Hello, this is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news, seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Nick Myers. And at 14 hours GMT on Thursday, the 31st of December, these are our main stories. China has given its first full approval of a coronavirus vaccine.

A man reputed to be America's most prolific serial killer has died in a California hospital aged 18.

Also in this podcast, Stanley Johnson, the father of the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, says he is applying to become a French citizen now that the UK has severed its ties with the European Union.

And no one knows whether he's conquering treacherous mountain peaks, slipping through shimmering ice caves or discovering billowing hot springs with his dog by his side.

The climate change campaigner, known to millions as Glacier Bro, is thought to have perished on the ice fields he loved.

It has been a week of contrasting fortunes in the fight against coronavirus, the new, more contagious variant has spread yet further. Many nations are reporting record infection and death rates, but it's also been a week of vaccine landmarks.

The easy to steer Oxford, AstraZeneca jab is starting its rollout.

And now comes news from Beijing. China has given its first full approval of one of its own vaccines. The company that's developed. It says the drug is 79 percent effective. The announcement came from a top health official, Chen Shifang.

Selena Eufala is an issue that after a series of strict reviews, verification tests and data analysis in accordance with the law and procedures, it's concluded that the known and potential benefits of cinephiles Farm's new inactivated coronavirus vaccine are bigger than the known and potential risks, and it fully meets the pre-set requirements of conditional marketing standards.

More on China's vaccine development now from our Asia-Pacific editor, Michael Brissenden.

China has more than a dozen vaccines in development, five of them, including this one, which is being approved today in phase three trial. So right at the very end of the trial procedure, as you heard there, the official said it was a safe vaccine and China is now going to give it to tens of millions of people, perhaps 50 million by the middle of February, which is when Chinese New Year starts and lots of people are going to be moving around.

It's going to be provided free to everybody in China. And as I said, it's just one of a number of vaccines which are in late stage trials which are going to be rolled out for people in China over the next year.

And Michael, you mentioned all these vaccines coming out of China. The global media has emphasized American and European efforts to find vaccines.

There's been less focus on China's research until now. Why do you think that is?

Well, in China has been a lot of focus on this, of course, and in countries where they'll be receiving this vaccine. But what you say is correct, a lot more focus on American and European efforts. And that's partly because we just have more information about those vaccines. The companies manufacturing them release all kinds of data which scientists can pore over and check their more media friendly. They speak to journalists and they're more willing to talk about their vaccines.

In China, though, China is a very secretive place in all kinds of ways. And that's been the case with its vaccine development. We've just got information in a very piecemeal fashion. So, for example, we know for this particular vaccine, which has been approved, it's 79 percent efficient. But we don't know exactly the calculations which have led to that state. And we don't know how many people in the trial where the trials took place, exactly what the age groups of people involved in the trial were.

China has promised to release all that information in the coming weeks, but certainly scientists across the world will be looking at this stage and say, well, we can't really assess this and other vaccines until we get all that information.

And Michael, briefly, there are a lot of people already using Chinese vaccines around the world. To what extent will that be a diplomatic coup that Beijing is keen on?

Well, look, China is the place where the coronavirus pandemic originated. The leadership has been very embarrassed about that fact, tried to underplay. So if it can give a vaccination or several vaccines to the world, it will be a great diplomatic coup. Already, some Chinese vaccines have been delivered to other countries now being used. The United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Egypt, Brazil, all these places are going to use Chinese vaccines. Chinese government has promised to give them a cheap prices because it wants to show the world that it's going to do something that is doing something about the pandemic in one country that will be hoping that China's vaccination rollout is going to change things is North Korea.

Its border is close with China because of the pandemic and the resulting shutdown in trade has plunged North Korea's population into deeper economic hardship. More than 10 million people are believed to have a lack of food.

The North Korean leader, Kim Jong un has called a rare party congress. Laura Baker reports from Seoul.

