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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

Hello, I am Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Thursday, the 3rd of December. Our main stories, the UK approves the first coronavirus vaccine ahead of the US and Europe. The UN says the past decade has been the hottest on record and Nike is facing a backlash in Japan over an advert which highlights racial discrimination.

Also in the podcast, we find out why the cryptocurrency Bitcoin is surging even as economies struggle.

And how to Otter's in England found love during lockdown.

Hundreds of thousands of people have already been given a Chinese vaccine against covid-19, while Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia's Sputnik V jab to be rolled out on a large scale by the end of next week. But the UK has become the first nation in the world to approve a vaccine that's completed an internationally recognized Phase three safety and efficacy trial. Some 800000 doses of the Pfizer biotech jab are due to arrive in Britain in the coming days. But with development and approval happening so much quicker than usual, are people willing to be vaccinated?

I would take the vaccine. It will give me hopefully freedom again to go out and about having been housebound for nine months.

I know I can understand people's concerns about it being rushed through, but that's what the trials are there for. I mean, there's a collaborative worldwide effort in producing all these vaccines, so somebody has to be first.

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Obviously, lots of drugs come out quite quickly, but we usually have quite a few years to test them before we get them to the main public. So I'm not sure about it.

I'm not an anti vaccine. My daughter has had all of the vaccines, but I am cautious of the new vaccine. And also I think it's very healthy to keep an open mind on funding on how these vaccines have come about. Surely we should dig deeper and have this debate.

Well, Wednesday's announcement led to another spike in conspiracy theories surrounding the vaccine, as I heard from Marijana Spring, the BBC's disinformation and social media reporter.

These are totally different to legitimate concerns and questions about a vaccine, about its efficacy, about its safety. Instead, these are really quite dangerous and false claims, suggesting, for instance, that Bill Gates is going to attempt to insert microchips into everyone by means of a vaccine because he's very supportive of vaccinations or the vaccines will be a way of deliberately causing harm to people or even altering their DNA. All of these claims are false. There's no evidence to support them.

But multiple, Meems, of Bill Gates looking really quite scary have been shared across Facebook today in all kinds of different languages, in local and Facebook groups and on Instagram.

Why do people push this stuff out? There are a variety of different reasons.

We often see that it originates in antivirus circles. Those are people who for a number of years have shared false claims about vaccines on social media, other big pseudo science influences, looking for CLECs possibly to make money. But a lot of the people who fall victim to this disinformation aren't necessarily bad actors rather than people who are feeling a bit anxious, spending a lot of time on social media and come across this stuff and it starts to sow seeds of doubt.

Some people in China have said that UK citizens are being used as guinea pigs by the US to test out this vaccine. Is there something about the national pride, the race to be the first with a vaccine about this? Absolutely.

There are various political tensions running underneath this whole vaccine conversation. And whenever there's any kind of political undertones or bias or agendas, we do see disinformation spreads that can be certain countries being more critical of other countries. And so I think as ever, it's important to remember that disinformation can come from a variety of different sources, not just from the dark corners of the Internet and to think about why something was shared, how it makes us feel, whether there was an agenda, whether that was motive, and just to interrogate the source and to ask ourselves whether they're the best person to be telling us this information.

Marijana Spring. The past decade has been the hottest ever recorded, according to the UN, and time is running out to fix the damage that we're doing to the planet. The UN secretary general said. Apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones and hurricanes were increasingly the new normal as nature hits back.

Here's our chief environment correspondent, Justin Rowlatt.

The UN chief Antonio Guterres told the BBC today that action was needed now. Let's face facts.

The state of our planet is broken. Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. The science is clear.

For example, unless the world cuts fossil fuel production by six percent every year between now and 2030, things will get worse, much worse.

Sir David Attenborough joined Mr Gutteridge in warning time was running out.

Young people are very impatient and quite rightly so. For nothing to come out except words is very dispiriting. We need action.

The UN chief says. The world now faces a moment of truth. He says the choice is very simple.

Start cutting carbon emissions now or face disaster.

Justin Rowlatt will for a closer look at the UN's current assessment of the world climate. I spoke to the BBC's Matt McGrath.

