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I'm Alex Ritson. And in the early hours of Saturday, the 20th of March, these are our main stories.

Europe confronts a third wave of coronavirus infections and a shortage of vaccines.

The U.S. and China conclude their first face to face top level meeting since Joe Biden entered the White House. Salmiya Soula, who Hassan becomes Tanzania's first female president.

Also in this podcast, after four months of fighting in Ethiopia, we hear from some of the people who fled the Tigray region.

We passed through a lot, we saw unburied bodies. We are lucky we are not dead.

And Bulgaria charges six Russian officials with spying. The covid crisis in Europe is getting worse and quickly. Cases are going up.

There's a shortage of the vaccines to prevent them and a lack of confidence among many populations in at least one of them. The AstraZeneca jab after reports of some patients developing blood clots. Some countries pause to dealing out the jobs as a result, but the European medical authorities say the vaccine should be used.

A message underlined by the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros outearned on Gabrielsson.

We understand that people may have had concerns about the safety of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. The question with any pharmaceutical or vaccine is whether the risk of taking it is greater or less than the risk of the disease it's meant to prevent or treat. In this case, there is no question covid-19 is a deadly disease and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine can prevent it.

Several European countries, including Germany, Italy, Spain and France, are resuming their rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but restrictions are coming back into force across the E.U. The German health minister, Jens Spahn, said this was because there isn't enough vaccine supply in Europe at the moment to stop a third wave of infection. You staying in town.

And that's been in constant volkan kind of vital. And increasing the number of cases may mean that we won't be able to announce further steps towards reopening in the coming weeks. Quite the opposite. We may have to go backwards. The best way to do this would be to agree for the same rules for the entire country.

After a meeting with regional leaders, the Chancellor Angela Merkel, said she was prepared to take the AstraZeneca jab herself.

I asked our Berlin correspondent, Jenny Hill, if that said something about the urgency of the situation.

Yes, I suppose in some ways it does. I mean, of course, the authorities here are keen to make sure that people trust the AstraZeneca vaccine. And you're quite right. Mrs Merkel has said that, yes, she will take it, but crucially, she's not going to jump the queue. She's not in two of the priority groups currently being vaccinated here in Germany. So she says she'll wait her turn. Thank you very much. And it's interesting, actually.

And as you know, Germany, Mrs Merkel, have rather defended their decision to temporarily suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine. And Mrs Merkel said that actually she doesn't genuinely believe that the reputation of that vaccine will have been greatly damaged by the decision to do so. She says that you've got to bear in mind that all of the vaccines currently in use in Europe have only been given conditional approval, that the authorities are continuing to monitor them because they're so new. So she says actually what Germany did should inspire trust amongst the population.

It shows, she said, that Germany has been transparent and hasn't tried to cover anything up or keep quiet about any potential concerns. Now, whether what Mrs Merkel says is is actually going to be borne out, we're going to have to wait and see.

And more generally, how is the vaccine rollout out in Germany going causes for concern still? Yes, I think so. I mean, just eight percent of the population have been given a first job. And if you look at the situation, her case numbers are now rising exponentially. Experts warning that having seen a real surge in infections and deaths, but infections which took intensive care capacity to the limit at Christmas, they're saying we might well see the same pattern emerging at around Easter and that in a population which is vastly unprotected.

So there is a huge amount of concern. The authorities desperate to speed up the vaccination program, but it's all dependent on supplies, on getting enough in from the manufacturers. And we don't really expect to see much of an increase in that kind of supply until the second quarter. So, you know, the authorities are very concerned. And actually tonight it looks as though Germany, the beginning of next week, will probably start to reimpose a lot of restrictions.

And in some places, Hamburg, Cologne today have already said that they're going to do so.

Jenny Hill in Berlin. Lockdown's have now come into force in 16 areas of France, including Paris, as the country battles a sharp rise in the number of cold cases. Despite fears about the spread of new variants, bookshops and hairdressers are among the businesses that will be allowed to stay open. Our Paris correspondent Lucy Williamson was out ahead of the deadline to assess the mood at this barber shop in central Paris.

Rafiq had a message for President Macron today. Mr. President, thank you for letting us stay open. Turnover has dropped by 70 percent. He says we'd go bankrupt if we had to close again this year.

After weeks of resisting lockdown, the government is bringing in new restrictions tonight for France's worst affected areas, including Paris. Non-essential shops will close, but hairdressers will stay open, along with bookshops, music shops and schools.

I think it's just better than yesterday thought in the barber's chair, customer Damien tells me the new restrictions are just window dressing to mask the real problem facing French leaders.

It's the only thing that I know is there is a vaccine. We just crop from vaccine. And this is only thing that is working on that. Maybe we will figure out something better in three months, but right now it is the only things that matter.

