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

I'm Jonathan Savage, and in the early hours of Saturday, the 19th of December, these are our main stories, a glimmer of hope for people in the world's poorest nations as the World Health Organization secures two billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

With today's news, the light at the end of the tunnel has grown a little bit brighter. But we are not there yet and we will only get together in the US.

Vice President Mike Pence is injected with the Pfizer biotech vaccine live on television in an effort to bolster confidence in the national rollout of jobs.

I didn't feel a thing. Well done. And we hear from the doctor in San Francisco who says they're running out of beds in intensive care units to treat coronavirus admissions.

Also in this podcast, a suicide attack kills at least 10 people at a stadium in Somalia shortly before the prime minister was due to speak there. And dreadful graphics, frustrating glitches. Why one of the most eagerly awaited video games of recent years, Cyberpunk 2077, has been withdrawn from Sony's PlayStation console.

It's hugely dramatic. This hasn't happened before. A title with this one segmentation behind the title of this big has never, ever been pulled off. This time of year.

Even as many developing countries in the West have been buying up vaccines, there's been concern that poor and low income countries could be left behind. So now some welcome news.

The World Health Organization has announced that it has secured agreements for two billion doses of vaccine for its Kovács initiative to ensure the vaccines are distributed fairly around the world. The head of the Tedros Adhanom Gabriel said it was a milestone in global health, but said there was still work to be done.

This is a time for taking comfort that the end of the pandemic is inside, but taking care that we do not let down our guard. We are all responsible for taking the measures to keep ourselves and each other safe, including during this holiday season. With today's news, the light at the end of the tunnel has grown a little bit brighter, but we are not there yet and we will only get there together.

I found out more from our global health correspondent, Naomi Grimley. The Kovács alliance has managed to double the access that its got to vaccines for next year to two billion Dice's. So this includes 170 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, 500 million doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, or C 200 million doses of the Sanofi GSK vaccine, and also a big deal with the Serum Institute in India, which will produce either AstraZeneca or Novavax vaccine. They will start being rolled out from the first quarter of next year.

One stumbling block, though, is that even the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine has yet to be approved, even in the UK or the US. So it needs to be approved by big regulators first before the show will sanction it. And then, of course, there's the logistics of rolling it out. UNICEF is going to get involved because of all their history with childhood vaccinations. They're installing, for example, 70000 fridges in countries which are vulnerable or fragile states to help with the distribution of these vaccines.

What more does the Kovács initiative see they need in order to properly put a dent in this pandemic?

Well, there's still a big shortfall in their funding and they think they need another six point eight billion US dollars for the next year. The other thing to stress, of course, and they are a bit more diplomatic on this front, but it's pretty obvious they want to see more of it is interaction from other vaccine makers that are already approved. So I'm talking here about Pfizer and Moderna, which is expecting approval in the US very shortly. They are not yet part of the Kovács facility.

And of course, that means that low and middle income countries will not have access to those leading vaccines.

We heard recently how many wealthy countries have bought far more vaccine than they actually need to vaccinate their population. How does that play into what Corvax is trying to do?

That's a big problem and it's something that countries like the US, the UK, the EU, Canada have all been culprits of doing of overbuying to spread their bets so that they don't leave their own populations unvaccinated. And so, interestingly, one thing that the Kovács facility has done today is to publish guidelines for how those extra doses might be shared around once. These countries have fully protected their own populations, Naomi grimly. Well, one person who has already received their first job of an approved coronavirus vaccine is the US vice president, Mike Pence, who was vaccinated live on television on Friday as part of efforts to build confidence in America's mass immunization program.

Mr. Pence insisted the Pfizer biotech job was safe and effective. Another vaccine developed by the U.S. for Moderna is expected to be approved by American regulators soon. Our North America correspondent Nick Bryant sent this report. I didn't feel a thing.

Well done. Vice President Mike Pence, moments after being given the vaccination in an event staged at the White House with a backdrop reading Safe and Secure that was broadcast live on American Breakfast television. Mr. Pence is headed up the Trump administration's coronavirus task force. And this very public shot in the arm was intended to reassure Americans who are skeptical about the vaccine, which is being rolled out under a government scheme labeled Operation Warp Speed. He was joined by the surgeon general, Jerome Adams, an African-American who spoke of the importance of people of color getting access to the vaccine.

