A New York City intensive care unit nurse on Monday became the first person in the United States to receive a coronavirus vaccine, saying she felt "healing is coming," as the nation's COVID-19 death toll crossed a staggering 300,000 lives lost.
President-elect Joe Biden threw his weight into the Democratic battle for control of the US Senate on Tuesday, as his White House win was finally acknowledged by top Republicans and holdout foreign leaders.
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Biden flew into Georgia — a southern state he won in an upset against President Donald Trump — to host a rally for two Democratic candidates in runoff races that will determine the Senate’s balance of power.
“Honk for your next United States senators Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock,” Biden told the crowd at the drive-in event in Atlanta — urging voters to turn out in force on January 5.
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“Send me these two men, and we will control the Senate!”
One day after the Electoral College affirmed Biden’s victory, attention shifted to the looming Senate battle — and to the shape of the incoming administration, as Biden also announced he had nominated Pete Buttigieg, a former Indiana mayor and presidential rival, as secretary of transportation.
Buttigieg would be the first openly gay person confirmed by the Senate to a presidential cabinet post — in sync with Biden’s pledge to usher in the most diverse cabinet ever when he takes office on January 20.
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And while Trump still refuses to concede — continuing to tweet baseless allegations of mass fraud that have been rejected in dozens of lawsuits — top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell finally broke his silence with a message to the president: it’s over.
“The Electoral College has spoken. So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, adding that Americans can also “take pride” that they will have their first female vice president in Kamala Harris.
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Biden told reporters before flying to Georgia that he had a “good” phone conversation with McConnell, a longtime Senate colleague.
“I told him that while we disagree on a lot of things, there are things we can work together on,” Biden said.
The Electoral College confirmation triggered an acknowledgement of Biden’s win from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said he was “ready for collaboration” with the Democrat.
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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — who had both waited until now to recognize the president-elect — also sent their congratulations.
‘Turn the page’
Trump, in unprecedented fashion, has yet to acknowledge his defeat in the chaotic election that will see him exit the White House after a single four-year term.
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But Biden urged the divided country to “turn the page” as he welcomed the Electoral College vote on Monday, saying US democracy proved “resilient” against Trump’s “abuse of power.”
He praised voters for casting ballots in record numbers despite fears of Covid-19 and “enormous political pressure, verbal abuse and even threats of physical violence.”
The White House transition is occurring with the coronavirus pandemic surging, pushing US Covid-19 deaths above 300,000.
While critical winter months lie ahead, a bright spot has emerged with health care workers receiving the first doses of the coronavirus vaccine distributed in the nation.
And with top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci recommending Biden and Harris quickly take the vaccine, the president-elect said they would receive the shot in public view.
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Minds on Georgia
Although the door has all but shut on his efforts to overturn the vote results, Trump has remained defiant, insisting in a series of tweets that he won a “landslide victory” and that there were still “tremendous problems” with the vote.
In a threatening move against Republican leaders in Georgia, where he has made baseless claims of massive voter fraud, he retweeted a pro-Trump lawyer who posted a picture of Georgia’s governor and secretary of state, saying “they will soon be going to jail.”
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Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, need to flip both Georgia Senate seats in order to seize control of the upper chamber, while Republicans must hold just one to maintain their majority.
Republicans have framed Georgia as must-win races, with the state forming the last line of defense against what they describe as radical “socialism.”
If Republicans do, McConnell remains majority leader, and his relationship with Biden will quickly become the most closely watched in Washington.
The pair were known for striking deals during crunch periods when Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president.
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But McConnell gave Obama no quarter, repeatedly stymying him on judicial nominations and forcing the president to curtail his legislative agenda.
The 2020 US presidential election will quasi-officially come to an end on Monday, December 14, when members of the Electoral College in all 50 states and Washington, DC, formally cast their votes to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr the next president of the United States.
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After a prolonged post-election period marked by a flurry of legal challenges launched by President Donald Trump’s team at both the state and federal levels, Joe Biden’s presidential win takes another step toward becoming official when every state plus the District of Colombia certify their results on Monday.
