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      Jill Biden makes unannounced visit to Ukraine and meets first lady

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      Jill Biden makes unannounced visit to Ukraine and meets first ladySurprise trip on Mother’s Day as Biden meets with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenskiy US first lady Jill Biden made an unannounced visit to western Ukraine on Sunday, holding a surprise Mother’s Day meeting with the nation’s first lady, Olena Zelenskiy, as Russia presses its punishing war in the eastern regions.US president Joe Biden has not visited the country, though he expressed a desire to when he was in Poland this spring, following Russia’s invasion in February, but at that time Russian tanks were advancing on the capital, Kyiv, and he hinted that his security advisers held him back.Jill Biden traveled under the cloak of secrecy, becoming the latest high-profile American to enter Ukraine during its 10-week-old conflict with Russia.Russian forces drew back from Kyiv in the weeks after Biden’s trip to Poland, and the return of a greater level of security in the capital prompted visits by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, days after US secretary of state Antony Blinken and defense secretary Lloyd Austin, and other world leaders, including British prime minister Boris Johnson, had met there with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.“I wanted to come on Mother’s Day,” Jill Biden told Olena Zelenskiy on Sunday.“I thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop and this war has been brutal and that the people of the United States stand with the people of Ukraine.”The first lady traveled by vehicle to the town of Uzhhorod, about a 10-minute drive from a Slovakian village that borders Ukraine.The two came together in a small classroom, sitting across a table from one another and talking in front of reporters before they met in private. Zelenskiy and her children have been at an undisclosed location for their safety.Zelenskiy thanked Biden for her “courageous act” and said: “We understand what it takes for the US first lady to come here during a war when military actions are taking place every day, where the air sirens are happening every day – even today.”The school where they met has been turned into transitional housing for Ukrainian migrants from elsewhere in the country.The visit allowed Biden to conduct the kind of personal diplomacy that her husband would like to be doing himself.The White House said as recently as last week that the US president “would love to visit” but there were no plans for him to do so at this time.On Sunday, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau also made a surprise visit to Ukraine and was expected to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskiy.Earlier, the meeting between the two first ladies came about after they exchanged correspondence in recent weeks, according to US officials. Jill Biden drove through Uzhhorod and the meeting between the women lasted about an hour.Her visit was limited to western Ukraine. Russia is concentrating its military power in eastern Ukraine, and she was not deemed to be in harm’s way.Earlier, in the Slovakian border village of Vysne Nemecke, she toured its border processing facility, surveying operations set up by the United Nations and other relief organizations to assist Ukrainians seeking refuge. Biden attended a religious service in a tent set up as a chapel, where a priest intoned: “We pray for the people of Ukraine.”Before that, in Kosice, Biden met and offered support to Ukrainian mothers in Slovakia who have been displaced by Russia’s war and assuring them that the “hearts of the American people” are behind them.At a bus station in the city that is now a 24-hour refugee processing center, Biden found herself in an extended conversation with a Ukrainian woman who said she struggles to explain the war to her three children because she cannot understand it herself.“I cannot explain because I don’t know myself and I’m a teacher,” Victorie Kutocha, who had her arms around her 7-year-old daughter, Yulie, told Biden.At one point, Kutocha asked, “Why?” seeming to seek an explanation for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine on February 24.“It’s so hard to understand,” the first lady replied.Meanwhile, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, acting ambassador Kristina Kvien, temporarily returned to the US embassy in Kyiv, according to an unnamed US official, weeks after it was vacated.TopicsJill BidenUS politicsJoe BidenVolodymyr ZelenskiyUkraineRussiaEuropenewsReuse this content More

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      Jill Biden criticized husband’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate, book says

