World
Wafa Al-Udaini, Palestinian Journalist, Told Story of Gaza That Was Full of Life
Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trusted result.
Donahue hailed from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, increasingly snowy thatch of hair, marble eyes, occasional pair of suspenders and obvious geniality said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “Stage Manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town.’” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a butterscotch helmet, fancied a uniform of jacket-blouse-skirt and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice of crinkled tissue paper. Not even eight years separated them, yet so boyish was he and so seasoned was she that he read as her grandson. (She maybe reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — every kind of them — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, outrage, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s televisual jackpot: cutaways to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity made it to the “Donahue” stage — Bill Clinton, say, La Toya Jackson, the Judds — they were expected to be human, too, to be accountable for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, he permitted us to be accountable to ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we — women especially — were eager, desperate, to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host” when, really, the way he did it, running that microphone throughout the audience, racing up, down, around, sticking it here then here then over here, was closer to “switchboard operator.” It was “hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man got his steps in. He let us do more of the questioning than he did — he would just edit, interpret, clarify. Egalitarianism ruled. Articulation, too. And anybody who needed the mic usually got it.
The show was about both what was on our mind and what had never once crossed it. Atheism. Naziism. Colorism. Childbirth. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to its bottom, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode when he made his entrance in a long skirt, blouse and pussy bow for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now’s the time to add that “Donahue” was a morning talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about compulsive shopping or shifting gender roles from the same kitchen TV set as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the show’s prime subjects. There was so much that needed confessing, correction, corroboration, an ear lent. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t land in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t land on television until she was in her 50s. Ruth Westheimer arrived to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life corkscrewed, as it mocked fiction. Her family most likely perished in the Auschwitz death camps after she was whisked to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. The twists include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, maiming by cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She earned her doctorate from Columbia University, in education, and spent her postdoc researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding and the nasty.
Hers was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. On her radio and television shows, in a raft of books and a Playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk-show appearances, she aimed to purge sex of shame, to promote sexual literacy. Her feline accent and jolly innuendo pitched, among other stuff, the Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where we get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; the board is vulval and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism” and “Goose Him.”
On “Donahue,” she is direct, explicit, dispelling, humorous, clear, common-sensical, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. On one visit in 1987, a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage, and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what she should do is to masturbate him. And it’s all right for him to masturbate himself also a few times.” The audience is hear-a-pin-drop rapt or maybe just squirmy. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-student war chest and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don’t play with yourself, or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid at the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it till I need glasses?” Westheimer giggles, maybe noticing the large pair on Donahue’s face. This was that day’s cold open.
They were children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the garment industry call notions. They inherited a salesman’s facility for people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer whether her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says this is why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil: ‘Do not listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which cracks the audience up.
But consider what she talked about — and consider how she said it. My favorite Dr. Ruth word was “pleasure.” From a German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks with an American tongue: sensual unfurling. She vowed to speak about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn the euphemisms. People waited as long as a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue” so they could damn them, too. But of everything Westheimer pitched, of all the terms she precisely used, pleasure was her most cogent product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we owed ourselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s fitting somehow that this antidogmatic-yet-priestly Irish Catholic man would, on occasion, join forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility, reciprocation. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: Let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. Boldly they went. — And with her encouragement, boldly we came.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
BALTIMORE (AP) — Blake Horvath to Eli Heidenreich.
That’s the connection that led Navy to such a memorable season — and the two of them came through again on the biggest play of the biggest game.
Horvath threw an 8-yard touchdown pass to Heidenreich with 6:32 remaining — on fourth-and-goal — and No. 22 Navy rallied to beat Army 17-16 on Saturday. Heidenreich, the career and single-season leader in yards receiving for the Midshipmen, caught six of Horvath’s seven completions on the day.
“Who wouldn’t go to him?” Horvath said. “Talk about an all-time Navy legend. You’re going to be talking about Eli Heidenreich for years and years and years.”
Although it was clearly a passing situation, and Heidenreich was Navy’s top target, he was single covered over the middle.
“Tried to bring some pressure on them,” Army coach Jeff Monken said. “Good throw and good catch.”
With President Donald Trump in attendance, Navy (10-2) got its second straight victory over Army (6-6), and the Midshipmen won the Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy for a second straight season. The Black Knights have not beaten a Navy team that was ranked by the AP since 1955.
Horvath was fortunate to have the chance to throw that decisive touchdown pass. On second-and-goal from the 1, he lost the ball while attempting a tush push. Army linebacker Eric Ford had a chance to scoop it up, but Navy running back Alex Tecza lunged over to prevent that, and Heidenreich eventually fell on the ball back at the 8.
“That’s probably the last thing you want to see on the 1-yard line is you turn around and the ball is just bouncing behind you,” Heidenreich said. “I was blocking down. I thought he had pushed in, and kind of out of my peripheral I saw it going behind me.”
On the next play, Horvath was nearly sacked, but he was able to throw the ball toward Tecza as he went down. The ball fell incomplete instead of being caught around the 15, which was just as well for Navy because it made going for it on fourth down a more viable option.