This made for television moment, comes at an awful time in America's coronavirus outbreak, when more than 3000 people are regularly dying each day. There was a noticeable absentee from this White House event. The president, Donald Trump, who's adopted a low profile over the rollout, consumed with contesting his clear-cut defeat in the presidential election. He said surprisingly little about the vaccine, even though it was his administration that helped oversee its rapid development and deployment. He's been urged to take the vaccine even though he's had covid-19, but he hasn't indicated whether or not he'll do so.

Nick Bryant, let's stay in the US, which, despite the hopes surrounding the vaccine rollout, still has the highest number of deaths from coronavirus in the world. And California is now the center of the disease in America, recording a quarter of a million cases in a single week. Hospital admissions are surging to the point that availability of beds and intensive care units is set to be down to three percent statewide. Dr. Peter Qinghong is an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.

He's been speaking to Gillian Marshall.

Things are very bleak in San Francisco. People are walking around in the hospital very, you know, in a daze almost. It's eerily quiet. People are hunkering down. They're a little bit exhausted from the year, from what's to come as we fill our hospitals. I mean, right now we are more than five times the way we were at the beginning of October. And we're watching the rest of the where, like the last man standing where the safe house right now.

And I think the writing is on the wall. We expect that our beds will be filled and will be exceeding our capacity, certainly after Christmas.

So the surge in hospital admissions you're seeing at the moment is is after Thanksgiving and you're expecting another surge after Christmas, are you?

Yes, we are definitely expecting another surge. People have deferred seeing relatives across the country for many, many months. This is a time of year when we've traditionally had family reunions. And I'm afraid that, you know, even with a shelter in place that is really non-enforceable in our culture, that people continue to travel. During Thanksgiving, when we had guidance against travel, more than a million Americans traveled. So I assume that will be the case as well.

And again, stretching the hospital's capacity, stretching the hospital's capacity.

Does that mean at the moment you still have enough beds to treat patients who are ill?

And more importantly, perhaps, do you still have enough beds in intensive care units to treat those who are seriously ill?

Right now we have beds, but they are declining rapidly. So the rate of decrease of the beds is really alarming. Sure, there's been some winters where our beds have been filled because of influenza or other story illnesses during the wintertime, but I've never really seen such decline. And that's persistent and continual as what we're seeing now. And many parts of our neighboring counties are already filled with zero percent capacity. And what we've traditionally done in California and in the U.S. in general is we distribute patients when there's room in one place, you take somebody else's patients.

And we've done that for other parts in California during more regional surgeries. But now, because their surges are so widespread, there's very little give in the system.

Vaccinations, they are under way now in California, but from. What you're saying that's that's coming too late, yes, too little, too late, and it's really a trickle of a rollout rather than the floodgates of vaccinations just really due to the numbers game. It's estimated that by the end of December, California may get two million doses, but there are two point four million health care workers. It will have a dent in keeping health care workers healthy during this time.

But we have no vaccination against burnout. We have no vaccination against mental fatigue. And that's what I'm worried about.

Do you think Christmas should be canceled in California?

Yes, I'm a big Christmas fan. I love family. I love the foods of my homeland. But this is the year that we have to really stay mobile, restrict our movements. Otherwise, we're continuing to be in more dire straits. I was going to say we're going to be in dire straits, but we are already in dire straits.

Dr. Peter Qinghong next to Latin America.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, but production is now at its lowest level since the 1930s, while President Nicolas Maduro blames U.S. sanctions on the oil industry. The truth is more complicated than that. The government is unable to provide the country's population with fuel, and that is taking its toll on millions of Venezuelans. Our South America correspondent Katie Watson reports from the Venezuelan coastal state of Karabo.

Dawn has just broken apart and there will be a white sandy beach on the Caribbean coast. It's just gone 6:00 a.m. and the fishermen are cooking up breakfast fried fish, of course, and boiled cassava, a couple of teams have gone out to empty the nets from overnight.

Now, a short while later, they're back offloading several boxes of red snapper and bonito.