US voters do not directly cast their votes for president but rather, under the Electoral College system, they choose the electors who will then vote for the president. According to the US Constitution, these electors — 538 in total — must meet to cast their votes “on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December next following their appointment” in the November presidential election.
Similar scenes played out at select hospitals in other cities, including Los Angeles, where California Governor Gavin Newsom applauded as a Kaiser Permanente emergency room nurse rolled up her sleeve for a needle jab on live television.
"It's been an incredible morning. It's historic," said Dr. Leonardo Seoane after he received a shot at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, where he has led some of the clinical trials that found the vaccine 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 illness.
“It motivates me to leave, that I may not be able to have the life with my partner that we dream about, to maybe have family in the future,” Barbara Pongracz, a 31-year-old recruitment consultant, told AFP.
“I am just fed up with this negative environment,” said Pongracz, who also DJs at LGBT events.
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Prime Minister Viktor Orban has enacted a socially conservative policy agenda in recent years, shaping Hungary into what he calls a bastion against liberal ideologies.
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On Tuesday, parliament passed a constitutional amendment declaring that “the mother is a woman, the father is a man” as the government doubles down on traditional definitions of family and marriage.
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Another new law says that only married couples can adopt children, practically excluding LGBT Hungarians as gay marriage is not permitted in Hungary.
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The legislative wave this year has been accompanied by rising anti-gay sentiment in the media, sometimes voiced by senior politicians.
Orban himself urged gay people to “leave our children alone” in October.
Only weeks later, Jozsef Szajer, a co-founder of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party and the main author of Hungary’s rewritten 2012 constitution, resigned as an MEP after Belgian police caught him fleeing from a gay orgy in Brussels that breached lockdown rules.
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“I’m not surprised that there are gays in Fidesz,” said Pongracz. “That makes it all the more disturbing how they talk about LGBT people.”
- Polarisation -
“The LGBT community has become a scapegoat,” said Marcell Lenart, a 39-year-old freelance translator, who says attitudes on the street have “polarised” recently.
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“If I hold hands with my partner in public people now either demonstrate their progressiveness or they are openly homophobic,” Lenart told AFP.
“But we just want to be left alone,” he said.
Faced with the raft of legislation, especially the ban on same-sex parenting and the recent dissolution of an equality authority that handled workplace and housing discrimination cases, Lenart has also considered leaving Hungary.
“I’m not thinking of adopting right now, but if that changed soon it is upsetting that basically I cannot do that here,” he said.
- Harassment -
Ivett Ordog, 40, made her decision to emigrate shortly after another law was passed in May that reversed regulations allowing transgender citizens to change the gender listed on legal documents.
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Previously a spokesperson for the “Drop 33” campaign that opposed the legislation, she moved to Berlin in August, where she works as an engineering manager.
“I feel more calm here, before moving I started developing psychological issues,” she told AFP.
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Ordog says the new law puts trans people at risk of getting harassed in situations when they must show their identity papers, forcing them to come out as trans for example when collecting a package at the post office or accessing public services.
“Usually nothing bad happens, but every time you have to prepare for the worst, when you are outed in front of staff or a large audience, you never know if someone might come after you,” said Ordog.
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“People have a natural tendency to be curious but it is easy to turn them against a minority that they don’t have much information on,” she added.
- Verbal attacks -
Anti-gay violence is still rare in Hungary, but Agoston, another recent emigrant who did not want his full name published, said verbal aggression is increasing.
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“I got tired of homophobia,” said the 39-year-old nurse who also volunteered each year to marshal the annual Budapest Pride parade.
In recent years he experienced “more and more far-right attacks on the fringes of the Pride events, not physical but verbal, but the trend was worsening”.
Agoston said he feels “lonelier than back home, but safer” since moving to a Bavarian town in November.
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“When I read the news now about another homophobic law, at least I know I’m out of it,” he told AFP.
