People talek 3/18/02

Aging actress offers tips for looking young

LOS ANGELES -- Raquel Welch attributes her youthful beauty to a simple regime: "Exercise, diet and attitude."

The 62-year-old actress says she's religious about daily exercise and starts each morning with two large glasses of water.

"If you're feeling great, you look better," Welch, star of the new PBS series "American Family," said in Sunday's issue of Parade Magazine. "I reject the idea that you can't do this after 30, this after 40 and so on. In my teens and 20s I was running around in bikinis, and that was fine. But this is the best time of my life."

Welch says it also helps that she lives near the ocean, but not too close by.

"I love the ocean, but baking in the sun makes me lazy. I become like an old lizard in a hat, taking in the sun."

Paralyzed actor not giving up hope for cure

VAIL, Colo. -- Christopher Reeve may not be walking on his 50th birthday in September as he once promised, but he isn't giving up hope.

When he's not working on his second book, Reeve is lobbying to lift restrictions on stem cell research that he believes could lead to a cure to his paralysis, and exercising almost daily.

"There will be a cure. It is very important for me to stay in the best possible condition to be prepared," he said in an interview at a weekend fund-raising event for the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.

Since the fall from a horse that injured his spinal cord, Reeve has become an advocate of increased funding for a cure for paralysis. He also has driven himself, riding a bike 10 miles a day three times a week while using electrical stimulation to move his legs.

Visit to Afghanistan reveals surprise

LOS ANGELES -- Broadcast journalist Linda Ellerbee figured she'd find devastation when she visited Afghanistan for her news show for children.

What she didn't expect to find was that children themselves don't act devastated at all.

"You see kids in what looks like a hopeless situation and yet all we found was hope," said Ellerbee, taking a break from editing the long-running show. "I kept asking myself, 'How can this be? Don't they know how hopeless this is?"'

"Faces of Hope: The Kids of Afghanistan" was on Sunday's schedule on the Nickelodeon cable network.

Ellerbee found children who have managed to turn burned-out helicopters and bomb craters into makeshift playgrounds, to use sticks as both bats and balls for pickup games of baseball, and who, like children everywhere, find joy in the simplicity of a snowball fight.

-- From wire reports