President Macron has been counting on France getting vaccinated to avoid another lockdown, but there have been fresh problems with vaccine supply. And a recent survey suggested that just 20 percent of the population here had confidence in the AstraZeneca jab. The new restrictions are due to push the bill for France's crisis to more than seven billion euros a month. Delays in vaccines can be. Offensive trust in them is priceless. Lucy Williamson, the first face to face meeting between the new U.S. administration and top Chinese officials, has ended in Anchorage, Alaska, where their top diplomats took a measure of each other engaging in what they called a frank and candid talks.

That's code for undiplomatic diplomacy.

Chinese officials accused the US of inciting countries to attack China, while the U.S. said China had arrived intent on grandstanding.

The US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said the two sides had been honest with each other.

We were also able to have a very candid conversation over these many hours on an expansive agenda on Iran, on North Korea, on Afghanistan, on climate. Our interests intersect on economics, on trade, on technology. And we told our counterparts that we will move forward on them in a way that fully protects and advances the interests of our workers and our businesses.

State Department correspondent Barbara Platt Ashiya is in Anchorage.

The secretary of State, Tony Blinken, as well as the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, came out. They both gave a very brief statement. They did not take any questions. But what they, in essence, said was we knew it was going to be tough. We came here to explain what our position was and to have a candid conversation, and that's what happened. So no comments really on that very acrimonious start. But saying we got what we came to do, they did say it wasn't a surprise that the Chinese were defensive because they had raised contentious issues like, for example, its treatment of the weaker Muslims in Xinjiang.

But they had also had a chance for a candid conversation on an expansive agenda. They said that on issues of economy and trade and technology, all of which they have some difficulties also with the Chinese, of course, they said those issues are being reviewed in conjunction with allies and they will be do not have the final say on that yet, which, of course, is important to the Chinese because they want the Americans, the right administration, to lift those tariffs that Donald Trump put in place and to lift sanctions and other restrictions that he put in place.

Mr. Blinken, talk a little bit about areas of cooperation where interest intersected, including things like North Korea and Iran. But he didn't really say whether they had managed to move forward on any of those issues. But he said the two things we wanted to do were to share a significant number of concerns. We did that. We wanted to lay out our own policy as policies and priorities. We did that, too. And despite what it looked like at the beginning, we achieved what we wanted.

That's their message.

Barbara Platania, Tanzania's new president, Salmiya Soula, who Hassan has been sworn in, becoming the first woman to lead the East African country, taking her oath of office on the Koran.

She called on the country to move forward together after the death of her divisive predecessor, John Magufuli. Africa correspondent Leila Naftali reports.

Two days after announcing the death of President Magufuli from heart disease in accordance with Tanzania's constitution, Samir Salu, who Hassan was sworn in as president, joining a small list of women who have led African countries wearing a bright red headscarf. She took the oath of office in front of a small crowd at the state house in Dar es Salaam, while Tanzania remains in mourning for her predecessor. She now has the task of deciding the way ahead for the country.

Mr. Magufuli was nicknamed The Bulldozer while leading the SCM party, and he prided himself on being a man of action. But in his final months, he refused to acknowledge or take precautions against the coronavirus pandemic.

So will his former vice president, Mr. Salmiya, be any different? The BBC's James Menendez asked Gregory Maddox, a history professor at Texas Southern University who has written extensively on Tanzania.

Oh, by all means. But he also represents a bit of consistency in the way CCMA has approached governing over the years that its been in power. She's very much a product of the institution of CCN and as such, her administration, whatever happens, will represent a turn away from the sort of personality politics that Margaret Pooley embodied throughout his term in office.

He was a covert denier, wasn't he? I mean, what do we know what her attitudes towards coronavirus.

So he has been very quiet in public about it. There is certainly more than a little bit of support in Tanzania for facing reality, both within the party and outside the party and, you know, moving in concert with the international community and addressing the pandemic. Currently, a number of cabinet members are reported to be down with covid. So it it's going to be a bit chaotic in this transition because of wouldn't. I mean, if there's a move towards a more cooperative attitude and a move to emphasize protecting the people of Tanzania, I guess the government could start with publishing statistics because I don't think there are any statistics.

Are there? I mean, not since May last year.

There are none. President Magufuli insisted that COGAT had been defeated in Tanzania and refused to publish statistics or cooperate with international agencies or even neighboring governments in measures to try and contain the pandemic.

Gregory Maddox speaking to the BBC's James Menendez. Still to come in this podcast, Goldman Sachs investment bankers complain of inhumane and abusive working conditions. The results paint a picture of declining mental and physical health due to the stresses of work. They suggest respondents averaged 95 hours of work a week and five hours sleep a night. And could chimpanzees join your next room call?

