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Amazon has a pre-Prime Day coupon sale on Govee smart lighting
Smart lights can be a fun and easy way to take a drab living room and transform it into an exciting, fresh experience. Ambient indoor lighting, just like outdoor lights, can add so much to a room, especially when it’s implemented in a tasteful way. Case in point: Govee smart lighting.
Right now, ahead of Prime Day, you can head to Amazon for discounts on several Govee products by way of on-page coupons you can clip to save some cold hard cash on. From light bars to decorate your home with fun and fresh lights to TV backlights that change with what’s happening on-screen, these deals bring some great and innovative ways to change up your space.
Check out our picks for some of the best deals you can save on below before Prime Day — and all the various deals it’s set to bring with it — roll around.
Govee Envisual TV LED backlight
Want to level up your home theater without buying a new TV or moving things around? Adding an LED backlight to your display will do the trick. This Govee TV backlight uses cameras to color-match whatever you’re watching on TV to display a variety of lights that complement the action on screen.
Choose from multiple lengths, starting at 11.8 feet, install the lights at the back of your TV (or string multiple sets together) and watch as the lights complement what you’re viewing. Control it all via the Govee Home App, work with preset options to enjoy fun light shows, or just see what the lights get up to when you watch your favorite movie.
You can clip the on-page coupon to save $20 off your purchase right now. The discount will be automatically applied when you check out.
Govee Smart LED strip lights
Don’t want to install lighting for your TV, or want to get more creative with where you place your lights? Get a strip of them instead. This smart LED light strip can go wherever you’d like to put it, and it comes in a variety of lengths, starting at 16.4 feet.
Control your LED strip lights with the accompanying app or with your voice to customize their behavior. They can sync with your favorite songs thanks to their built-in microphone, and they’ll “dance” along to the beat without you having to program them to do so.
With more than 150 LED lights, there are plenty in each strip to illuminate a small or large room, so these lights are perfect to put up just about anywhere you want to liven up a bit.
Right now, you can clip the on-page coupon to get $6 off your strip lights. You’ll see the discount applied automatically when you check out.
Govee RGBIC light bars
Smart lights come in more forms than simple strip or TV lights. Light bars are a great option when you’d like to add some illumination in multiple places. These bars can be placed wherever you deem necessary — by your TV, or in other locations that you can mount them.
The bars can be rotated up to 90 degrees, and offer eight music modes, including party options and more ambient picks that can calm you instead of hyping you up for a get-together. You can control each bar with your voice or with the companion app as well, so when you’re sitting comfortably and don’t want to get up to change things, you have control at your lips (or your fingertips).
You can clip the on-page coupon to save $20 right now. The discount will automatically be applied at checkout.
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H&R Block and Intuit drop on a report that Elon Musk’s DOGE may develop a new tax-filing app
H&R Block and Intuit shares dropped on Tuesday after the Washington Post reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which is run by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is looking at developing a free app for people to file their taxes.
The publication cited two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in reporting that the leaders of the incoming administration’s DOGE discussed the idea of crafting a mobile app to file income tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service.
H&R Block shares tumbled 8.2%, while Intuit shed 5.1% on Tuesday. As the dominant players in tax preparation, H&R Block and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, generate billions in revenue annually by offering online and in-person services.
The Biden Administration in March rolled out a pilot Direct File program through the IRS in 12 states. It allows qualified taxpayers file directly through a federal portal. Additionally, the IRS provides services through its Free File program for those who made an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less.
More than 100,000 taxpayers used the new Direct File program to file their taxes this year, which marked the first time the system was in operation, according to the Treasury Department.
The DOGE, which has been directed by Trump to slash government spending and cut federal regulations, criticized the complexity of the U.S tax code in a Nov. 16 post on X, the social media service owned by Musk.
“In 1955, there were less than 1.5 million words in the U.S. Tax Code. Today, there are more than 16 million words,” its X account wrote. “Because of this complexity, Americans collectively spend 6.5 billion hours preparing and filing their taxes each year.”
Intuit and H&R Block also have free filing options.
That said, the Federal Trade Commission earlier in the year barred Intuit from advertising its popular TurboTax product as free when most people have to pay to use it. The FTC in February filed an administrative complaint against H&R Block, alleging it marketed its tax-prep products as free yet deleted the data as a way to pressure them to pay for pricier services. Both companies said they’d appeal.
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Trump “hush money” sentencing could hang in limbo for years
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Trump taps television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead key Medicare and Medicaid agency
Washington — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he has selected Dr. Mehmet Oz — a celebrity heart surgeon who hosted a daytime television show — to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The agency falls under the Department of Health and Human Services and oversees Medicare, the federal portion of the Medicaid program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the federal health insurance marketplace. Trump has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services. Both positions require Senate confirmation.
“America is facing a health care crisis, and there may be no physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said in a statement. “He is an eminent physician, heart surgeon, inventor, and world-class communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades.”
The president-elect said Oz will work with Kennedy, if he is confirmed, “to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He also indicated there may be cuts to CMS, writing that Oz “will also cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency, which is a third of our nation’s healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire national budget.”
Oz was defeated by Democratic Sen. John Fetterman in the 2022 Senate race in Pennsylvania after receiving Trump’s endorsement.
This is a developing story and will be updated.