But as they start scraping the scales off and chopping it up to sound, they tell me they're disappointed.

I'll be lucky if they get three dollars each from this hole because I'm looking for of these.

Gray is one of the fishermen. He says they'd head back out to see if they could, but their big problem is fuel. They can't get hold of it.

I mean, they left over there later and we were told the fuel was burning out in February. This is an oil rich country. How is that possible? We thought we didn't listen, but the fuel shortages have started and then the pandemic hit. We couldn't get anything.

And we have to start treating fuel for food, gasoline at any time soon enough. Camille.

An hour along the coast is Al Falletta refinery, it's spewing thick black smoke into the air and the facilities look tired after years of underinvestment and mismanagement. Plus added pressure from U.S. sanctions mean production is about a third of what it should be. And the lack of fuel has led to immensely long queues outside petrol stations across Venezuela. This is a country whose people used to have petrol on tap and who are used to paying next to nothing for it. Now they're paying international prices, but even that doesn't guarantee a tank of petrol.

Everywhere you go, you can see hundreds of cars backed up in a line outside petrol stations. People sat for hours, sometimes days and nights sleeping in the car just so they can fill up to.

Five hours in and this is a good day, Manuel tells me as he sits outside a station in Valencia. He can't look at me in the eye. He's so angry as well as devastated about what his life has come to this.

It's a disaster. The good times have gone. What hope is there? I'm about to turn 80 and I have no life further up the line.

Betsy is another exasperated driver. She sat in her car with several snacks in the passenger seat of a bicycle shirt that in such an oil rich country, the government has finished the industry off.

It's not just petrol either. I can hide from this sweating. I want to shower and there is no water, then no electricity, etc..

I all had to play Meckering Suburban.

Later in the day, I meet someone, not his real name. He doesn't want to be identified, that ringing you can hear is the sound of a pipe decanting petrol from a jerrycan into a fuel tank. One used to work for a multinational company. Now he sits in queues to fill up his tank and then sells it on the black market for twice the price. But he has other ways of finding fuel to work, but only when we've never lived through something like this.

He says every day is about survival. The military has been selling him contraband fuel this past year to have access to everything. He says they are the ones in control. Back at the beach, the fishermen tell me the same thing police, military, anyone with special access. It's a precious commodity now in Venezuela and corruption is rife. People have to rely on it to carry on with their lives.

Katie Watson, you're listening to the Global News podcast. Still to come, Paul McCartney's surprise new album and how he needed no help from his friends in the studio was really helpful.

You're able to keep your mind off this whole plague that was set in the world and get your head into music. Now to Somalia, where there's been another suicide attack, this time in the city of Galkayo at a stadium just before the prime minister was due to make a speech, there are Africa regional editor Mary Harper told me more about what seems to have happened is that shortly before the Somali prime minister, Mohamed Hussein Rubbly and the regional president were due to speak at the stadium, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance, killing at least 10 people.

Some reports are talking about as many as 20, including at least three senior military officials, some of whom had made their names fighting al-Shabab and al-Shabab. The Islamist militant group said that it had carried out this attack and that the reason why it had done it was to target the prime minister, even though he was apparently not in the stadium at the time, so has not been injured in any way.

Is al-Shabab intensifying its terror in the country or is that pretty consistent at the moment?

It's pretty consistent. al-Shabab doesn't occupy very many towns and cities like it used to, but it still controls huge areas of the country. If you look at a map of Somalia, most of the southern and central regions are controlled by al-Shabaab. And then it also carries out regular attacks, suicide attacks, grenade attacks, assassinations and otherwise in towns and cities. So it does still exert great control and it's able to spread fear throughout throughout the land. And also recently I was just in Mogadishu last month in the Somali capital, and it's now started extracting a lot of money from people as well as carrying out these violent attacks.

So it's certainly a group that doesn't look like it's going away any time soon.

Mary Harper, OK, a change of gear now.

We're going to talk about one of the most eagerly awaited video games of recent years, cyberpunk 2077.

The year is 2077. An economic crisis culminating in nuclear conflict has left America in pieces.

With most of the continent degenerating into lawless war zones, people from all over have converged on the already overcrowded city, one of the world's last great megalopolis.

