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

I'm Gareth Barlow. And in the early hours of Friday, the 25th of December, these are our main stories. After months of talks and torturous last minute negotiations, the European Union and Britain have agreed a free trade deal setting out their post Brexit relationship. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said it delivered everything the British public was promised. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said now was the time to leave Brexit behind.

In other news, the state media in Ethiopia say the army has killed dozens of militants a day after a massacre of ethnic groups in the west of the country.

Also in this podcast, when I think about quiz hindsight, I really don't know how to think about myself, whether this is like a moment of, wow, I was very professional or I was someone who lost a human feeling.

The BBC journalist who continued reporting on the massive explosion in Beirut while her brother in law lay fighting for his life in intensive care.

On June the twenty third 2016, the British people voted narrowly to leave the European Union and now, after more than four decades of membership, that has become a reality. The UK and the EU have agreed a deal to govern their future trading relationship. The deal announced by the president of the European Commission s Levander Lion, marked the start of something here.

So we have finally found an agreement. It was a long and winding road, but we have got a good deal to show for it. It is fair, it is a balanced deal and it is the right and responsible thing to do for both sides. Competition and our single market will be fair and remain so. The EU rules and standards will be respected. We have effective tools to react if fair competition is distorted and impacts our trade. Secondly. We will continue cooperating with the U.K. in all areas of mutual interest, for example, in the field of climate change, energy security and transport.

Together, we still achieve more than we do apart across the channel in Downing Street, the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, responded at times, at least in kind.

I think this deal means a new stability and a new certainty in what has sometimes been a fractious and difficult relationship. We will be your friend. Your ally, your supporter. And indeed, never let it be forgotten, your number one market, because although we have left the EU, this country will remain culturally, emotionally, historically, strategically, geologically. Attached to Europe? Well, that's the view of the politicians, but it was, of course, the people that made the decision for the UK to leave the European Union, and this was the response of people on the streets of London.

It's a compromise. It had to happen. It would have been totally ridiculous if it hadn't. So I hope they've done something sensible.

I'm really pleased with that. How do you fly at the end of the tunnel? We've had a terrible year and I get some really good news, but it's better than no deal. But still all of the disadvantages of leaving the European Union. So it's making the best of a bad job.

So what to make of it all? Is it possible to say yet he's come out on top? A question for our Brussels correspondent, Kevin Connolly.

I don't think you hear anybody from the European institutions talking in terms of winning and losing. And the essential European view of this common to most politicians within the European Union is that Brexit is a bit of a tragedy and that this negotiation has been about mitigating the worst consequences of it, making the best of a bad job, if you like. I thought that sort of underline she did rather well. I think a capturing a sense of occasion from the European point of view without making it about winning and losing.

When she said this is about the start of a new relationship with the United Kingdom, which remains a trusted partner, a long term ally, you know, a country with whom the European Union shares values, you know, a subtle reaching out, I suppose, to people listening in the United Kingdom and a sense that, well, they would have much preferred, of course, the UK to remain in the European Union.

That has not happened and that this is the beginning of a new relationship and is from the EU's point of view, the next best thing for Boris Johnson did make some characteristically booster ish noises at his news conference about how great the deal was for Britain.

Yes, at times when you were listening to him, one could almost imagine that the referendum campaign was still underway way rather than four and a half years behind us, because his central message was, look, we promised to take back control of our laws, our borders and our money in 2016.

And that is what we are delivering now. Of course, if you look at it carefully, it's not really that in the sense that vote leave and promise that you would have exactly the same benefits as membership of the single market if you voted to leave as if you stayed in. But for me, the interesting thing now is that Brexit is no longer this thing that's about to happen, this theoretical thing, it's something that's real. And so now we're going to find out whether Mr Johnson and leave us.

He talks about the sunlit uplands were correct or whether the Romanians who warned of this being one of the biggest strategic mistakes that Britain had made since the Second World War are right. And again, echoing back to the referendum, Mr Johnson made this sort of argument that hopefully this would be the beginning of a of a sort of a new friendship between the UK and the European Union and that the EU would come to the view eventually that maybe it was better off without a member who'd never been entirely comfortable with being in the club.