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      Jill Biden criticized husband’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate, book says‘Why do we have to choose someone who attacked Joe?’ first lady reportedly said, according to This Will Not Pass The first lady, Jill Biden, complained about her husband’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate and now vice-president, according to a new book, asking: “There are millions of people in the United States. Why … do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?”Kid Rock says Donald Trump sought his advice on North Korea and Islamic StateRead moreThe quote is contained in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, which is due to be published on 3 May.Excerpts have already been reported. Jill Biden’s reported remark was relayed by Politico on Tuesday.Harris made her mark in the Democratic primary – and bruised Biden – at a debate in Miami in June 2019, criticising his opposition to bussing, a way of racially integrating public schools, as a young senator in the 1970s.01:39Biden was reportedly hurt by the insinuation he had been racist but still picked the California senator as his running mate and ultimately the first woman and person of color to be vice-president.A spokesman for Jill Biden, Michael Larosa, told Politico: “Many books will be written on the 2020 campaign, with countless retellings of events – some accurate, some inaccurate. The first lady and her team do not plan to comment on any of them.”Promising “juicy excerpts” of the new politics book, Politico said Martin and Burns offer extensive accounts of Harris’s struggles as vice-president. As allies complained about her “impossible” portfolio, including border security, the news website said, “Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director, not only grew tired of the criticism that the White House was mismanaging Harris – she blamed the VP.”Martin and Burnswrite: “In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice-presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice-president’s staff.”Bedingfield told Politico: “The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call to fact-check this unattributed claim tells you what you need to know. Vice-President Harris is a force in this administration and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to move the country forward.”Harris, the book says, does not want only to work on issues connected to women and Black Americans. In her attempts to lead the way on voting rights, however, she reportedly felt stymied by Biden’s reluctance to commit to serious Senate reform.Burns and Martin also report that Biden and Harris are “friendly but not close”, but say the president grew frustrated with leaks about Harris, warning aides that if “he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice-president … they would quickly be former staff”.The authors say Harris’s frustration was “up in the stratosphere”, according to an unnamed senator who “lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy’. Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”Biden, the oldest president ever inaugurated for the first time, will turn 82 shortly after the 2024 election. He has said he intends to run again.Whatever the accuracy of the reporting by Martin and Burns, it seems Harris may have cause to agree with a famous judgment by John Nance Garner, vice-president to Franklin D Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941. The vice-presidency, Garner said, “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss”.TopicsJoe BidenKamala HarrisJill BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Jill Biden axes Melania Trump’s blood trees for restrained Christmas decor

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      Jill Biden axes Melania Trump’s blood trees for restrained Christmas decorAfter her predecessor’s terrifying vision, the first lady’s minimal display strikes a polite and safe tone You’ve heard the faint murmur of All I Want for Christmas Is You, you’ve seen people swapping their pumpkin spice lattes for Starbucks Eggnogs and Jill Biden has unveiled the White House’s Christmas decor. Yes, Christmas is officially here.She’s following seasonal protocol: since 1889 the White House has been marking the beginning of the season with an interiors makeover. JFK and Jackie’s version gave Lana Del Rey and other fans of classic Americana inspiration for life, Lady Bird Johnson went “peace and love” in 1967 putting a wreath of flowers on hers, the Reagans gave it full 80s glam by allowing Mr T to co-star in the photo-op as Santa (JR from Dallas did the honours the following year) and Hillary Clinton memorably threw everything at her tree in classic overachiever style.But never has the phrase “DECK THE HALLS!” sounded so threatening as when Melania Trump become chief of staff of interior Christmas decorating. Blood trees (Twitter never forgets), ivory white sticks that resembled witches fingers and enough Christmas lights that suggested a special cut-price deal with the power grid. The overall mise en scène Trump was emoting seemed to be The Handmaid’s Tale meets the launch of my premium brand of Glaceau smartwater in Elsa from Frozen’s ice castle.Jill Biden has gone minimal by comparison. The theme is “Gifts from the Heart”. And if that sounds like the name of a Celine Dion Sings the Seasonal Classics-type affair, well, you’d be right. Dr Biden was inspired by the people she’d met while her husband was campaigning, according to Associated Press. There’s a gingerbread White House diorama, candy cane-like stockings sized apparently to fit a baby elephant’s foot and The Tree. Well, The Tree is bursting with life, with white tinsel wrapped around to look like white doves of peace. It’s polite. It’s safe. And after four years of hell, it’s just a relief.Still, there’s certainly a wave of nausea when one looks at the gold-plated leaves adoring the tree in the light of the unemployment numbers and The Great Resignation.The big takeaway question we have, though, is: with all the supply chain issues, what’s exactly in those big red boxes?With Omicron likely to become the Grinch that stole Christmas (again), maybe these pictures should be seen as normal-time placeholders. With your normally scheduled Christmas set to recommence some time in 2025. Now, let’s all suspend our collective beliefs and stare at those huge stockings again.For a full look at Jill Biden’s Christmas decorations, click here.TopicsChristmasJill BidenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden’s income fell by a third as he ran for president, tax returns show