Nearly 200000 people have fled their homes in Ethiopia's Tigray region over the past four months amid brutal fighting between local forces and the central government. The BBC's Kalkadoon Egberto has gained rare access to the region to meet the families displaced by the violence.

Classrooms in a school in Surrey are packed, but not by students instead of school desks, old mattresses and clay pots are everywhere.

This is one of the town's makeshift displacement camps. These are victims of the conflict. Great. Forced to flee their homes and seek shelter wherever they can find safety.

When the conflict integrate reached to her hometown of Danja as a Democrat, Tom had to run for her life with her children and grandchildren.

People were walking through hills in the dark. We passed through a lot. We saw unburied bodies. We are lucky we are not dead. We give a little praise to God.

Across Europe, there are six major displacement camps in schools and a university campus now home to close to 200000 people that are in this conflict as a result of long simmering tensions between the great political elite and prime minister of Yemen.

Administration. When federal national elections were postponed due to the covid-19 pandemic last year, relationships between the two worsened to grow went forward anyways, calling the delay unconstitutional. In a matter of months, the angry rhetoric escalated into open conflict. The federal government accused the ground forces of attacking an army base, and it launched a military offensive. Thousands are estimated to have died so far, with many more lives broken.

Even now, four months after the fighting first began, people are still fleeing and arriving at the already overstretched camps when some aid is arriving, providing basic food and medical supplies. The people here say it's not enough. They're hungry and fearful for the future. The interim administration says there are some one point four million displaced people in multiple towns in cities like Shray across the region. Attention is the administration's spokesperson for the aid agencies were asking to be granted access.

Now they're allowed to come in and help now as they buy time. We expect them to give us all the necessary aid and rescue our people.

Many people in the camps have their own tale of loss and tragedy in Fort Worth millions. Their lives have been turned upside down and Ethiopia's divisions laid bare. No one knows when complete peace is going to return to the gray, but the scars of the conflict will last a lifetime.

Kalkadoon Ibota reporting from the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Bulgarian prosecutors say they've uncovered the biggest spy ring in the country's modern history.

They've arrested six officials from the Ministry of Defense and the intelligence service and charged them with spying for Russia. The announcement was made on state TV by the chief prosecutor, evangel, chief toxoplasmosis.

When we're here, together with the colleagues from the military prosecutor's office, to disclose information about an investigation of significant importance to the national security of Bulgaria and the national security of our partners, the EU, NATO and the USA, this is a case without precedent in our recent history. There's never been such a case since 1944.

Vitaly Shevchenko from the BBC Monitoring Service gave me more details about the charges facing the Bulgarian officials.

The alleged spy ring was led by a former Bulgarian intelligence intelligence officer whose wife has dual Russian Bulgarian nationality.

According to the prosecutors, she passed confidential information about Bulgaria and other NATO and EU member states to a staff member at the Russian embassy. The embassy in Sofia issued a statement earlier today warning against what it called as attempts to demonize Russia or drive a wedge between the two countries.

If this is true, why was Bulgaria targeted? Well, it's obviously a member of both NATO and the EU. So Russia's potential interest goes beyond the confines of that particular country. Bulgaria may be a member of the EU and NATO now, but during the Cold War, it was a communist state and a member of the Warsaw Pact, which is a defense alliance led by the Soviet Union. So the USSR armed and trained the Bulgarian army and many members of the Bulgarian military went to military colleges in the USSR.

And some argue that it would be unimaginable for Russia not to try and exploit this sort of resource in some way.

So the US and NATO and the EU will be watching this very closely. Is there any sense that information that was passed could could be damaging?

Well, it's not clear what exactly the Russian embassy may have got from the Bulgarians. And the Bulgarian prosecutor general, Juan Gesher, may have called the arrests unprecedented. But it's not like recent relations between the two states have been completely cloud free. Between October 2019 and the end of last year, five Russian diplomats and a technical assistant at the Russian embassy were expelled from Bulgaria over similar accusations. And there are also claims that Russia's military intelligence service, the EU, sent a squad of assassins to Bulgaria six years ago to poison an arms manufacturer called A Million Kebra.

But he survived.

Vitaly Shevchenko from BBC Monitoring.

The president of Afghanistan has decided that the only way to deal with the security situation in his country is to replace both the defense and interior ministers. It comes amid a step up in violence, with hundreds left dead in recent months and no progress in the peace talks. Our chief international correspondent is Liz Doucet.

It is a very drastic situation. It's something I discussed in quite a lot of detail on my last trip to Afghanistan, which was in February. And I discussed it on the. Your biggest concern of all is that there hasn't been a defense minister for many months now as the Afghan army fights the battle of its life, and that is because the defense minister, Asadullah Khalid, who barely survived a Taliban suicide attack on him in 2012, had to go back for more emergency treatment.