The World Meteorological Organization, they maintain the records here going back several decades. They use a collection of five data sets maintained by meteorological agencies around the world. They've been able to use those to look at records essentially going back to 1850 to 900. They call that their baseline years and they're able to compare modern temperatures to that. And while human activities and climate warming have been going on for decades, temperatures have only really started to climb through the early 2000s.

And by 2010, they were starting to move ahead. So the year is from 2015 16 to now, the sixth warmest on record, the decade from 2011, the warmest on record. That's the way it's moved. And despite various things like El Nino etc, the fingerprint of human warming is there and it's keeping those temperatures high.

Yeah, we keep hearing about temperature records being broken. Is the impact of this warming accelerating?

Yes, that's to say it is appears to be accelerating. We've seen temperature rise in the Arctic before, but now we're seeing consistently, like this year, temperatures in parts of Siberia where five degrees Celsius above the average five degrees is an incredible amount of variation. We saw the highest temperature ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. And we're seeing with the oceans, particularly, sea level rise is increasing. We're seeing greater acidification and a thing called marine heatwaves, which 30 or 40 years ago were an absolute rarity.

They're now quite commonplace. And in fact, about 80 percent of the oceans had one in 2020.

And yet only on Tuesday we had that the UN's climate goals were within reach. So can this heating be reversed?

Yes, I have to say the heating itself really would be a big struggle to reverse it. However, the cause of future heating is still in our hands. And that's what the UN was talking about the other day. If we managed to get a carbon emissions over the next decade, particularly than the long term temperature outlook is a little bit better than it was. But if we don't, then we're already locked into one point two degrees of warming and that could go up to one point five very quickly and beyond.

And that would have disastrous consequences for the world.

Yes, it is going to get hotter.

Whatever we do, certainly it's going to get a bit hotter. And whatever we do, it's already gotten over a degree hotter. But the question is really, we're now moving into that quite dangerous territory around one and one and a half degrees. If we don't carve our emissions, that will go beyond that and we'll be in literally uncharted territory.

Matt Megraw, the Ugandan politician and pop star Bobby Wine, has said he will resume his presidential campaign after pausing it when four of his colleagues were injured during clashes between his supporters and the security forces. He's asked the Electoral Commission to protect opposition politicians from harassment. The country's long term ruler, Hilary Museveni, is seeking a sixth term in office in the election on the 14th of January. The BBC's Patience to Hire has this report from Kampala. A swift response by security forces to anger on the streets of Kampala.

Supporters of opposition candidate Robertshaw Gilani, also known as Bobby Wayne, were demanding for his release from detention. The protests over two days in November left 54 people dead, but the anguish would be felt beyond the roadblocks and burning tires.

I am right in the center of town, in the heart of the central business district, and they are throngs of people coming out of the arcades, the shopping arcades, the shopping malls, locking up their shops, coming up with their hands up and trying to make it past the police lines and make it safely home.

But Trader Hydromatic, 25 year old son Almos, would never make it home.

And when the chaos started, I closed the shop so we could rush home. We were trying to cross to the taxi park. I was even holding his hand. A military vehicle came up from the road, the soldiers shooting. That is how a bullet caught him in the mouth. Almost fell right next to me. I fell down to in shock. I'm in extreme pain. I never got my son home. What saddens me most is that he was so young, not involved in the protests or in politics.

I haven't been able to sleep properly since I got to the Ministry of Health and the electoral body allow gatherings of up to 200 people in a controlled environment to allow for social distancing. But some opposition politicians have accused the government of using the pandemic as an excuse to curtail their campaigning and have decided to defy the rules. Bobby Wayne had been arrested in eastern Uganda for violating restrictions on drawing crowds. He was later charged and granted bail. Having spent two days in detention, opposition politician Ibrahim Sandwiching Gundaroo is campaigning to retain his parliamentary seat in a constituency just outside of Kampala, is one of those who have vowed to flout the restrictions.

