 Hello and welcome to today's episode of International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch where we bring you some of the top stories from around the world. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Houthi's achieve another victory in Yemen. Israel announces settler population will double in Jolan Heights. What will be the impact of the setback to build back better in the US? Houthi forces in Yemen announced on Sunday, December 26 that they have completely liberated the Nadan Jof province from forces loyal to the Saudi-led coalition. Spokesperson of the Houthi armed forces Yaya Saray said that they now have full control over the Nadan province which shares borders with Saudi Arabia. Yemen news agency Saba reported. The announcement comes a day after the Saudi-led coalition bombed different locations in Yemen on Saturday, killing at least three people including a child and a woman in Ajama near the capital Sanaa. The Saudi coalition claimed that the airstrikes were carried out in a response to a Houthi missile attack earlier in the day which killed two people in its southern Jazan province. The deaths in Jazan are the first casualties inside Saudi Arabia due to a Houthi strike in the last three years. Since last week, the Saudi-led coalition has increased the number of airstrikes inside Houthi-controlled areas. On Saturday, coalition forces carried out at least 24 airstrikes in Marib province. According to the UN, apart from causing nearly 400,000 deaths and a displacement of millions of people, the Saudi-led war has pushed the majority of Yemenis, over 24 million people, to the verge of hunger and death with their survival dependent on foreign aid. The UN has called the situation in Yemen the world's worst humanitarian disaster of the century. Now on to our next story. On Sunday, December 26, Israel announced approved plans for the massive expansion of an illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied Syrian Jolan Heights. The proposed plan at an estimated cost of USD 317 million aims to build 7,300 new settler homes in the illegal Mevohama settlement over the next five years. The plan was first announced in October. It is reportedly designed to double the Israeli settler population by an additional 23,000 Jewish residents. Around 25,000 Israeli settlers currently live in the area, along with 23,000 Syrians, from the Druze community in the last four remaining Syrian villages still under occupation. The Israeli cabinet under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday voted in favour of the plan at a meeting that took place in the Mevohama settlement. He also hailed former US President Donald Trump, who recognised Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Jolan Heights in 2019. The current US government under Joe Biden has been silent on the issue, notably US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently told US media outlets that the region is of, and I quote, real importance to Israeli security, and mentioned threats posed to Israel by Iran-backed militant groups in Syria. And finally, recently West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said that he could not support US President Joe Biden's build-back-better plan. The ambitious $1.75 trillion plan would have seen spending on a lot of social sector areas such as healthcare, housing and climate change. The announcement by Manchin effectively kills the bill as the Senate is split 50-50 and the Republicans have said they will not support the bill. Eugene Purir of Breakthrough News talks about how the gutting of the bill will affect the people of the US and whether some of its proposals can be passed nonetheless. I think the at least temporary defeat, but what seems like a permanent defeat for the build-back-better agenda is going to have a huge impact on working families. First and foremost, this means that there is not going to be an extension of the child tax credit, which has given hundreds of dollars for a number of months now to families that are just doing their best to make it. And it also means that moving forward, a number of critical proposals will not be seen in terms of Medicare, for instance, which is the healthcare system for older Americans and in many ways is one of the better forms of healthcare that is affordable for people in this country. There is not going to be extended coverage for vision, for dental, for hearing aids, for things like that that people critically need, which means a number of poor working class seniors will continue to essentially have to move without the correct healthcare that they should be able to have to be able to live a full life because there is not going to be a build-back-better agenda. It certainly means, as it concerns the issue of climate change, that almost nothing substantive is going to be done this year or almost certainly next year in order to rein in carbon emissions. It also means that the richest people in this country, billionaires that got a huge amount of money over the pandemic, are going to not have any sort of higher taxes for broader provisions. It means that tens of billions of dollars that was going to go to promote affordable housing in a country where millions, tens of millions of people are desperately in need of really any housing, but certainly affordable housing, the 90 billion or so odd dollars that was going to that will not happen. It also means that America's public housing, which has basically turned into a slum system because it's so run down that billions of dollars that we're going to go in to help improve people's living standards there, that also is not going to happen. Other things that were already sort of pre-dropped out of the bill before we even got to this level, but that are also certainly not to happen. There are a number of provisions that were going to make it easier to unionize and things that have been pushed by unions. Now, that had already been dropped out of the bill, but since the bill is not happening in any way, shape, or form, I think it's also worth mentioning that things that would make it easier for workers to join unions or really to put it a different way, make it harder for employers to break the law to prevent people from joining unions. That's not going to happen either. And we're going to see many other things. There's other tax credits that are helping working class people. That's not going to happen. Other expansions of social programs that are out there, none of which seem to be willing to take place. Now, there's a whole discourse about whether or not the bill is dead 100% for sure. But I think it's worth noting here that this means the defeat of the Build Back Better package that any social legislation to address the basic needs of working in poor people and honestly a lot of so-called middle class people in America is totally off the table. And the only reason it's off the table is a handful of moderate senators didn't want to increase taxes on billionaires and people with hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's all we have for today. For more such stories, visit our website, www.people'sdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.