Not easy for you to say, cyberpunk 2077, which is set in a pretty miserable sending future, was launched a week ago. The blockbuster game received massive high, partly because it features the Hollywood star Keanu Reeves and spent years in development. But now Sony has taken the unprecedented move of pulling the game from sale on its PlayStation store and offering buyers a refund. Since its launch, users who paid fifty dollars each have been complaining of repeated bugs and frustrating glitches when playing on older consoles.

Its Producers CD project is Poland's biggest video game maker. Its share price has fallen sharply over the past few days and has lost a billion dollars in value. Microsoft later said it would also refund any dissatisfied Xbox players. BBK Technologies Market. This like has been speaking to my colleague Rob Young about the game and what went so badly wrong.

This is probably the biggest video game of the year and it's based on an old tabletop role playing game from the 80s. It's set in a dystopian cyberpunk future and it's based around an urban sprawl that's run out of control. Crime is absolutely rampant and human beings augment their bodies with cybernetic implants, which help them to survive in this horrible dark future. It's been in development for about eight years now. The hype train really has been rolling all this game. It comes from a very well respected developer called City Project Rete, who previously were very famous for fantasy games called The Whicher.

They were hugely successful. So levels of expectation for this game in anticipation have never been higher, possibly for any game in quite some time.

You may well have been excited about getting your hands on a copy as well. You've been playing it. Just talk us through some of the problems that you've encountered.

Normally when a video game comes out, you get a preview copy of it. I got my copy of this only, I think, a day before it was available to the general public. And it's a huge, huge game that's immediately made me start wondering what was going on here. And upon following the game up, as I asked how many other people have discovered that it is absolutely littered with bugs and glitches and some problems which caused your console to actually crash or the game crashing itself, which means the game just stops working and you have to switch the machine back off and back on again.

There are a myriad different faults and problems with this game from animations inside the game, not working properly, characters not doing what they're supposed to do, calls randomly flying through the air. And at some points there's a whole long list of bugs and glitches that are attached to this title.

Do you come across these kinds of problems often in a new game? Do they regularly have kind of teething problems before the developers sort them out?

This isn't unique. Big games from very big developers have released in the past with problems and with bugs. What's surprising is quite a level of problems that we're seeing and the fact that it's come from a developer who previously had a very, very good pedigree. So it's quite surprising, especially with the very long development time on this game as well, that it's arrived quite as broken as it is to these problems on consoles. The PC version of this still has some bugs and glitches, but it is nowhere near as broken as the console version.

Well, Sony is clearly pretty appalled at this because they have pulled the game from sale on their PlayStation store. Is that a pretty dramatic move?

It's hugely dramatic. This hasn't happened before. A title with this much expectation behind the title this big has never, ever been been pulled at this time of year.

Mark CISAC exactly two years from now, assuming all goes to plan, hundreds of millions of football fans will be eagerly awaiting the World Cup final in Qatar. The organizers are promising a net zero sustainable tournament, but is that really possible in a desert nation rich in fossil fuels with extreme temperatures? This report by our sports correspondent Alex Capstick.

The winner to organize the 222 FIFA World Cup is Qatar.

December the 2nd, 2010, I was there inside a Zurich convention center watching on as the Qatari contingent celebrated, while most other people in the hall sat in stunned silence, some in disbelief, criticisms over the decision to stage the planet's largest single sports event in a tiny desert state have been long and loud.

Now, as the tournament gets closer, attention has been drawn to claims that this will be the most sustainable sporting event in history. It's an ambitious plan and one which FIFA fully supports.

How can a World Cup be sustainable? How can that be carbon neutral?

With a lot of effort, with a lot of understanding of what's what is the impact of that on such a massive event as on the environment?

Federico Ariake is the head of sustainability at football's global governing body.

There's a commitment coming from both organizations, from both sides. FIFA, as always, happens in the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, commitment towards delivering the more sustainable events and CarbonNeutral events at the same time. But they want to have a sustainable event. They were aware of the challenges. They were aware of the risk. They were aware of what needed to be done.

Of course, one important factor helping Qatar is the size of the country.

It's small. The venues, seven of them built from scratch, are really close to each other. And that means there's no need for internal flights. And stadiums like this one, it's Al Janoo have been constructed using sustainable materials. It's also got air conditioning to ensure it can be used all year round.