Mr. Milosevic is using the same way he was using the Public Order Management Act, the Police Act, to stop freedom of association and freedom of assembly today as the more justified cause because he keeps waving the committee rules in everybody's face. So this is an extension of veneration that he must not allow anyone bruxism. The population was to be kept ignorant.

The government has defended the actions of the security forces with President Yoweri Museveni as their most prominent advocate.

The other that which are in a position is untouchable. And if police get him to arrest him, the reverse is not acceptable and must never be repeated. A very clear douceur committed by the criminals comes out in the street incidents that happened on the 20th 21st of November. Highly trained security personnel wearing the uniform of the counter-terrorism police went out on patrols through the so-called no go areas for law enforcement. Positive coverage are new areas for law enforcement. They were attacked by thugs to criminals.

We are sure to get them under the sun. One day later, you are going to reduce the perpetrators of decided that those forces will play with fire.

The incumbent's supporters have been gathering to welcome him in different towns as he traverses the country, he insists on not stopping to address them, only holding small covid safe meetings with party leaders. Instead, holding elections during a pandemic was never going to be easy. But the question some are asking is, can they still be fair?

Patients are to high in Kampala, the American sportswear firm Nike is facing a backlash over an advert highlighting racial discrimination in Japan. The company's latest TV ad shows the, quote, real life experience of three young football players of mixed heritage. It sparked a fierce debate in Japan with the details.

Ali Costello with over 25 million views on social media and almost 800000 shares.

It's definitely an advert that's got people talking.

And maybe I should stand out a little less, blend in a little more. Maybe I shouldn't be here. Maybe I should get them to like me.

The video features three young mixed race football players growing up in Japan. It shows them being bullied at school, being picked on, shouted out by their parents and being stared at its hands with them all happily playing football together with the slogan, You can't stop sport, you can't stop us. Nike Japan said the ad highlighted how people overcame their daily struggles and conflicts to move their future through sports. But judging by the comments on YouTube, lots of people didn't see it like that.

Some say Nike was exaggerating the scale of discrimination in the country, adding it was unfair to single out Japan. Others threatened to boycott Nike products. However, there were also positive comments about the ad thanking the brand for highlighting the issue of racism. The Japanese American journalist Morley Robinson said that many Japanese do not like to be told by outside voices to change their ways, while the business author Steve McGinness said the advert was an own goal and that Nike should know better as a foreign brand to point out endemic racism to its hosts.

Nike is not the only Western brand to come under fire for not understanding Asian cultures and consumer behavior. Last year, the luxury French brand Dior was criticized for using a map of China. They excluded Taiwan. Taiwan has been self ruled since the 1950s, but Beijing's official policy is that the island is a Chinese province. But controversy doesn't always lead to a fall in sales and can actually have the opposite effect.

So don't ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they're crazy enough, Nike's campaigns in the U.S. featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who notes during the national anthem to protest against racial injustice, also receive criticism and threats of boycotts, but actually resulted in an increase in sales.

Ali Costello.

Still to come on the podcast, how one of Zimbabwe's worst elephant poaching incidents has inspired an award winning film.

Now he has just 48 days left in power. But in the dying days of his administration, there is much speculation over whether President Donald Trump will issue preemptive pardons for his closest aides and family. We got more details from our Washington reporter, Anthony Cerca.

The reports are that Donald Trump is considering pardoning his three adult children. That's Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, although none of them have been charged for crimes. Also, Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, some of them have been investigated. For instance, Don Jr. was investigated for his contacts with Russia during the 2016 election. Giuliani reportedly has been investigated for his business dealings in Ukraine. And it appears that Donald Trump is concerned, according to these reports, that when Joe Biden takes over the presidency, his Justice Department might start digging into these more, whether for political purposes, in his view or otherwise.

So he wants to insulate himself against that. There is some history of preemptive pardons. Gerald Ford, the president, gave a preemptive pardon to Richard Nixon, even though he had not been charged for Watergate crimes. Jimmy Carter gave preemptive pardons to all the Americans who went to Canada to avoid the draft. It is unusual, though, but the reality is that a presidential pardon power is fairly sweeping. It's not defined. So it is a broad unilateral power vested in the president.