Question for both of you. This deal, which is 2000 pages long, still has to be ratified both in Europe and by the British Parliament before the end of the year. Are there any banana skins that could yet upend things? Rob first and then Kevin?

I don't think so, really. I think the majority of the Conservative Party will go along with that and will so will the main opposition Labour Party, just because it's so against no deal. I think the bigger question here in the UK is, is not really about the implementation or the political approval of the deal. The big question is, will this mark the moment at which divisions in the UK, astonishing divisions in the UK over Brexit begin to heal?

Or is it a moment where they possibly deepen? And again, I think that will probably depend on economics. If there is a big economic shock, then maybe the rancour between relievers and Romanies will continue. If perhaps those forecasts of economic dislocation in the end, if reality is not so severe or if any changes are more gentle, then maybe, just maybe those divisions can begin to heal in this country.

The European Parliament does have to ratify it, but I think it speaks volumes that that ratification is going to come retrospectively. It's really impossible to imagine the European Parliament voting this down and, you know, effectively going for no deal when, you know, Michel Barnier, the European Union chief negotiator, has kept the member states, kept the parliament briefed all along. So at least in theory, when they sit down and read this document, they shouldn't find anything in it that will really surprise them.

The acid test for this deal will in many ways be its economic. Impact how it affects businesses and by extension, the well-being of ordinary people. Our economics correspondent Andrew Walker joins us.

Andrew, how soon will it be apparent just how good this deal is?

Having dealt with tariffs? We are still going to be looking at a situation in which businesses that are exporting are going to have to deal with a lot of new bureaucratic barriers demonstrating that their products are compliant with the regulatory arrangements on their in the market they're exporting to. So British stuff going into Europe and and the other way around. And I think we'll be told fairly quickly if the extent to which businesses are finding this a significant difficulty and most economists were thinking this is going to raise the cost of doing trade across the border and that there will therefore be as a result, less of it will probably in the very short term, I imagine there will be significant disruption with, for example, truck drivers not having all the necessary documents and and businesses simply not knowing, not really understanding at first what they need to do.

But once we've got through those inevitable teething troubles, there will be some some continuing additional costs that businesses faced. And we'll get to know get a flavor of how serious they are for businesses fairly quickly. The longer term picture of how this affects economic growth, particularly in Britain, less so, but not completely negligible in in the European Union. That takes much longer. And we're looking at a process of several years in which economic growth would be a bit slower than most economists would tell you than it would otherwise have been.

And frankly, when there are other things going on, most obviously the pandemic, it's not necessarily going to be an easy matter to disentangle what aspect of economic performance is due to what underlying cause.

And the UK services sector is largely thought to account for 80 percent of the UK economy. And it's largely not covered, isn't it?

Well, we haven't seen the detail, but that is certainly the expectation and in particular the financial services sector, an area where Britain has a and absolutely global position as a major exporter, has benefited from easy access to to customers in the European Union. That is probably going to be dependent on decisions taken by the European Commission, unilateral decisions about whether Britain's regulatory arrangements are equivalent to use the technical term in EU law to the kind of protection that's provided to users in the EU.

So, yeah, that is certainly a very important gap in the coverage that matters to many British businesses.

Rob, what are the implications for the future of the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

I don't think there's any doubt that it's going to put great strains on the union with Scotland already saying Scottish nationalists, politicians saying that they they think this deal means that the only future for them is to be independent and as a member of the European Union. And of course, that has raised all sorts of issues in Northern Ireland, where the other part of the UK, where a majority of people voted to remain in the EU, Rob Watson.

And before that, Andrew Walker and Kevin Connolly speaking to the BBC's Alex Ritson.

Still to come on the podcast on the BBC, I haven't always been able to speak plainly and from the heart, so I'm grateful to Channel four for giving me the opportunity to say whatever I like without anyone putting words in my mouth.

The fake queen created, apparently to expose fake news, but triggering outrage among some on social media and military authorities in Ethiopia say they've killed 42 armed men believed to be involved in the massacre of ethnic groups in the western state of Benesch Jamus.