For returned emigrant Balint Meiszterics, back in Hungary with his partner after a year in the UK in 2017, coming back to be with friends and family is a decision he said he “starts to regret”.
“We can’t live the same life as straight people in Hungary, we can’t get married, we can’t adopt,” he said, adding that they will probably move abroad again soon.
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With a parliamentary election approaching in 2022, Meiszterics, a 29-year-old corporate trainer, fears the targeting could intensify during the run-up.
“I just hope they don’t go as far as in Poland where they have LGBT-free zones”.
Strutting onstage with well-honed confidence, 23-year-old comedian Qiqi is part of a new wave of young, female stand-up acts in China, crashing into what has always previously been a man’s world.
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Her jokes were met with roars of laughter from the well-heeled young professionals watching in a packed Beijing theatre.
“I’ve always liked making people laugh ever since I was small, it gives me a sense of accomplishment,” Qiqi told AFP, using her stage name.
She is among those benefiting from a surge of interest in stand-up in China, thanks to a wildly popular new web series called “Rock & Roast”.
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It racked up hundreds of millions of views this summer, and made viral sensations of several of its female stand-ups — their refreshingly outspoken anecdotes about awkward romantic encounters, body image and annoying male traits clearly striking a chord with audiences.
- Millennial gripes -
“My boss can’t even properly describe the tasks he wants me to do,” Qiqi, sporting dyed strawberry blonde pigtails and dangling cherry earrings, riffed to knowing chuckles from the crowd.
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“He said, ‘Hey, can you arrange a meeting with so-and-so?’ The person, time and place are all missing. It’s like he expects us to have some kind of telepathic connection!”
Qiqi’s full-time job is at an internet media company, and her sets often draw upon her daily life and common millennial complaints.
She first dabbled in open mic performances three years ago, when stand-up was making its first inroads in China — shows where she says she “had no idea what she was doing”.
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But the self-deprecation in her act is something fans are drawn to.
“One of the biggest characteristics of female comedians is that they dare to laugh at themselves,” said one audience member after a recent performance.
And Qiqi is steadily gaining fans, earning up to 9,000 yuan ($1,400) a month from shows.
‘Men swearing is normal’ -
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“When I first arrived in Beijing after graduation, I realised Beijing has inherited an age-old traditional northern Chinese culture — swearing,” ran another of Qiqi’s jokes, playing on a trope well-known to her audience — the renowned surliness of the locals.
Recalling her dealings with a foul-mouthed woman who runs a restaurant near her, she gleefully recounted profanity after profanity.
Qiqi says she was once called “vulgar and cheap” for swearing by an online viewer, and argues that women are subjected to more scrutiny than their male counterparts.
She shies away, though, from being labelled a “feminist” — seen as an inherently political term in China.
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Yang Mei, another Beijing-based comedian, agrees that audiences “don’t like female comedians swearing but see men swearing as normal, maybe because they think women are supposed to be more obedient.”
- Battle of the sexes -
Yang, 27, left her film industry job last year to perform full-time.
“I’m wearing a new jumper I bought for the occasion, just in case there are any hot guys in the audience,” she quipped in one of her shows.
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“I just had a look around at the male audience members — I think I can probably take it off now.”
She says web-streamed shows like “Rock & Roast” have brought the industry “forward by at least five to ten years”.
However, the increased exposure has also left contestants open to online criticism and abuse.
One of the most prominent “Rock & Roast” contestants, Yang Li, gained legions of fans for a much-shared joke asking why men “look so mediocre, but still have so much self-confidence?”
But it prompted an angry backlash online, with a prominent Beijing law professor calling Yang and her fans “pampered little princesses”.
Yang and Qiqi both say overall, shows like “Rock & Roast” have encouraged women to try performing, and boosted their visibility.
“I think women are natural performers, because we’ve been considerate of men’s thoughts and feelings since we were little, but suppress our own,” said Yang.
“But nowadays, there are more and more channels for women to express themselves — including stand-up comedy.”