Anthony Zarka in Washington, one of Zimbabwe's worst elephant poaching incidents, has inspired an award winning film, the movie Gone. A review is named after a remote national park.

It's the latest effort by young filmmakers to try to revive an industry that's buckled under the weight of an ailing economy. The BBC Shingai Nyako recently attended the OpenAir premiere in Harare.

It will make it more immersive. All over, the red carpet was rolled out for the premiere.

The dress code, safari chic, lots of cocktails, entertainment and of course, face masks was pretty difficult issues.

Writer and director Sidney Tavurvur, she was struggling to take it all in. He'd faced huge obstacles in bringing this project to the screens during a national economic crisis.

I wish all the support you are getting right now is a photograph. And when you're starting to do the production, we didn't have funding. We did the same on our own. And then after we released the trailer, that's when people started to see what we were up to. And that's when people say the film must be done. They used to take pictures here and they come as we used to shoot the film.

So we had to push ourselves to use the equipment that was available to us to create it so they can make the film begged him several firsts, his first international award and his first trip outside the country.

I've been having dreams of just making films since I was a little kid. And me being here seeing everything that's happening is the realisation that if you can keep pushing and keep believing yourself, it can happen.

Why did you decide to tell this particular story? So all of my films, I always make sure that they have a social message. Everything have to go. In 2013, about 300 elephants that were killed in one day. Using that saying, it sounds like I said A, where people go to some extent to kill elephants.

His is an astonishing tale of resilience, of a grassroots movement of filmmakers determined to commit local stories to film in the face of a lack of funding and equipment.

This was not the life I had imagined for myself, but my choices. But let me tell you, that issue explores the link between poverty in the rural communities and poaching. A fictional character called Zulu, a would be pop star is driven by his struggles and a family tragedy. His love interest to law is played by popular actress Tendai Shettima.

She's caught up in this underworld of poaching and she has to make like a really big life decision that will impact the rest of of the whole storyline. So basically, it's not just poachers who are affected or the the larger community of where the wildlife is. Everybody is affected. And so it's like everyone's decision.

And while the story is fiction, it echoes real life scenarios for volunteer Ranger Taruta. Last, she not only produced the film, but acted in it.

I play the character of Sergeant Rene. And having experience as a ranger myself and having lost fellow Rangers, I think, but there were there were there were threats that that I could relate to and were very, very relatable. So we need to look after our heritage. If we don't take intentional steps to look after our heritage, our animals will we won't have them tomorrow.

So we hope that this will will ignite or enlighten people in that regard to Zimbabwe with its five million acres of national park land and the world's second largest elephant population is hugely profitable for Asian based poaching syndicates and corrupt officials. Park authorities say over 300 elephants were killed between 2016 and 2019. Tayyiba Vasher hopes to have his film screened on Netflix and other global channels. And while the primary message is about conservation, he says he hopes the sweeping scenes of majestic cliffs and natural beauty will also help lure new global tourists post covid and revive a sector that so desperately needs it.

Shingai Yorker reporting from Harare. Just before we came on air, we had some news from France. The former French president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, has died at the age of 94. Iure regional editor Mike Sanders looks back at his life.

When Valery Giscard d'Estaing came to office on a center right ticket in 1974, he was at 48, the youngest French president since the 19th century. He backed nuclear power and high speed trains and helped liberalize laws on divorce, abortion and contraception. He founded the Group of Six leading industrial nations to help world leaders get to know each other. Initially, he tried the common touch, inviting dustmen in for breakfast at the Elysee Palace. It grated, so he accentuated his aristocratic persona to match the noble name the family had purloined from an ancestral branch.

He had a reputation for arrogance, accepting diamonds from the Central African Republic dictator Jean Bedel Bokassa didn't help his image. Primarily, he'll be remembered as a committed European who worked with the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, to deepen monetary integration from 2001 to 2003, often in excellent English. He chaired the European Convention to draft an EU constitution. His countrymen voted to reject it. Perhaps his greatest rebuff. British Eurosceptics were triumphant, but he was stoic, reminding EU leaders after the British voted to leave that it was just a return to the situation before Britain joined Mike Saunders.

