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Joe BidenJoe Biden says he and first lady plan on getting Covid booster shotPresident defends shots as millions worldwide are unvaccinated: US has ‘provided more to the rest of the world than all the rest of the world combined’ S More
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
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
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
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
In her first solo address as first lady, Jill Biden hosted her first solo event by praising the work of teachers and promising them support during the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden hailed their ‘heroic commitment’ and explained that she was teaching a class on the morning of the inauguration of her husband, Joe Biden
Joe Biden to focus on economic recovery – US politics live More
On Wednesday in Washington DC, a striking young woman stood at a podium on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by the country’s leaders, who were masked against the pandemic. She was unmasked, at a safe distance, so she could speak with resonance and force, spreading her enthusiastic vision without danger. She radiated joy, conviction and purpose as she declaimed the poem she had written to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th president of the US: The Hill We Climb. Tears sprang from the eyes of many listeners, those weary and wary from four years of domestic discord, whether they sat on folding chairs at the Capitol, or on easy chairs in their homes. Hearing her words, they felt hope for the future.That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman. She is America’s first national youth poet laureate and, at 22, she also is the youngest poet accorded the honour of delivering the presidential inaugural poem. But despite her youth, Gorman’s assurance and bearing made her seem to stand outside time. Erect as a statue, her skin gleaming as if burnished, her hair cornrowed, banded with gold and drawn tightly back into a red satin Prada headband, worn high like a tiara, she evoked what poet Kae Tempest calls the “Brand New Ancients”: the divinity that walks among us in the present day. According to Greek mythology, nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, inspire creative endeavour, with five devoted to different kinds of poetry – epic, romantic, lyric, comic or pastoral and sacred. Gorman suggested a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.Gorman told the New York Times that she had not wanted to dwell on the rancour, racism and division of America’s four years under the Trump administration: she wanted to “use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal”. That way would require action, her poem declares: “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.”Gorman knows the importance of taking action to make the change you want to see. Raised in Los Angeles by a single mother, Joan Wicks, a middle-school English teacher, Gorman overcame daunting obstacles to forge her path. Amanda and her twin sister Gabrielle, an activist and filmmaker, were born prematurely. In kindergarten, the future poet was diagnosed with an auditory disorder that gave her a speech impediment. When she was in third grade, a teacher introduced her to poetry, and it was through writing and reciting poetry that she found her voice. She found a role model in the poet Maya Angelou, whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings reminded her of her own life, she remarked in one interview: “[Angelou] overcame years of not speaking up for herself, all for the love of poetry.”Gorman has presidential plans. ‘I am working on hashtags,’ she told the Harvard Gazette. ‘Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar’As Gorman struggled to improve her spoken fluency, she also strove for social justice. For her, it was clear from the start that expression was to be both poetic and political. In 2014, at the age of 16, she founded a non-profit organisation to support poetry workshops and youth advocacy leadership skills, called One Pen One Page. The following year, she published her first poetry book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, and went to Harvard to study sociology. (She graduated in 2020.) Her clarity of expression received a turbo boost from musical theatre while she was in college, with the arrival of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, whose lyrics she memorised and recited (the song Aaron Burr, Sir helped her pronounce her “R”s, she has said).In the spring of her sophomore year in 2017, she was named America’s first national youth poet laureate, an honour that took her and her poetry to public events across the country. At one of these, held at the Library of Congress, Dr Jill Biden heard her read a poem she had written in the wake of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, titled In This Place (An American Lyric). Three years later, Biden, as first lady-elect, suggested the young poet for the inaugural honour.In the first week of January, Gorman was halfway through writing The Hill We Climb when a mob of angry Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in an attempt to violently overturn the election result. She finished the poem in the hours after the melee, undeterred, with that jarring tumult as backdrop.On inauguration day, Gorman wore a ring depicting a caged bird, a gift from Oprah Winfrey that attests to the link the young poet represents between the past and the future. It not only summoned thoughts of the poet’s first inspiration, Angelou; it reminded anyone looking for portents that Angelou, as the US poet laureate, had also recited a poem to a new president on the Capitol steps: Bill Clinton, in 1993. One day, Gorman may be the audience, not the author, of such a poem: she has presidential plans. “I am working on hashtags,” she told the Harvard Gazette. “Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar.” The last lines of The Hill We Climb, containing an intended echo of Miranda’s Hamilton, constitute a poetic battle cry: “We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”Her words not only electrified Washington, they have prompted a surge of admiration in the public at large. That same day, her two forthcoming books were Amazon’s top two bestsellers. Instagram feeds flash continuously with images of her triumphal stand at the Capitol; op-eds across the country have called for poetry education programmes in schools, and television news broadcast highlights of her performance hour after hour – lyric adrenaline bursts to reanimate democracy.Gorman has appeared on many of these news programmes. On one, Good Morning America on ABC, Miranda made a surprise appearance to congratulate her. “The right words in the right order can change the world; and you proved that yesterday,” he told her. “Keep changing the world, one word at a time.”As if anyone could stop her. As she writes in her forthcoming book, Change Sings:
I can hear change hummingIn its loudest, proudest song.I don’t fear change coming,And so I sing along. More