The mastermind behind the technology is Dr. Soad Abdulghani, who's been nicknamed Dr Cool.

But this one is the second ever air conditioned stadium. And here we control the thermal environment for the players, for the spectators and for the grass.

From my limited knowledge, air conditioning isn't very environmentally friendly.

Air conditioning broadly, they say, is not environmentally friendly. But we made sure that we put a lot of measures in order to make sure that the provided air conditioning system is very sustainable.

And the materials we've used, even the lighting system, a new public transport system linking the stadiums has also been built towards sustainable goals of our solar energy. Farm is under development. A million trees are being planted, all designed to help neutralize the tournament's carbon footprint. But while environmental experts acknowledge this is all positive, they also harbour real concerns that Qatar's green credentials only partly address the huge challenges.

Every little bit of effort is good. I want to celebrate that. But we have to keep things in perspective. This is not a sustainable event.

Dr Mahathir is founder and co-director of the Sport Ecology Group, a body of academics who specialize in topics of sport and the natural environment.

When we think about events, we have to think about the scope of travel. We need to think about the scope of construction. We need to think about the number of people who will be in one place consuming goods. You know, we know that this event is partially being paid for entirely, people, for that matter, by fossil fuels. And so we need to think about what do they mean by carbon neutral? Do they actually mean zero? And if so, where are those carbon offsets going?

Dr Mahdi, or ending that report from Alex Capstick. Many people have rediscovered their creativity during Lockdown's this year, and that includes the world's most successful composer, Paul McCartney. His new album, released today, is a DIY job. He played every instrument and also produced it. Paul McCartney has been talking to John Wilson.

In 1970, depressed after the Beatles split, Paul McCartney released his first solo album, an introspective series of low fi home recordings.

Every night I just want to go out, get out of my head.

Ten years later, he made McCartney two in the same way, again, playing all the instruments. And now in the year of covid comes McCartney three, a record which shares the DIY ethos of its predecessors.

The first one was just very homemade and very basic. Just plug the mic in and then played a bit of drums. And if he didn't like the sound, I moved the mic to the one like. Then the second one was more electronic stuff. Yeah, with me being able to get into the studio. It was really helpful because, you know, you're able to keep your mind off this whole plague that was hit the world and get your head into music.

You know, give me a whim and then why I didn't feel like I had to have any overriding plan. And it actually is a surprise how well it hangs together chasing tomorrow.

And yet it is a very diverse sounding album musically as well. Yeah. I mean, you do let yourself loose on a few tracks. Is that the result of not having a producer there to rein in your more experimental instincts which have always been there?

Yeah, yeah. When you when you're on your own.

I love the freedom when you're an artist or when you're a writer, when you're creative, you're looking for that freedom.

The Beatles were great. Experimenter's the big crazy beat in the middle of day in the life. You know, all of that stuff was what we were into. And I've remained into it all as a musician. He played his first professional gig over 60 years ago. Paul McCartney is keenly aware of the devastating effects that the pandemic has had a live performance, all their plans to be back on stage next year. Is there a first date already penciled in next year?

No. We'll see what happens with the vaccine. And, you know, everyone doing all the rules and stuff, you'll be keen to get the vaccine as well.

Yeah, I will. Yeah. I'd like to encourage people to get it, too, because with this it's much more serious.

And if I am allowed to get it, I will be amazed by Paul McCartney.

And that's all from us for now. But there will 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, Dalziell DOT UK. And as we countdown to our Happy News podcast coming out on the 25th of December, we've been asking our listeners to tell us what they've learned in 2020 and what their hopes are for 2021.

Julian Hawkins lives in the U.S. state of California.

Living here in the U.S., we had a pandemic of misinformation regarding politics and covid seemingly many people here are unable or unwilling to filter information before they start spreading potentially dangerous propaganda. My hope for 2021 is that politicians and all the media companies are made responsible for what is being said on their platform, and we return to rational thought and trusted sources.

I'm Jonathan Savage. The studio manager was Cassie Galpin. The producer was given Lihe and the editor is Karen Martin. Until next time. Goodbye.