The North Korean people are facing one of their bleakest years in a generation. The already ailing economy has been hit by three major crises a border blockade to prevent the spread of covid-19 from China, devastating typhoons and floods and the continuing effect of strict economic sanctions. Leader Kim Jong un has already ordered his people to labor extra hours and fulfill tougher quarters over the last 80 days. Now he's calling a rare meeting of his party Congress, where he's expected to outline a new economic plan for the country.

But he has very few options. Trade with his biggest ally, China, has fallen by nearly 80 percent due to the. Border closures. It's led to a shortage of raw materials in factories and a hike in the price of basic goods such as sugar, Mr. Kim may try to put forward a foreign agenda and respond to the recent US election. But so far, his message to the people has been one of self-reliance. This is bound to mean harsher conditions for many, including the already 11 million people believed to be suffering from lack of food in the impoverished nation.

Laura Baker. As we enter a new year, a lot of hope is being placed on the covid-19 vaccines, including China's, which we've just been hearing about that are being rolled out globally.

The BBC World Service has an access to labs and trials around the world to find out how scientists have been able to create brand new vaccines in such a short space of time. Glenn Tansley reports.

Early December at the Chris Honey Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa, I feel fine because it doesn't do any harm to my body. My name is the one thing I'm at Bahra at the trial vaccine for the cause of my. I'm Dr. Anthony Kuhn, the principal investigator on the Chattooga vaccine trial, but this morning what we are doing is we are seeing people for their follow up visits. They presented for different protocol visits. Some of them would receive their second dose of vaccination this morning.

Others are coming in for a safety checkup. And then we are also starting to see some of our participants for their six months follow up.

covid-19 is a disease that has touched all corners of the world in order to find a solution. Scientists can't be contained to labs and offices. They have to get out into communities to test their newly developed vaccines work, and they need to be in as many communities as possible.

My name is Janine Lost, a family member at covid-19, my grandfather's brother, so I just wanted to help if they can be able to find something that can prevent covid-19.

I just wanted to be part of these. Participants are taking part in the trial for the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, also known here as Shadowbox one. Dr Sean Elias is a researcher at Oxford University.

The main things we're essentially looking at is different age groups and obviously different populations. Now there's different genetic make up of different people all around the world, and your genetics can also have an effect on how susceptible you are to a disease. One of the things we've noticed with covid is there's certain biases into who is most at risk of the virus. So particularly men are more susceptible than women. And individuals who are older are more susceptible than those who are younger.

But we've also seen the virus can have a bigger impact on individuals who are black and ethnic minority background. And as a result, you need to assess your vaccine in different populations to make sure that it's safe first, but also effective because in some populations it might not work as well as in others.

It's an enormous challenge to recruit enough people to take part. But the researchers and participants alike know just how important it is.

My mom was the one who was not sure about this. That is just just unsure because she's like, what if you're going to contracted the virus, stuff like that. So it was a bit of a concern at first if we can be able to find a vaccine. Most of our illness can be much more safe.

Scientists in South Africa wanted to help Oxford to run their vaccine trials.

In return, they get local data on how the vaccine works on people living here, which will help the country's regulators decide whether to approve the vaccine or not. Here's Professor Shabbier Maddi, the principal investigator on two covid vaccine trials in the country.

What is also invested in the study is involvement of people living with HIV. And that is particularly important in the context of South Africa, where close to 15 to 16 percent of the adult population are people living with HIV. So understanding their immune responses of the vaccine in that particular group of individuals relative to what is observed in people with HIV is also of particular interest to us in South Africa.

But Professor Mardie is worried because none of these vaccines come cheap. The South African government has begun to procure vaccines through a global system called Kovács, which aims to guarantee fair and equitable access to covered vaccines around the world.

The model of the CapEx facility doesn't work in the interests of South Africa, and the reason for that is the South Africa is classified as an upper middle income country and is expected to pay the same sort of price to be paid by high income countries in terms of a country perspective. Unfortunately, it would actually undermine our ability to gain access to adequate quantity of vaccine because the economy of the country is pretty much in the doldrums as a starting point.