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      Joe Biden forfeited more than a third of his annual income in running for the White House last year, with his newly disclosed 2020 tax returns showing a drop in earnings from almost $1m in 2019 to $607,336.Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, released their 2020 joint tax returns on Monday. They show that the couple saw their income fall by some 38% from 2019, largely because Biden had to give up high-paying bookings on the speaker circuit when he launched his presidential campaign.The Bidens paid $157,414 in federal income tax last year – a rate of 26%. In 2019 the balance sheet looked substantially more lucrative, with a combined income of $985,233 and total taxes of $299,346.Details from the Bidens’ 2020 tax return were published by Bloomberg News shortly before the White House made the figures available.Kamala Harris paid an even steeper price after she stood as Biden’s running mate in the presidential election and now as vice-president. Her 2020 joint tax returns with her husband, Doug Emhoff, record federal adjusted gross income of $1.7m last year.That was dramatically down from $3.1m in 2019. Most of the reduction in earnings was accounted for by Emhoff’s relative fortunes.The second gentleman took a leave from the law firm DLA Piper, where he was a partner, once Harris joined the Democratic presidential ticket last August. He left the firm altogether after the election in November.The released tax returns show that Harris and Emhoff paid $621,893 in federal income tax in 2020, a tax rate of 37%.The release of the president’s tax returns further increases the gulf in behavior with Biden’s predecessor in the White House. Donald Trump shattered tradition by refusing to make his tax returns public, while the current president has now released details on his financial affairs stretching back 23 years.Before Monday’s disclosure, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that full transparency “should be expected by every president of the United States”.The new documents show that the Bidens donated more than $30,000 to charity – about 5% of their total income. The organisation benefitting from their largesse was the Beau Biden Foundation, a group seeking to combat child abuse set up in honor of the their son who died in 2015 from the brain cancer glioblastoma.Harris and Emhoff gave $27,000 to charity.Despite the decline in their income, the Bidens are still in an elite tax bracket that mean they would be subject to the new top income tax rate of 39.6% under the president’s American Families Plan, unveiled last month. That rate would apply to the top 1% of Americans, who earn more than $540,000 a year. More

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      Joe Biden’s Venmo account discovered in ‘less than 10 minutes’ – report

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      Venmo accounts for Joe Biden and Dr Jill Biden were removed on Friday after BuzzFeed News said it easily found the US president on the payment app – a discovery it said raised national security questions.The website went looking for Biden’s account after it was mentioned in a New York Times report on White House conditions and working practices.Under the headline “Beneath Joe Biden’s Folksy Demeanor, a Short Fuse and an Obsession With Details”, the Times reported lengthy policy debates, angry outbursts at advisers and officials – and plenty of time spent with grandchildren.“They have been known to show their grandfather apps like TikTok,” the story said. “One adviser said he had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.”The Trump administration wrestled unsuccessfully with the popularity of TikTok, an app for sharing short videos, over its ownership by a Chinese company, ByteDance.Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, enables simple payments between contacts. Transactions are public by default. They can be made private but contact lists remain visible. Biden’s payments were private. BuzzFeed did not publish names of his contacts.Reporters commonly scan Venmo for leads. The scandal engulfing the Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, for example, has included reporting on payments to women, allegedly for sex, made by a former associate.One recent Daily Beast headline read: “Gaetz Paid Accused Sex Trafficker, Who Then Venmo’d Teen”. Gaetz denies all such accusations.BuzzFeed said it took “less than 10 minutes” to find Biden’s account, “using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature”.“In the process,” it said, it “found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family but a wide network of people around them, including the president’s children, grandchildren, senior White House officials and all of their contacts on Venmo.”The White House did not immediately comment. By late Friday, BuzzFeed said, accounts for the president and first lady had been removed.A Venmo spokesman said: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously.“Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”In a 2018 Guardian report, Christine Bannan, then of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: “Venmo is an unusual app because it combines social media with financial transactions.“One of those is usually fairly public and one is usually very private, so it’s hard to gauge consumer expectations of privacy.”Gennie Gebhart, acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed: “Venmo’s privacy failures are already a big problem for everyday folks who use Venmo, and that’s been the case for years.“All of those problems are magnified when we’re talking about a major public figure.” More