Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will visit Washington on Wednesday for talks with U.S. President Joe Biden and to address Congress in his first known trip abroad since Russia invaded his country in late February.

A senior U.S. official said Biden will announce a new weapons package of nearly $2 billion for Ukraine that will include a Patriot missile battery to help Kyiv defend itself against barrages of Russian missiles.

Zelenskiy’s visit, which had been organized in secret until details emerged on Tuesday night, was expected to last several hours.

He will hold talks with Biden and top national security aides at the White House, participate in a joint news conference with Biden, and then go to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that Biden invited Zelenskiy to Washington “to underscore the United States’ enduring commitment to Ukraine.”

“The visit will underscore the United States’ steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes, including through the provision of economic, humanitarian, and military assistance,” she said.

The Zelenskiy trip takes place 300 days after Russia invaded Ukraine with the aim of capturing Kyiv in days, a goal that quickly fizzled as the strength of Ukraine’s response – aided by billions in weaponry from the United States and allies – made the Ukrainians unexpectedly tough opponents.

Biden’s message to Zelenskiy, the official said, will be one of resolve and conviction.

Biden will be face-to-face with the man he has spoken with regularly over the past 10 months but not met in person since the war broke out. With Biden’s firm support, the West has rallied behind Ukraine and sought to isolate Russia without getting involved in a direct conflict with Moscow.

Biden will not use the talks to push Zelenskiy toward the negotiating table with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the official said.

Biden’s administration has been intensifying diplomatic efforts to ensure that the transatlantic alliance that opposes Russia’s invasion maintains unity.

“They will discuss every element of this conflict, including the situation on the battlefield and including the question of where the war goes from here,” the official said.

“The president is not coming with a message that is about pushing or prodding Zelenskiy in any way. This is going to be a message of solidarity and support, coordinating and alignment,” the official said.

The Biden administration has so far provided about $20 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, including artillery ammunition, munitions for NASAMS air defense systems and for high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS).

The supply of the Patriot missile battery is aimed at improving Ukraine’s air defenses against Russian missiles. Ukraine forces will be trained on its use in a third country, the official said.

Reuters reported last week that Germany was the likely location of such training.

Planning for the Zelenskiy visit has been conducted in secrecy as U.S. and Ukrainian officials sought to get him safely out of his country and to the United States.

The two leaders discussed a possible visit in a Dec. 11 phone call and the White House three days later extended a formal invitation to him, the official said.

Zelenskiy accepted the invitation last Friday and the visit was confirmed on Sunday, the official said.

Biden has wanted to visit Ukraine but security concerns have forced him to rule it out for now.

Dozens of hearses queued outside a Beijing crematorium on Wednesday, even as China reported no new COVID-19 deaths in its growing outbreak, sparking criticism of its virus accounting as the capital braces for a surge of severe cases.

Following widespread protests, the country of 1.4 billion people this month began dismantling its “zero-COVID” regime of lockdowns and testing that had largely kept the virus away for three years – at great economic and psychological costs.

The abrupt change of policy has caught the country’s fragile health system unprepared, with hospitals scrambling for beds and blood, pharmacies for drugs, and authorities racing to build special clinics. Experts now predict China could face more than a million COVID deaths next year.

At a crematorium in Beijing’s Tongzhou district on Wednesday, a Reuters witness saw a queue of around 40 hearses waiting to enter, while the parking lot was full.

Inside, family and friends, many wearing white clothing and headbands as is tradition, were gathered around roughly 20 coffins awaiting cremation. Staff wore hazmat suits. Smoke rose from five of the 15 furnaces.

There was a heavy police presence outside the crematorium.

Reuters could not verify whether the deaths were caused by COVID.

China uses a narrow definition of COVID deaths, reporting no new fatalities for Tuesday and even crossing one off its overall tally since the pandemic began, now amounting to 5,241 – a fraction of what much less populous countries faced.

The National Health Commission said on Tuesday only people whose death is caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as COVID deaths.