The South African government has now made a payment of 19 million dollars to Kovács that will secure access to vaccines for about 10 percent of the population.

A report by Glyn Tansley. And you're going to hear more on Breakthrough, their race for the covid Vaccine, a special documentary on New Year's Day here on the BBC World Service.

The United States has set a new record for the number of coronavirus deaths registered in a single day. In the latest 24 hour reporting period, the country recorded just under 4000 new deaths. California has become the second state to confirm a case of the new, more infectious strain of covid-19 that was first identified in Britain. And speaking with California Governor Gavin Newsom, the leading US virologist Anthony Fauci, said it was likely the new US strain was much more widespread.

I'm not surprised that you have a case and likely more cases in California, and we likely will be seeing reports from other states. Colorado were the first to do that. I think you're going to start seeing it because if you have that much of a prominence of this. In the U.K., with all the travel not only directly to the United States but through other countries intermittently, like where you go from U.K. to France, France to the United States, et cetera, then Canada has cases.

So I don't think that the Californians should feel that this is something odd. This is something that's expected.

Anthony Falchi. And for a concise update on the latest news on the pandemic. Don't forget our Coronavirus Global Update podcast. Five minutes of the most important developments from around the world. Now to Africa.

And it became known as the Land Cruiser war after the modified and heavily armed pickup trucks that reached across the arid lands of the Darfur region of Sudan.

Rebel groups fought government forces and Arab militias, but it was the civilians who suffered. Tens of thousands died in the early 2000s.

Several million were displaced. A joint African Union and United Nations peacekeeping mission, known as UNAMID was sent in. And now, 13 years later, the troops are being pulled out. Our Africa correspondent Catherine Byaruhanga told me how the region has changed in the years since the peacekeepers were first deployed.

For a lot of our listeners, that might have these vivid images from the mid 2000s where you really saw rebel groups, militia on horseback riding through villages. You had millions of people who had been displaced, taken to to camps in Darfur and even outside of Sudan. Now, today, if you go into some of the big cities in the region, you have vibrant communities, you have a lot of trading business. You have business people from countries like China coming in to trade.

There has been a big transformation on the ground in Darfur. But despite that, you still have over a million people living in some 60 displacement camps. We still have reports of communities being attacked, people are being killed and even ethnic clashes between some communities.

We'll come back to that in a second, Catherine. But first, let's listen to what Ashraf Issa had to say. He's a UNAMID spokesperson. He's been talking about what the UN's role will be from now.

The UN is not leaving, only UNAMID is leaving, but the follow on mission and the UN country team and even the African Union, which was part of UNAMID, will the international community will continue to support the people of Sudan and the people of Darfur.

But, Catherine, I read a lot of people in Darfur going to be wary about, particularly the government now being responsible for security in Darfur.

Well, a lot of people have mixed feelings about the peacekeepers leaving. First of all, there had been some criticism as to whether they were doing enough to protect civilians. But there was always a sense that this was the bottom line, the main guarantee that they would have for their protection. Now, that's changing. It will be the government in Khartoum and the various security forces that will now protect civilians. But remember, for example, the rapid rapid support forces, the ISF is made up of forces that were actually involved in the fighting in Darfur, forces that were accused of carrying out atrocities.

Now, for the communities to trust that the security forces will now come in and protect them is going to be a major struggle.

And, Carol, what about the underlying problems that many people say actually led to the situation deteriorating in the first place?

Conflicts over water overland suggestions that the Arab population of that area was actively racist towards non Arabs.

Have any of those situations got better as time as the economic situation has improved? There has been a greater transformation for people in Darfur. But as we saw just a few days ago, there were ethnic clashes in South Darfur between communities over these same struggles, over resources of water and in some cases land as well. So those tensions still exist. What we've seen this year is that the most rebel group signed a peace deal with the government. There's hope that this this peace deal might work.

Others have other peace deals have been agreed. They haven't worked before. Maybe this one will.

Catherine Byaruhanga, that the man known as America's most prolific serial killer, Samuel Little, has died in a California hospital aged 80. He was serving three life sentences, some in Ponsford reports, for decades.