“I kind of felt like we had to,” Navy coach Brian Newberry said. “The nature of what they do offensively, despite how well we played in the second half, you may not get the ball back.”
Even after Heidenreich’s touchdown and an Army punt, Navy still had to escape one more near-turnover. On third-and-3 from the Army 43, the ball popped loose on a run by Horvath, but he was able to catch it out of the air. It came loose again and the Black Knights recovered, but after a review, Horvath was ruled down before the second fumble — a yard short of the line to gain.
Tecza then ran for the first down that enabled Navy to kneel out the clock, and Horvath appeared to wave goodbye at the Army sideline. There was a bit of a ruckus near midfield after the final kneel-down before things eventually calmed down for the traditional singing of the alma maters.
“They want to talk all their crap during the game and act like they’re so tough,” Horvath said. “The excuse last year was that they played a conference championship game before us. This year, we’ll see what it is.”
The Black Knights were trying to turn the tables on Navy after a ranked Army team — which had just won the American Conference title — lost to the Midshipmen last year.
The teams traded touchdown drives to start the game, each lasting 13 plays, 75 yards and over seven minutes. Horvath had a 5-yard scoring run, and Army quarterback Cale Hellums answered with a 2-yarder. Army’s first drive didn’t end until 5 seconds into the second quarter.
Then it was a while before anyone reached the end zone again. With Army up 10-7 late in the second quarter, the ball slipped out of Horvath’s hand while he was looking to pass. Army recovered the fumble at its own 45 with 20 seconds to play and moved into range for a 45-yard field goal by Dawson Jones.
Navy’s defense stiffened in the second half, but the Midshipmen still flirted with disaster. Horvath threw an interception in the third quarter that was initially returned to the end zone — before a replay showed Army’s Justin Weaver had a knee down when he picked off the pass at the Navy 32. The Black Knights had to settle for three — Dawson connected on a career-long 48-yard kick.
Navy’s Wing-T offense has been explosive this season. The Midshipmen entered the day with an FBS-high 10 plays of at least 60 yards. Army mostly kept them contained, but Horvath slipped free for a 37-yard run that set up a third-quarter field goal that made it 16-10.
After Hellums’ underthrown pass was intercepted by Phillip Hamilton, giving Navy the ball at the 50 with 11:19 to play, Tecza’s 24-yard run made it first-and-goal from the 5.
Trump tossed the coin before the game at midfield, then returned at halftime to walk from the Navy sideline to the Army one.
One that got away
Army defensive lineman Jack Bousum, who is from Annapolis, had a big game against his hometown team. He finished with 1 1/2 sacks and a fumble recovery.
The takeaway
Army: The Black Knights were the better team in the first half Saturday but didn’t do much offensively after that.
“They beat blocks,” Monken said. “We didn’t sustain the blocks we needed to.”
Navy: Horvath made some big plays and some bad ones, and the Navy defense was stout in the second half. The Midshipmen finished tied for first in the AAC this year but missed out on the league title game because of tiebreakers. This victory matters more to them anyway.
Up next
Army: Faces UConn in the Fenway Bowl on Dec. 27.
Navy: Faces Cincinnati in the Liberty Bowl on Jan. 2.
___
This story has been corrected to show Army took over at the Navy 32 after Horvath’s interception.
___
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World
2 US Army soldiers, interpreter killed in Syria ambush attack, Trump warns of ‘very serious retaliation’
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President Donald Trump warned Saturday that there will be “very serious retaliation” after a lone Islamic State gunman in Syria killed two U.S. Army soldiers and a U.S. interpreter in an ambush attack.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced earlier that the soldiers and interpreter were targeted in the central Syrian town of Palmyra in an attack that left three others wounded. U.S. Central Command said the deaths and injuries were a “result of an ambush by a lone ISIS gunman in Syria.”
“We mourn the loss of three Great American Patriots in Syria, two soldiers, and one Civilian Interpreter. Likewise, we pray for the three injured soldiers who, it has just been confirmed, are doing well. This was an ISIS attack against the U.S., and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack. There will be very serious retaliation,” he added.
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U.S. forces patrol in Syria’s northeastern city of Qamishli in the Hasakeh province, on Jan. 9, 2025. (Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)
In comments to reporters outside of the White House on Saturday, Trump also said, “This was an ISIS attack on us and Syria. And again, we mourn the loss and we pray for them and their parents and their loved ones.”
Parnell wrote on X that the attack happened as the soldiers “were conducting a key leader engagement.”
“Their mission was in support of ongoing counter-ISIS/counter-terrorism operations in the region,” he added, noting that “The soldiers’ names, as well as identifying information about their units, are being withheld until 24 hours after the next of kin notification. “
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that, “The savage who perpetrated this attack was killed by partner forces.”
“Let it be known, if you target Americans — anywhere in the world — you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you,” Hegseth also said in a post on X.
