First Thing: Zelenskyy will visit White House to sign minerals deal, says Trump

President says of his Ukrainian counterpart, ‘I hear he’s coming on Friday’. Plus, train robbers swipe $2m worth of Nikes

Good morning.

Donald Trump has said that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit the White House on Friday to sign a rare earth minerals deal to pay for US military aid to defend against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The announcement followed days of tense negotiations between the US and Ukraine in which Zelenskyy alleged the US was pressuring him to sign a deal worth more than $500bn that would force “10 generations” of Ukrainians to pay it back.

“I hear that he’s coming on Friday,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Certainly it’s OK with me if he’d like to. And he would like to sign it together with me. And I understand that’s a big deal, very big deal.”

What’s not in the deal? The deal is more favourable to Ukraine than the original one proposed by Washington. According to the Financial Times, which first reported the deal, the new terms do not include the onerous demands for a right to $500bn in potential revenue from exploiting the resources, which include rare earth metals and Ukrainian oil and gas resources. It also does not include references to long-term security guarantees that Kyiv wanted to receive.

Search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight resumes after 11 years

A new search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been launched, more than a decade after the plane went missing in one of aviation’s greatest enduring mysteries.

The British maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity has resumed the hunt for the missing plane, Malaysia’s transport minister, Anthony Loke, said on Tuesday. He said the contract details between Malaysia and the firm were still being finalised but welcomed “the proactiveness of Ocean Infinity to deploy their ships” to begin the search for the plane, which went missing in March 2014.

Where are they looking, and for how long? Details had not yet been negotiated, Loke said, but Marinetraffic.com showed that the Ocean Infinity vessel was in the south Indian ocean as of 23 February.

House narrowly passes Republican budget blueprint to fund Trump’s agenda

Republicans unified behind a budget blueprint on Tuesday evening, just barely scraping together the votes to advance Donald Trump’s sprawling agenda of tax and spending cuts amid widespread concern that it would hit social programs.

The House approved the plan in a vote of 217-215, with Thomas Massie, a prominent fiscal hawk, the lone Republican to vote in opposition. No Democrats supported the measure, which they have cast as a betrayal of middle and low-income voters on behalf of “billionaire donors” such as Trump’s chief lieutenant, Elon Musk.

Passage of the “big, BEAUTIFUL bill” that Trump pushed for amounted to a major victory for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, whose bare-bones majority left him almost no room to spare.

What does the plan include? Approximately $4.5tn in tax cuts alongside increased spending for defense and border security.

What about the cuts? To pay for the tax cuts, congressional committees must find about $2tn in spending reductions over the next decade. Though the resolution does not explicitly target Medicaid, and Trump has vowed the program would not be “touched,” even some Republican lawmakers have conceded that there are few alternatives.

Is the budget now law? Not yet. This vote was the first step in the process. Next it will go to the committees, which will draft the legislation.

In other news …

MSNBC has reportedly told most of the employees who produce Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid’s primetime evening news shows they are being let go as part of the network’s programming overhaul.

Apple has promised to fix a bug in its iPhone automatic dictation tool after some users reported it had suggested the word “Trump” when they said the word “racist”.

An Indian cinema chain has been successfully sued by a filmgoer over lengthy pre-film adverts.

Doubts about whether Peter Paul Rubens painted the Samson and Delilah picture in the National Gallery have been revived by new evidence, 45 years after it was bought for a then-record price.

Stat of the day: Train robbers swipe $2m worth of Nikes

Thieves have targeted freight trains running through the deserts of California and Arizona in a string of audacious heists resulting in the theft of more than $2m worth of new Nike sneakers, according to officials and court documents. In a 13 January robbery, suspects cut an air brake hose on a BNSF freight train traveling through a remote section of Arizona and made off with more than 1,900 pairs of unreleased Nikes worth more than $440,000.

Don’t miss this: ‘I felt nothing but disgust’ – Tesla owners vent their anger at Elon Musk

When Mike Schwede first sat in a Tesla Roadster 15 years ago, he felt like it was a glimpse into the future. By 2016, he was the proud owner of a Tesla, revelling in the thumbs up he would get from other drivers. Of late, the sheen of owning a Tesla has begun to wear off. Schwede watched aghast as the Tesla CEO poured hundreds of millions into backing Donald Trump as he made promises to ramp up domestic oil and gas production. The final straw came when Elon Musk made back-to-back fascist-style salutes during Trump’s inauguration in January. “I felt nothing but utter disgust,” said Schwede.

Climate check: Plants losing appetite for carbon dioxide

Our planet is losing its appetite for mopping up carbon dioxide, according to analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements that show Earth’s plants and soils reached peak carbon dioxide sequestration in 2008 and absorption has been declining ever since. Passing this tipping point increases the chances of runaway climate breakdown.

Last Thing: ‘Superpod’ of more than 2,000 dolphins frolic off California coast

More than 2,000 dolphins gathered off the California coast to form a “superpod”, gliding and breaching the clear, aquamarine waters off Monterey Bay. Evan Brodsky, a captain and videographer with the private boat tour company Monterey Bay Whale Watch, captured the video of the dolphins. “They’re all smooth,” Brodsky told the Associated Press. “When they jump, they look like flying eyebrows.”

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