Dozens of people died in the attack against ethnic Amhara and Agel minorities. On Wednesday, Ethiopia's prime minister, Abu Ahmed, visited the region the day before the attack to meet with locals to discuss the resurgence in violence dangled. Micheli is chairman of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission set up by the government.

These are armed groups who are operating from the Bushes. They launch an attack and retreat back to the bushes and come back to attack again. And he has been cut in quite a while now. So some kind of law and order measure to bring perpetrators to justice is a necessary response.

Our reporter Kalkadoon Pubertal is following developments from the capital, Addis Ababa.

This is the latest bout of violence in Ethiopia's restive state of Bengal. That's the western state. The latest incident, we understand, happened yesterday around dawn and during which armored mean unknown assailants attacked. And so far, we know that at least 100 people were killed, among them were children. Rights groups are saying that many of those killed were targeted due to their ethnicity. Since September, there have been at least four similar attacks in which scores were killed.

And this latest incident happened a day after the prime minister, Abdulhamid, visited those areas in order to address this issue of recurrent violence. And this follows on from the conflict in TIKRAI.

Indeed, this is just going to be yet another headache for the federal government and for the prime minister. In a tweet earlier today, he tried to associate this violence with what's happening in the north, in the northern Tigre. As you know, there have been military confrontations last month in which hundreds, if not thousands, are believed to have been killed and more than 50000 have fled their homes to Sudan. And the prime minister is saying that this latest round of violence is an attempt by enemies to distract the government from finishing what it has started.

He, of course, has presented any evidence, but that's what he said. And local authorities have been saying that antipathies, elements, that's what they call them, were behind these attacks. And today that the army was deployed in that area and we understand there have been engaged in some sort of fighting. They said that 42 armed people who they said were behind those attacks have been killed. They also say that they've seized different weapons, including guns and bows and things like that.

This increasingly suggests that the Egyptian government is not in control in the way that it used to be.

Indeed, yes. Ethiopia, which is the second most populous nation in Africa and the largest country in the Horn of Africa region, used to be known for its stability and for its security for decades, particularly for the past two decades. It's been a very important country in this area in the fight against terrorism and also trying to stabilize the area in Somalia and in South Sudan as well as in Sudan. But now it seems that it's grappling with its own instability and its own issues of insecurity.

Kalkadoon Lieberthal speaking with my colleague Alex Ritson. On the fourth of August this year, a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate stored at the port in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, caught fire and exploded. At least 200 people were killed, 6000 were injured and an estimated 300000 left homeless. It was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts ever recorded. But what do you do when you have to report on such a catastrophe but also live through it as a family? Karine Tobei reports for the BBC from Beirut.

Just after the explosion, she received a phone call from her sister. Nicole Nichols husband was missing, believed injured by the blast. But Karim didn't ask Nicole about this because a professional site kicked in.

I sent an e-mail to London breaking a huge explosion heard in Beirut and immediately the work mode kicked in. Now, when I think about it with hindsight, I really don't know how to think about myself. What is this is like a moment of, wow, I was very professional. I was someone who lost her human feeling. And later on we discovered that that was a real catastrophe for her, a disaster that might have changed her life forever. This is where questions started to pop in my mind.

How could it they asked her how she was doing and we decided that the best place to be was a hospital.

At that point, I knew that they were looking for my brother in law because someone took him to a hospital, but they did not know which hospital it was. I rushed immediately to the emergency. They had the main gate shots and people from outside shouting names. They were just giving names to the hospital staff just to make sure whether this thing was ready in that hospital or not, because injured people were just rushed to hospitals without any kind of, you know, the regular formalities, like some sort of a miracle.

We managed the team mean the producer and the cameraman to find each other amid the chaos. And at that point, I started immediately like live, and I would never go through what we went through that night, the blood everywhere, even at some point as I was talking, there were doctors coming and putting bodies on the floor and, you know, making signs with their hands. That's basically just one is dead move. Got to the second person maybe can save another one.