Parnell said the attack is currently under investigation. A Pentagon official told Fox News Digital that the attack unfolded in a place where the Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa does not have control.
President Donald Trump meets with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House on Nov. 10, 2025. A Pentagon official told Fox News Digital that the attack on the soldiers on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, unfolded in a place where the Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa does not have control. (Syrian Presidency/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“I’m praying for the brave U.S. soldiers and civilian who lost their lives, those who were injured in this attack, and the families who bear this profound loss,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll wrote on X. “The men and women who serve our country represent the very best of our nation. We mourn the passing of these heroes and honor their service and sacrifice.”
A senior U.S. official earlier confirmed to Fox News there were multiple injuries after American service members were ambushed in Syria.
“The United States, CIA and military forces are reportedly deeply involved in securing and stabilizing the situation in Syria,” Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, recently told Fox News Digital.
The injured in Saturday’s attack were taken by helicopters to the al-Tanf garrison, which is near the border with Iraq and Jordan, The Associated Press reported, citing Syrian state media.
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U.S. Army soldiers prepare to go out on patrol from a remote combat outpost on May 25, 2021, in northeastern Syria. (John Moore/Getty Images)
There are currently around 900 U.S. troops in Syria.
The U.S. had eight bases in Syria to keep an eye on ISIS since the U.S. military went in to prevent the terrorist group from setting up a caliphate in 2014, although three of those bases have since been closed down or turned over to the Syrian Democratic Forces.
On Monday, tens of thousands of Syrians flooded the streets of Damascus to mark the first anniversary of the Assad regime’s collapse.
U.S. Army soldiers stand near an armored military vehicle on the outskirts of Rumaylan in Syria’s northeastern Hasakeh province, bordering Turkey, on March 27, 2023. (Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)
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Those celebrations came a year after former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the capital as rebel forces swept through the country in a lightning offensive that ended five decades of Assad family rule and opened a new chapter in Syrian history.
Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson, Ashley Oliver, Jennifer Griffin, Benjamin Weinthal and Ashley Carnahan contributed to this report.
Published on
The European Commission has dismissed as “speculative” and groundless a lawsuit launched by the Russian Central Bank against Euroclear, the Brussels-based central securities depository that holds €185 billion in immobilised assets.
In a short statement published on Friday morning, the Russian Central Bank announced the start of legal proceedings for the “recovery of damages” and blamed Euroclear for preventing the release of the assets, which are subject to EU law.
The lawsuit was submitted to the Arbitration Court in Moscow.
The development comes with the EU still hammering out a plan to channel Russia’s sovereign assets into a zero-interest reparations loan to Ukraine, a process with Euroclear at its centre. EU leaders are meant to make a final decision when they meet on 18 December.
“Our proposal is legally robust and fully in line with EU and international law. The assets are not seized, and the principle of sovereign immunity is respected,” Valdis Dombrovskis, the European Commissioner for the Economy, said on Friday afternoon.
“We kind of expect that Russia will continue to launch speculative legal proceedings to prevent the EU from upholding international law and to pursue the legal obligation for Russia to compensate Ukraine for the damages it has caused.”
According to Dombrovskis, all European institutions that have Russian assets, from Euroclear to private banks, will be “fully protected” against Moscow’s retaliation. The EU has controlled €210 billion in assets of the Russian Central Bank since February 2022.
The sanctions regime already allows Euroclear to “offset” any potential loss, he added.
For example, if a Russian court orders the seizure of the €17 billion that Euroclear has on Russian soil, Euroclear will be allowed offset the loss by tapping into the €30 billion that its Russian counterpart, the National Settlement Depository, has stored within the EU.
Additionally, the reparations loan, if approved, will introduce a new mechanism to deal with state-to-state disputes. If Russia seizes the sovereign assets of Belgium in retaliation, Belgium will be allowed to “offset” the lossagainst the €210 billion, while Russia will not recover the amount it has seized when the assets are freed.
The Belgian factor
The legal safeguards are meant to allay the concerns of Belgium, which remains the chief opponent of the reparations loan. Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever has repeatedly warned of the risk a successful legal challenge could pose.
“We put forward a proposal. We are confident in its legality and its court-proof character,” a Commission spokesperson said.
Euroclear, which declined to comment, has previously criticised the reparations loan as “very fragile”, legally risky and overtly experimental.
The lawsuit comes a day after EU countries agreed to trigger an emergency clause to immobilise the Russian Central Bank assets for the foreseeable future.
Under the new law, the €210 billion will be released only when Russia’s actions “have objectively ceased to pose substantial risks” for the European economy and Moscow has paid reparations to Kyiv “without economic and financial consequences” for the bloc – a high bar that is unlikely to be cleared any time soon, if ever.
The indefinite immobilisation is meant to further placate Belgium and Euroclear in order to facilitate the approval of the reparations loan next week.
In a separate statement, the Russian Central Bank said it “reserves the right, without further notice, to apply all available remedies and protections if the proposed initiatives of the European Union are upheld or implemented”.
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