the rest of us know better. We understand what it would mean if the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism ever possessed nuclear weapons.  When Israel takes the fight to Iran’s terror network proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Revolutionary Guard, it is not merely doing our bidding; it is doing what conscience and common sense require. It stands between civilization and chaos. Israel’s cause is our cause.  

When Israel succeeds, as it did in 2024 by decapitating Hezbollah’s leadership in a precision pager-bombing campaign, America is safer. The practical case for our alliance is clear.

Centuries before the founding of modern Israel, our Founding Fathers championed the return of the Jewish people to Israel and made special provision for the Jewish faith in America.

But the heart of American support is still a matter of shared values and faith. We stand with Israel because we believe in right over wrong, in good over evil, and in liberty over tyranny. Israel must be empowered to finish the fight against those who would harm her, terrorists who hide behind women, children, hospitals and holy places as they launch rockets indiscriminately into Israel. Peace and justice, within Gaza and without, require that Hamas be destroyed. 

In the end, Americans have always supported Israel because the very existence of this enduring nation bears witness to God’s faithfulness. And the support of millions of Americans throughout the generations has been built upon the ancient words recorded in Genesis where God promises to ‘bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’

For 250 years, America has been blessed like no other country in history. As we prepare to celebrate our blessings as a nation, I believe we must never forsake that promise or our cherished ally. If the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: America stands with Israel.