He's been getting hospital treatment in the United States for months and only came back briefly. And so the big question has been, why aren't they replacing him? You can't have this hole in your security structure. So they finally have found someone. And it's one of the rising stars, Gen. Yasin Zia, who's the general chief of staff. He's now the acting defense minister. The interior minister is quite different. Minister, are you and Robbie, we spend time with him on our last visit watching some of his special forces.

He's been widely regarded by some, heavily criticized by others. But obviously, President Ghani has decided he needs to top people, especially when, first of all, they're losing so many of their members of the security forces, both police and army. And there's concern that the command structure just isn't working as it should.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government and the Taliban have been speaking in Moscow.

Yes. And there's been a lot of discussion on on social media about this. People, Afghans in particular, looking at the photographs of, you know, the body language between the Taliban and members of the government meeting and what was supposed to be what's called the extended troika meeting. It's a regular meeting of the United States, Russia, China and Pakistan. But as the United States, President Biden's administration tries to accelerate the peace process, they invited leading members of the Taliban and representatives of the Afghan government and other parts of Afghan society to also come along.

And this is one of three big events that will happen in the months to come that the Biden administration hopes will help them to get their troops out of Afghanistan, if not by May 1st, not long after.

Is President Biden hinted this week at least, is that how tough is it in the world of high finance?

It's so tough that a group of First-Year employees at the Goldman Sachs Investment Bank in the United States carried out a survey which they said revealed inhumane and abusive working conditions. And they warned that they would be likely to leave within six months unless things changed. More from our business correspondent, Katie Austin.

The survey started circulating on social media on Wednesday. The BBC understands a group of 13 first year investment banking analysts in the US carried it out among themselves. The results paint a picture of declining mental and physical health due to the stresses of work. They suggest respondents averaged 95 hours of work a week and five hours sleep a night and that the majority felt they have been the victim of workplace abuse. The employees say they want to work a maximum of 80 hours a week with more realistic deadlines.

The analyst presented their findings to Goldman Sachs management in February. The bank said it had taken steps to address employee burnout, but acknowledged that a year into covid, people were understandably quite stretched.

Katie Austin Karen, who is a professor of anthropology and the author of Liquidated and Ethnography of Wall Street, she spoke to the BBC's Razia Iqbal about overwork in the finance industry.

Overwork is endemic to Wall Street culture, and it's tied to two key things. One is Wall Street's notion of what constitutes a superior worker in stark contradistinction to what one might call the average nine to five employee. But importantly, that culture of overwork is tied to another key cultural value, which is that of being real time with the markets. Banks like Goldman Sachs and senior bankers really pride themselves on being able to have market knowledge at their fingertips at a moment's notice.

But that often means a lot of pressure to do that work in order for the senior bankers and the larger bank to convey that they have real time market knowledge.

In some cases, they describe themselves as victims of workplace abuse. That's pretty strong.

Absolutely. So many of the junior bankers really are beholden to the timeframes and the schedules of senior bankers. So, for example, in order for a senior banker to actually maintain a regular work time, then the junior bankers are the ones working throughout the night after nine p.m. to five a.m. in order to crunch the numbers, create the slide decks, make the PowerPoint presentations so that the senior bankers will have it at their fingertips during the workday.

Karen Ho speaking to Razia Iqbal after a year of socially distanced socializing and. Working from home, even the least tech savvy among us are starting to become experts at making video calls. In fact, chimpanzees at a pair of Czech zoos are starting to get the hang of it to some Dagestani reports.

It's feeding time at that word Karlov, a safari park. And these chimps are enjoying their meal with some online company to keep these social animals entertained. Keepers set up big screens to link them up with potential friends in another zoo on the other side of the country. At first, they were reluctant to come closer to the screens, but now they have gotten used to them. They have even adopted some human behaviors, such as grabbing goodies to chew on while watching the action.

There isn't going to be much chance for human visitors entertaining the chimps until the zoo can open. But in the meantime, they are really enjoying watching one another and they are not as fed up with zoo meetings as we are.

Some Dagestani without report, finally, as we record this podcast, were seeing pictures of a volcanic eruption coming into the BBC from Iceland, some 40 kilometres from the capital city, Reykjavik. This follows thousands of small earthquakes in the area. In recent weeks. The country's main airport has been closed to both incoming and outgoing flights. A helicopter with scientific personnel has been scrambled to assess the extent of the eruption.

And that's all from us for now. But there'll be an updated version of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC Seo Dot UK. I'm Alex Ritson.

The producer was Peter Goffin, the studio manager, Mike Utley, and the editor Karen Martin. Until next time. Goodbye.