Samuel Little went on a killing spree. Most of his victims were vulnerable women, such as sex workers and drug addicts. But he was only. Caught in 2012 and then only convicted of three murders, which he denied, but two years ago, little opened up to a Texas Ranger and confessed to more than 90 killings. Going back to 1970, he drew pictures to help identify his victims. The FBI has since confirmed nearly 60 of those murders and it says all of the confessions are credible.

Simon Ponsford.

Still to come, according to my unwittingly logic, the hiding place is the stronger the Internet connection will be.

So I pick one tree that I was able to climb and try accessing the Internet using my smartphone, the student who sat her exams at the top of a tree in Borneo.

Well, 20/20 has been difficult worldwide for Venezuelan's, the pandemic has been yet another challenge for an economy already on its knees. Around 60 percent of people in the country now live in poverty, but there's also a growing elite that is living a very different life. Indeed, this report from Caracas is by our South America correspondent, Katie Watson.

In the lobby of the Hotel Humboldt, a pianist is practicing his repertoire. They're putting on a special festive dinner here, one that costs 100 dollars a head hotel. Humboldt is perched more than 2000 meters above sea level on an Avilla, a stunning mountain range that overlooks the capital, Caracas. Built in 1956 under dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. The glass structure was an ambitious project at a time of great oil wealth in the country.

Carlos is one of the hotel managers, but he that time trying to be he has the needs to show the world that he has power. And this building was part of this.

It operated as a hotel for just a few years before falling into disrepair. But it remained an icon, one that former President Hugo Chavez wanted to restore. And his successor, Nicolas Maduro, has been intent on finishing it off. But for 300 dollars a night in a desperately poor country, it feels like a folly.

The containment of the building is really difficult. I'm just trying to stand at the ready because obviously the average minimum wage is about two dollars.

Of course, we're a five star hotel. If you have a five star hotel in your country, you don't go into the first level of the society. You're going to the level of able to pay the.

Hotel is seen by many as a symbol of the new class of welfare, those who've benefited from government ties in recent years. But while there's this emerging class of haves, there are still plenty of have nots. On the outskirts of Caracas, I meet a former housekeeper, Yourka Gonzalez, helping out in a soup kitchen for children.

The bottom here, my boss couldn't keep me on because she was scared of the pandemic, she tells me. And on top of that, I'm a single mother. The worker didn't even earn two dollars a month. Now she gets nothing. But the soup kitchen allows her two year old daughter to eat one decent meal a day.

Down the lane, I mean, Jonathan, who relies on the free lunch for his three kids, Jonathan's wife Lila, left to find work in Colombia at the beginning of the year. They've not seen her since April.

Well, really, at the beginning, it was horrible because my youngest was 18 months old. She was still breastfeeding and she had to stop. Suddenly, the first month felt like a prison sentence in a military barracks. I didn't sleep at all.

Jonathan has had to learn the roles of both mom and dad for life.

It's also been hard. Everything done by WhatsApp, a photo here, a voice message there. But it's not the same.

And the way I live now is how thousands of thousands of Venezuelan families are living a life that feels a million miles away from the hotel, humbled but far more representative of the desperate challenges Venezuelans still find themselves in with little hope of anything changing.

For now, Katie Watson, the father of the UK's prime minister Boris Johnson, says that he's applying for French citizenship now that Britain has severed its ties with the European Union. Mark Saunders reports.

Stanley Johnson set out his credentials in French. His mother was born in France, he said, and her mother was totally French, as was her grandfather. He said he would always be European and that it was important to retain ties with the European Union. In some ways, it's no surprise he feels that way. He voted remain in 2016. He worked for the European Commission and he won a seat in the European Parliament when direct elections were first held in 1979.

But it shows an enduring attachment to the EU among those who never wanted to leave Mike Sanders.