Although the pandemic has brought havoc to much of the world economy, not every sector has suffered. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin surged to a new high this week of 19000 dollars, and although it's fallen back since Monday, it is still more than trebled in value this year. So what's going on, Chris? Mark McAlary is CEO of Quoin Cloud, which runs a network of Bitcoin ATMs in the Americas. He spoke to my colleague Tim Franck's.

We're seeing trends that we're going digital. We're seeing that accelerated Coheed seeking adoption curves, that we're 10 years in the making and compressing them down into months. And so we're seeing that people prefer to hold cash in their digital wallet rather than their physical wallet. The cash you're holding in your Venmo or your PayPal is now more valuable than the cash you're holding in your physical wallet. And Bitcoin and other digital currencies are no exception to that. And so Bitcoin has a relatively stable supply, 21 million will ever be created.

That constraint on the supply side would increase. On the demand side is sort of rocketing the price upward as more and more people are using the digital currency, all of which makes sense.

But when you use the word stability in Bitcoin in the same sentence, you know, some people may raise their eyebrows because, I mean, it has been a switchblade ride for Bitcoin over recent years. How confident are you that this rise in value will be sustained?

The adoption is here to stay. You're seeing companies like these. You're seeing companies like people in the cash app. They're all integrating Bitcoin, wired into their software so that they're tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of combined customers are able to use this. And so when the network effects of hundreds of millions of people tapping into these, these networks are just making them so much more useful, very similar to the early days of email when it was five college professors in the US on email made no sense to to write an email to your grandmother.

But when there's tens of millions and hundreds of millions of email clients out there, just in the way that there are these digital currency, what's today? The usability and network effects go through the roof. And for that reason, it's here to stay.

Chris McAlary, now we finish with a feel good. Wholesome Love Story starring Otter's. Here's Beth Timmins for two lucky hotties in England, lockdown loneliness will soon subside after they were matched up through a dating website. Ten year old Harris from the Cornish SEAL Sanctuary, whose partner Apricot died four years ago, moved to sea life in Scarborough to be with Pumpkin because Östersund actually live in pairs. Pumpkin was also lonely after losing her elderly partner, Eric and her animal care team hope to New Mallozzi would improve her mood.

Asian short doses are a very vocal species and can make at least 12 different sounds to communicate, including alarm greasing, mating or feeding calls such as that.

Tamara Keith, curator at the Cornish Sail Sanctuary, said it was the perfect fairytale ending for these playful handholding, pebble juggling creatures to ensure the best chance of success for a new pairing of Asian shore claws, it's best to introduce a new male into a female's territory so that the male more easily submits to the female. On first meeting, though the smallest of the 13 otter species and are found in southern India, southern China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines, they share the habitats of rivers, mangroves, marshes, rice paddies and sea coast with three other species of otter Eurasian, smooth coated and hairy nosed sea life.

Scarboro said things were going swimmingly and that Harris had settled in extremely well. Beth Simmons.

And that is almost all from us for now. But before we go, a message about our year and happy news pod from my colleague Jackie Leonard.

Hello and welcome to our countdown to the Happy 2020 Advent calendar, if you like. We are global news board listeners with their thoughts on the lessons of 20/20 and their hopes for 2021.

Here's today's.

An important takeaway for me personally from 2020 is that it is sometimes OK to just not be OK. Corporate journey brought out how fragile economies are, how fragile human life is, how fragile human psyche is. I mean, being told to stay indoors is clearly enough for a lot of us to just unravel. And for me, I learned to cope with that. But just being OK with not being OK, just hitting pause and taking a deep breath and simply hoping that things will get better.

And that's in fact what I hope for all of us in 2021, that things will just be a little bit better than it was in 2020.

That was Namrata Sankar from Toronto in Canada. And you, too, can join in by sending 30 seconds worth of wisdom to global podcast at BBC Dot CO2 UK. And stay tuned for the Happy Pod on the 25th of December. This edition of the Global News Pod was produced by Beth Timmins and mixed by way Dunklin Ed is Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conaway. Until next time.

Goodbye.