And all of this was just happening in front of me. At some point. I thought that Datchet. And so so my producer told me now we can have a break for ten minutes and I found out that they finally were able to locate my brother and I knew that my sister was on the fourth floor because my my brother in law was admitted to the ICU. He had he had been knocked over by the explosion. And we think he was we think that he was propelled from the balcony into the dining room and there was a very heavy door that fell.

And that's basically back then they told her he has 24 to 48 hours so we can know if he will be alive or not. And then we can start assessing whether this person I mean, the damage has had and whether he will ever be the person we know.

And she was on the first floor and I was on the ground floor. And at that moment when my producer told me, you have a break, I rushed to the first floor and they told me she just left. I couldn't see her, but they told me, just pray. I went down again right on time for the 10 o'clock news I got home around, I think must be one o'clock. I fell on the floor and collapsed and I started crying.

My brother in, though, has recovered to a very large extent. I think he was among the lucky unlucky people. So he was unlucky to be so seriously injured, but he was lucky to make it out alive.

Kareen, be in Beirut. My son to you has been sworn in as the first female president of the Eastern European state of Moldova. More details from Steve Rosenberg. At a ceremony in the capital Kishinev, she took the oath of office and set out her priorities, then to look back on track.

They are uniting the country, boosting the economy, tackling corruption. President Sandu also favors closer ties with the European Union, and she wants Russia to withdraw its troops from her country, from the breakaway region of Transdniestria.

Her supporters were on the streets to congratulate her, but reforming Moldova won't be easy. It's one of the poorest countries in Europe. Corruption is deeply rooted and the president has limited powers for now in parliament. It's President Sanders opponents who hold a slim majority and they favor closer links with Moscow.

Steve Rosenberg reporting. Joe Biden will bring many changes to the White House when he replaces Donald Trump, including the number of animals Mr. Trump has none. He was the first US president in more than a century not to have a pets of any kind. That was a break with a time honored tradition that's captivated Americans, as Barbara Petrushka reports.

The Obamas famously released a video of their two dogs frolicking on the White House lawn, but it's been a while since America fell in love with presidential pets. That's about to change. Sunny and Bo make way for Major and champ Biden.

He's a talker. Watch this. Hey, champ, you don't play golf. Well, where's the golf course?

The German shepherds will join the ranks of White House animals, celebrities, some of them rather unconventional.

I asked the resident historian of the Presidential Pet Museum, Andrew Hagger, which had been the strangest.

There's a lot of competition for that. There was Rebecca, the raccoon given to Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace, as a potential Thanksgiving meal.

They decided not to eat her and kept her as a pet instead.

Not to mention the tiger cubs gifted to the eighth president, Martin Van Buren, by the Sultan of Oman.

Congress made him send them to a zoo, partially, I think, because if you were a congressperson going to visit the president, just sitting there petting his tiger cub, that's pretty intimidating.

Then there was Josiah the Badger given to Theodore Roosevelt by a little girl at a campaign stop.

He wrote a letter home to his son and said, you know, Kermit, I've just received a badger from a little girl. And it bit me how wonderful. You know, he was very excited.

Teddy Roosevelt in particular stands out as an animal lover. His White House was practically a zoo.

How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn without the Donald Trump stands out as that rare presidential breed uncomfortable with dogs?

Sort of not for I don't know, just I don't feel good. Feels a little phony. Phony to me. Fair enough.

It wasn't his brand. Although a dog can help politicians win support. Richard Nixon, for instance, he used his dog Checkers, to lighten the mood while responding to accusations of misusing political donations.

We did get something we'll get after the election. It was a little cocker spaniel dog. And, you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog. And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep that so-called Checkers speech saved Nixon's political career.

That's Tom Whalen, a presidential historian. But again, it also show which was rare for Nixon, at least publicly, a degree of empathy and empathy wins over voters, wins political support because it shows I'm one of you United States answer to what Adlai Stevenson termed Soviet blackmail.

In Cuba, a pet could also influence a president's response to a crisis, especially a Cold War puppy. Pushing was a gift from Nikita Khrushchev to the Kennedys. Andrew Hagger likes to think that factored into JFK's caution during the Cuban missile crisis over Russian nuclear weapons.

