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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

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      Restorationists urge Jill Biden to erase Melania Trump’s Rose Garden makeover

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      Efforts to erase the Trump family legacy have reached the White House potting sheds and nurseries with Jill Biden being urged to restore the mansion’s garden to a state that predates ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s 2019 makeover.An online petition calling on the first lady to return the Rose Garden to its “former glory” has been signed by more than 54,000 people. The petition says Biden’s predecessor “had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself”.Restorationists urge that the garden be returned to a state that was created in the early 1960s by Jacqueline Kennedy with the help of famed designer Bunny Mellon.“Jackie’s legacy was ripped away from Americans who remembered all that the Kennedys meant to us,” the petition reads, and notes that her husband, the president, had said that “the White House had no garden equal in quality or attractiveness to the gardens that he had seen and in which he had been entertained in Europe.”In July 2020, as her husband fought for re-election and the coronavirus pandemic raged, Trump announced that her renovation project, which included electrical upgrades for television appearances, a new walkway and new flowers and shrubs, would be an “act of expressing hope and optimism for the future”.The changes to the garden were the first since Michelle Obama initiated a project in 2009 to dig up an 1,100 square foot plot on the South Lawn adjacent to the tennis courts for a vegetable garden.The plan included replacing crab apple trees, introducing a new assortment of white “JFK” and pale pink “peace” roses, and a new drainage system. “In a way, the metaphor of openness and improved access became our overall plan concept,” wrote Perry Guillot, the landscape architect overseeing the project.But the renovation met with criticism focused on Trump’s decision to go ahead with her project during the Covid-19 pandemic. There is no indication, as yet, that Jill Biden plans to act on the petition’s recommendations.On Thursday, her husband was spotted by the White House press corps picking a dandelion for his wife from the White House lawn before they boarded a helicopter.A day later, on Friday, the first lady commemorated Arbor Day by planting a linden tree on the north lawn of the White House. Her press office said it was to replace one removed last month that was deemed a risk and had not been planted by a historical figure.“Who doesn’t plant trees in high heels?” she said. More

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      Biden says inauguration 'one of the most consequential in a long, long time'

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      Joe Biden has described his swearing-in as president as “one of the most consequential inaugurations in a long, long time” in his first White House interview.The new president marked two weeks in office on Wednesday and speaking to People magazine, Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, discussed a range of topics, including their marriage, faith and the scale of the challenges he will face.His inauguration bore a rare weight, Biden said, “not because I was being sworn in, but in the sense of what the state of the nation is, between everything from Covid to unemployment to racial inequality.“We wanted to make sure that as many Americans could participate as possible, and it turns out millions of people watched it.”Biden has signed a series of executive orders since he came into office, increasing food-stamp benefits and halting new oil and gas leases on public lands. He has also put in place stricter coronavirus rules on people entering the US.“We have such an incredible opportunity as a country now. Not because of me but because the American people sort of had the blinders ripped off, and they realized that, man, we have problems, but we also have enormous opportunities,” Biden said.On Tuesday the new president also pledged to undo the “moral shame” of Donald Trump’s immigration polices, in what was probably a deliberate choice of words Biden, who is Catholic. In the People interview, Biden discussed how important his faith is in his daily life.“My religion, for me, is a safe place. I never miss mass, because I can be alone. I mean, I’m with my family but just kind of absorbing the fundamental principle that you’ve got to treat everyone with dignity,” Biden said.“Other people may meditate. For me, prayer gives me hope, and it centers me.”The Bidens also discussed the secrets to a stable marriage, with the president saying Jill Biden “has a backbone like a ramrod”.“Everybody says marriage is 50-50. Well, sometimes you have to be 70-30,” Biden said. “Thank God that when I’m really down, she steps in, and when she’s really down, I’m able to step in. We’ve been really supportive of one another.”Jill Biden, a college educator who will continue to teach during Biden’s presidency, told People that “after 43 years of marriage there’s really not that much more to fight about”.“All that we’ve been through together – the highs, the lows and certainly tragedy and loss – there’s that quote that says sometimes you become stronger in the fractured places,” Jill Biden said.“That’s what we try to achieve.” More