On today’s show: Zelenskyy and Trump will meet in Washington today to discuss a mineral-sharing agreement. The Wall Street Journal’s Ian Lovett explains the stakes, and the Journal also reports on why it will be difficult to extract those minerals from Ukraine. Mary Steurer with the North Dakota Monitor told us about a trial that started this week involving Greenpeace. Environmentalists have warned that the trial could bankrupt the group and threaten the future of advocacy work. The Oscars are on Sunday, capping off an awards season full of controversies. The L.A. Times’ Glenn Whipp details how that has left a lot of the major races wide open, and gives us his predictions for the biggest prizes. Plus, actor Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their New Mexico home, a rare “planet parade” will be visible in the sky, and Katy Perry will be part of an all-woman space crew. Also, how the UFC’s Dana White and Trump became friends. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What are the key topics discussed in today's episode?
Good morning. It's Friday, February 28th. I'm Shmeeta Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, a lawsuit that could sink Greenpeace. This year's Oscars wildcards. And Katy Perry is going to space.
Chapter 2: Why is the mineral agreement between Ukraine and the U.S. important?
But first, to Washington, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to meet with President Trump to discuss and potentially sign an agreement for Ukraine to share rare minerals with the United States, which are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars.
This was an idea proposed by Zelensky last fall, though at the time he suggested Kyiv would, in return, want assurance that the U.S. would provide ongoing support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia. Trump has criticized U.S. aid for Kyiv as a drain on resources.
And disagreements over the terms of this mineral deal are a big reason why the relationship between the United States and Ukraine has soured in recent weeks. Zelensky rejected an earlier version of the agreement because it didn't include security guarantees for Ukraine.
And the United States initially asked for the rights to up to $500 billion in revenue from mineral development, which is roughly five times more money than the U.S. has contributed to Ukraine during the war so far. Zelensky spoke at a news conference about why he rejected the initial offer.
I'm not signing something that will have to be repaid by generations and generations of the Ukrainians.
The new version of the deal that could be signed today does not include that revenue stipulation, and it also still does not include security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump has said that it would include a form of peacekeeping that's acceptable to everybody, but did not specify what that meant.
However, The Wall Street Journal's Ian Lovett told us Ukraine ultimately agreed to this version of the deal in the hopes that it could reset the relationship with Trump.
They really want to keep the U.S. on the Ukrainian side, which seems much less clear since Trump took office. They want the U.S. to be invested in Ukraine economically and ideally also militarily.
So far, the Trump administration has seemed to reverse the U.S. 's position as a strong ally of Ukraine. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that Ukraine will have to accept that it will not get back the land that Russia has seized. That's roughly 20 percent of the country. Last week, Trump falsely suggested that Ukraine, not Russia, was the aggressor.
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Chapter 3: How could the U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal affect international relations?
And in his first cabinet meeting this week, Trump said that Russia will have to make concessions to end the war, but did not specify what kind. Trump has maintained that his objective is to establish peace in the region, but Lovett told us it's not entirely clear what that means.
There have been a lot of questions about what Trump's goal is exactly, whether it's just to end the conflict as fast as possible, even if that means Ukraine giving up not only territory, but perhaps other concessions to Russia. And Ukraine has been working with European allies to try to come up with a contingency plan, basically, to continue to be able to fight if the U.S. pulls its backing.
Trump has also been meeting with European allies. Yesterday, he met with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House, who urged the president to stand by Ukraine.
Because it can't be peace that rewards the aggressor. We agree history must be on the side of the peacemaker, not the invader.
In that same speech, Starmer said the UK is ready to put boots on the ground and planes in the air to support a peace deal. If the US and Ukraine sign today's mineral deal, one outstanding question will be how the US plans to extract the resources. Up to 40 percent of Ukraine's rare mineral deposits are in parts of the country currently under Russian occupation.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations told the journal that means if the U.S. wants to access these deposits, it'll have no choice but to get involved in defending and protecting Ukraine's physical security. Now to a trial that started this week involving Greenpeace, which environmentalists have warned could bankrupt the group and threaten the future of advocacy work.
One of the concerns not only voiced by Greenpeace but other climate activists is that, like, a negative ruling against Greenpeace would be really serious for the fate of the climate movement going forward.
That's Mary Stoyer, a reporter at the North Dakota Monitor who's been following the trial. This is a civil case related to the Dakota Access Pipeline that was brought by the company Energy Transfer, which sued Greenpeace for $300 million, alleging the environmental advocacy group disrupted construction of the pipeline, which was completed in 2017.
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Chapter 4: What is the Greenpeace lawsuit and why is it significant?
That dollar amount, according to The New York Times, is more than 10 times the group's annual budget. Protests against the pipeline project started the year prior, when the Standing Rock Sioux tribe said a portion of the pipeline would endanger their water supply and sacred sites in the area. The demonstrations gained international attention, especially after clashes between police and protesters.
Police used water cannons on protesters in freezing temperatures, deployed tear gas, and shot them with rubber bullets. Medical professionals supporting the protesters say dozens of people were hospitalized and more than 300 people were injured. Police at the time said that protesters set fires in the area and threw rocks at officers.
In their lawsuit against Greenpeace, Energy Transfer claims the group supported protesters and encouraged violence.
Everything from, you know, paying people, training them to cause mayhem and destruction during the protests, like property damage, trespassing and harassing workers in order to stop the pipeline.
Greenpeace denies those claims and says it played a very small role in the protests. And the group says energy transfer is unfairly targeting them in an effort to intimidate environmental activists.
They also say that they've always adhered to a philosophy of nonviolence and so that they never supported or endorsed or financed any sort of destructive behavior by protesters.
An associate law professor at Pace University told NPR this case appears to be an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation, otherwise known as SLAPP. Those are anti-free speech cases that are typically designed to cost the defendants both time and money in court.
More than 30 states have protections against these types of lawsuits, but The Washington Post reports that North Dakota is not one of them.
And that's kind of an issue that they've raised, that a ruling against Greenpeace could set precedent that could shrink free speech rights and First Amendment rights in the United States more broadly. So something that could affect any protest group, journalists, etc.,
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the Greenpeace trial for environmental activism?
The Guardian reports more than half of the seated jurors have ties to the fossil fuel industry. The trial is expected to last at least five weeks. Sunday is the movie industry's biggest night, the Oscars. The ceremony caps what's been an interesting awards season.
A number of controversies have dominated the conversation, including the use of AI in The Brutalist, backlash over the absence of intimacy coordinators on the film Onora, and the past use of blackface by one of this year's best actress nominees.
It has been a strange Oscar season.
Glenn Whipp covers film and television for the LA Times.
We're heading into a ceremony where because of just these wild momentum shifts that we've seen in some of the races, there's just a lot of categories sort of up for grabs.
One of the most talked about storylines heading into the awards is the star of Amelia Perez, Carla Sofia Gascon, who, after old racist and Islamophobic tweets of hers resurfaced, deleted her social media accounts and was scrubbed from Netflix's awards campaign. Gascon is the first openly transgender woman ever to be nominated for an Oscar.
I don't think there has been a time when something of the scale of what happened with Carlos Sofia Gascon has happened. I mean, just in the sense that this was a movie that led the field with 13 Oscar nominations and had a chance to win Best Picture. And when it was discovered that Gascon had a history of...
Making offensive social media posts, denigrating Muslims, Black Lives Matter, even the Oscars themselves. It kind of really scuttled the movie's chances to win Best Picture.
Aside from the controversies, the absence of a big-budget frontrunner also makes this year's ceremony unique.
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