It is hard if somebody gives you a puppy. It's hard to wrap your mind around the idea of that person being evil or that person lacking humanity or, you know, wanting to drop a nuclear bomb on that person. So.

So that averted, I don't know, World War three yet. It's quite possible that Plushenko is the reason that we're sitting here talking in my backyard right now.

Andrew Hagger ending that report by Barbara Platzer. Every year since her coronation, Queen Elizabeth has delivered a Christmas message to the UK and Commonwealth on the BBC. And 2020 will be no different, except this year she'll have a competitor herself. Well, kind of.

Charlotte Gallagher explains on the BBC. I haven't always been able to speak plainly and from the heart, so I'm grateful to Channel four for giving me the opportunity to say whatever I like without anyone putting words in my mouth.

It sounds like the queen. It certainly looks like the queen, but it's definitely not the queen. In fact, it's the deep faith created by the British broadcaster Channel four. Oh, and if you're Canadian, you might want to cover your ears.

20/20 has been a challenging year for us all. One thing that has sustained many of us is our families, which is why I was so saddened by the departure of Harry and Meghan. There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they prefer the company of Canadians famously discreet.

You could never imagine the Queen saying that or insulting an entire nation. The message also includes references to her son, Prince Andrew, and his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The deep fake queen also gives a tick tock dance challenge. Ego, not very regal. Channel four says it created the digital doppelganger to give a stark warning about fake news and the spread of misinformation. Buckingham Palace hasn't commented, but some social media users aren't happy, calling it disrespectful and offensive.

Deep fakes are when videos and. Images are manipulated to make the viewer think a public figure is saying something they're not, Channel four may be honest about the fake queen, but other creators intend to manipulate, especially when it comes to politics and elections. Some Hollywood stars, mainly women, have also been targeted with deep fake technology, making them look like they appeared in pornographic films. Deep fakes are now easier to make, meaning there are more of them.

They're not going anywhere. So the question now is how to tap companies and social media firms respond and evolve.

With that report, a very real Charlotte Gallagher. If you're a regular listener to the Global News podcast, you'll probably have relied as much as we have on one man to help make sense of Britain's relationship with Europe. The BBC's Rob Watson has been watching and waiting literally decades for this moment. Here, then, are his thoughts, what undoubtedly has been a momentous day for the UK.

This is undoubtedly an historic moment for the UK and the EU. And in a small way, for me it was, yes, as a very young journalist in the early 1990s, I first reported to World Service listeners on a then conservative government led by John Major. Remember him struggling to persuade his own party to support the treaty that turned the European Economic Community into the European Union, committed to ever closer political and economic cooperation. Thirty years on, I'm now in my 50s and the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party that made John Major's life hell is now in charge and has led Britain on a very different path out of that ever closer union.

And a strange irony, I'm not sure that most people in the UK were that interested in the European Union until the referendum in 2016, which is now divided this country like no other issue since the 17th century, tapping into as it has citizens' feelings about identity, immigration and globalisation. Now, whether those divisions will heal or get worse probably depends on what happens with the economy. If there is no obvious economic hit, maybe, just maybe, the visceral differences and dislike between remainer and leave will slowly fade.

Who knows? Certainly this is the point at which Brexit goes from being theoretical to being real. One final thought. If Brexit has caused terrible divisions at home, it has also damaged Brand UK abroad. A country once seen as one of the most stable and saner countries in Europe has seemed anything but to the watching world. So there is a massive repair job ahead at home and abroad. As for me, I see this as another seminal moment in Britain's long and complex history with the European mainland.

And this may be not the last West I report on before I hang up my microphone. Rob Watson.

And that's all from us for now, but do keep an ear out for our annual happy podcast, all the best bits of the year, and it might have felt as though 20/20 was a little bleak. But don't worry, we've got stories that will surely make you smile. If you want to comment on this edition or the topics we've covered in it, do send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC Dichato, U.K.. The studio manager is Stuart Willie.

The producer was Alison Davies and the editor Karen Martin. I'm Gareth Barlow. Until next time. Goodbye.