One minute, Haya Shabaka was brewing tea in her sister Abeer’s Gaza City home. The next, she and her relatives were plunged into darkness, said Abeer Shabaka, who was in the other room when an Israeli strike hit their building on Dec. 6.

“I felt that we were all underground,” Abeer recounted. “I heard my mother scream, but I did not know where she was. I saw Haya. She looked like she was asleep.”

Abeer said she screamed and screamed until help came, and was eventually pulled from the rubble. Her mother and sister are still buried underneath.

“I wish I had been killed with them,” Abeer said. The Israeli military said it was targeting a gathering of militants.

Without their bodies, or confirmation of their deaths, their family was unable to register them with Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

They remain uncounted.

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The European Union's top court ruled Friday that every member country must recognize official changes to gender identity acquired elsewhere within the 27-nation political and economic bloc.

Legal experts say the ruling will boost protections for transgender people in the region.

The decision followed a case brought by a dual British-Romanian national named Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi. Mirzarafie-Ahi was registered at birth in Romania as female, then moved to Britain and obtained legal recognition of his male gender identity. Romanian authorities later refused Mirzarafie-Ahi's attempts to update his identity documents.

"Gender, like a first name, is a fundamental element of personal identity," the European Court of Justice said in a news release on its ruling.

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Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Sunday while continuing to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Lebanese health ministry said 105 people had been killed and another 359 injured. The fresh assaults on Iran-backed proxies across the Middle East risk accelerating a slide towards a devastating regional conflict on multiple fronts.

The attack on the port of Hodeidah in Yemen involved dozens of Israeli planes and appears to have targeted fuel facilities, power plants and docks at the Ras Issa and Hodeidah ports. It one of the biggest such operations yet seen in the near year-long crisis in the region. Houthi media reports said the strikes had killed four people and wounded 33. Residents said the strikes caused power cuts in most parts of Hodeidah. Israeli military officials said the raid targeted the Houthis, an armed Iranian-backed group that controls most of Yemen.

They have fired at Israeli targets for months in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. They have also targeted international shipping in the Red Sea. On Saturday, they launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel’s main international airport when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was arriving.

TVNL Comment:  Wake up, America!  Your tax dollars are paying for all of this horror.

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As the war in Ukraine enters a critical period, the European Union has decided it must take responsibility for what it sees as a security threat in its own neighborhood, and it’s preparing to tackle some of the financial burden, perhaps even without the United States.

The EU rarely moves ahead on international matters without the U.S., particularly involving major conflicts, but it hopes this decision will encourage others to come forward.

EU envoys have been working this week on a proposal to provide Ukraine with a loan package worth up to 35 billion euros ($39 billion).

“Crucially, this loan will flow straight into your national budget,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv last week. “It will provide you with significant and much-needed fiscal space. You will decide how best to use the funds, giving you maximum flexibility to meet your needs.”

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Police in Los Angeles are searching for three suspects who opened fire during a drive-by shooting and shot six people along a south Los Angeles street Wednesday.

The crime took place just before 3:15 p.m. in the city's Florence neighborhood near a homeless encampment, the Los Angeles Police Department reported.

Officers responded to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon call and said they found six people shot, according to a news release.

Police reported four women ranging in age from 40 to 62 were struck by gunfire, and a 36-year-old man was also shot. A fifth woman, whose age was not provided, was also shot.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.

A Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian missile facility early Wednesday threw up towering fireballs visible from space and thundering detonations that triggered earthquake monitors.

Even by the standards of this incendiary conflict, video showing the blasts north of Moscow was remarkable.

Officials on both sides said it was the result of a large Ukrainian drone attack on Toropets, a town in the Tver region around 230 miles from the Russian capital. Russian state media has previously reported that the military was building an arsenal for storing missiles and other explosives there.

Speaking to reporters early Wednesday, Tver Gov. Igor Rudenya said that all drones in the region were shot down and that there was a fire on the ground as a result of debris from a downed drone. As he spoke, loud explosions could be heard in the background.

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