We're going to tell you a story now of a student in Borneo who says her exams in a tree, Vivianna, Merseybeat, were struggling to find a good enough connection. In the end, the only place she could get a working Internet connection was at the top of a nearby tree. Her struggles make national news, but when my colleague Rahul Tandon got through to her on the Internet, it was raining heavily in our home village.

And would you believe it? Yeah, the connection wasn't good at all. So after several attempts, Vivianna recorded her answers and we edited them all together. It is actually ringing.

The Internet is not stable. My huge apologies for this. It's that that when the government issued mandatory lockdown of the whole country, so I had to go back to my village in a rural area in Sabha, where the Internet connection was neither good nor strong. Unfortunately, during that month, I had final examination in my local You Miss University Malaysia Sabor. So my university stated that the semester exam will be conducted online. Not only that, online classes and a lot of assignments should be done with specific due date.

I got very worried and stressed, so I took the initiative to find a good connection around my village. Nonetheless, all of them was very slow. So according to my unwittingly logic, the higher the places, the stronger the Internet connection will be. So I pick one tree that I was able to climb and try accessing the Internet using my smartphone. Well, to my surprise, I could access it. So from that day on, I started to find logs and would around my village typing and mailing it one another.

So the next day I climbed back the tree and and placed all the logs and woods on the tree as my floor. That is how I build it and use it on the day of my exam, sitting on top of a tree trying to do your exam.

Now we all get stressed enough as it is. That must have been even more stressful.

I didn't bring my laptop actually, because I thought the lockdown in my country will continue, put a lid so I get depressed. So that is when I came up with the idea of using only my smartphone to do all my assignments and reports. I downloaded the word application via Google Play and learn how to use it. So one problem fixed. I also use my smartphone to search for the online examination and also for the online classes. Actually, I'm a nature lover, so sitting on a tree is not a problem for me.

I felt calm and I felt safe and also bring mosquito net coils in order to prevent me from get bitten by mosquitoes.

What were people saying when you were up in the tree? What were the conversations afterwards? What were the looks you were getting?

Describe some of that for our listeners, I think it was a mixed reaction. Some people supported me and. Some did not. The people who supported me were mainly those who knew that rural area or remote village in Sabah had a problem with Internet connection, while those who did not support me were mainly saying that they thought because of me, people outside still think that we are still undeveloped and poor, which is may be true, but all I can say is that most people supported me because they wanted a change in the availability of Internet in rural places around Malaysia, even more so than on studying up a tree in Borneo.

A hugely popular Chinese environmentalist and social media star is believed to have died after disappearing nearly two weeks ago in the icy melt waters of northern Tibet. Peter Goffin reports.

They call him the glacier bro, the king of adventure, a 30 year old man who rose to stardom on Chinese social media, exploring the vast and otherworldly glaciers of Tibet.

Wang Xiang Jun's online videos resonate with an infectious enthusiasm was unknown whether he's conquering treacherous mountain peaks, slipping through shimmering ice caves or discovering billowing hot springs with his dog by his side.

But it was on one of these treks that it all seems to have come to a terrible end. Video shared on social media appears to show Mr. Wang slip and fall into a fast moving river at the base of a waterfall. Local officials have told Chinese media that the water is up to 20 meters deep there and Mr. Wang may have been swept under an ice floe. It would have been almost impossible for him to survive. They said it's a potentially tragic conclusion to a life spent inspiring love of the natural world.

Mr. Wang has visited more than 70 glaciers since 2013 and gained millions of fans around the globe. In 2019, he was invited to speak at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid, where he shared his observations on the shrinking ice sheets and the changing environment. Rescuers are still searching for Mr Wang, but a message posted by the administrators of his social media page seems to have given up hope.

My brother lives forever in his favorite waterfall, it says. For all of his life, he was obsessed with glaciers and gave his life to glaciers.

This is the best resting place for him. Peter Goffin, and that's all from us for now, but there will be an updated version of the Global News podcast later on. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics we've covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC dot com dot UK today, studio manager was Pete Luff, the producer Allison Davis.

And the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles. And until next time, goodbye.