Benjamin Mazer, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University, said that classification would miss “a lot of cases,” especially as people who are vaccinated, including with the Chinese shots, are less likely to die of pneumonia.

Blood clots, heart problems and sepsis – an extreme body response to infection – have caused countless deaths among COVID patients around the world.

“It doesn’t make sense to apply this sort of March 2020 mindset where it’s only COVID pneumonia that can kill you, when we know that in the post-vaccine era, there’s all sorts of medical complications,” Mazer said.

The death toll might rise sharply in the near future, with state-run Global Times citing a leading Chinese respiratory expert predicting a spike in severe cases in Beijing over the coming weeks.

“We must act quickly and prepare fever clinics, emergency and severe treatment resources,” Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert from Peking University First Hospital, told the newspaper.

Severe cases rose by 53 across China on Tuesday, versus an increase of 23 the previous day. China does not provide absolute figures of severe cases.

Wang expects the COVID wave to peak in late January, with life likely to return to normal by end-February or early March.

The NHC also played down concerns raised by the United States and some epidemiologists over the potential for the virus to mutate, saying the possibility of new strains that are more pathogenic is low.

Paul Tambyah, President of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, supported that view.

“I do not think that this is a threat to the world,” he said. “The chances are that the virus will behave like every other human virus and adapt to the environment in which it circulates by becoming more transmissible and less virulent.”

Several leading scientists and World Health Organization advisors told Reuters a potentially devastating wave to come in China means it may be too early to declare the end of the global COVID pandemic emergency phase.

The United States on Tuesday indicated it stands ready to assist China with its outbreak, warning an uncontrolled spread in the world’s second-largest economy may hurt global growth.

A major near-term concern for economists is the impact a surge in infections might have on factory output and logistics as workers and truck drivers fall ill.

The World Bank on Tuesday cut its China growth outlook for this year and next, citing the abrupt loosening of COVID measures among other factors.

Some local governments continue to relax rules.

Staff at the Communist Party and government institutions or enterprises in the southwestern city of Chongqing who have mild COVID symptoms can go to work if they wear a mask, state-run China Daily reported.

Other Chinese media reported similar moves in several cities.

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Pope Francis is met by Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, Ieronimos II, as he arrives on the Greek island of Lesbos at Mytilene airport on April 16, 2016 in Mytilene, Lesbos, Greece.

Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

• The Vatican will return three Parthenon fragments to the Greek Orthodox Church as a “donation.”
• The Vatican Museum has kept the fragments since 1803, when Greece says they were stolen.
• For years, Greece has sought to regain Parthenon marbles from The Vatican and British Museums.

After more than 200 years, the Vatican has agreed to return fragments of marble that were stolen from the Parthenon back to the Greek Orthodox Church.

The return of the fragments, which the Vatican is calling a “donation,” is a major win in an ongoing campaign by Greece to regain artifacts taken from the Parthenon and kept in The Vatican and British museums.

While Pope Francis initially considered a long-term loan of the fragments to Greece, he “decided to donate the works outright,” Giandomenico Spinola, the head of the Vatican Museums’ archaeology department told The New York Times, adding that — as a donation — the return should be seen outside of any debate on the restitution of additional marbles housed at the British Museum.

Parthenon sculptures of Ancient Greece at the British Museum in London. These fragments are known as the Elgin Marbles and are different than those returned to Greece by the Vatican.

In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images

“The Holy Father Francis, as a concrete sign of his sincere desire to continue the ecumenical journey of witness of Truth, has decided to give to His Beatitude Hieronymos II, archbishop of Athens and all Greece, the three fragments of the Parthenon which for centuries have been carefully preserved in the Pontifical Collections and the Vatican Museums, and exhibited to millions of visitors from all over the world,” read the entirety of a brief statement on the subject released by the Vatican on Friday.

The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports in a statement called the pope’s decision “generous” and expressed hope the return of the fragments would put pressure on the British Museum to do the same.

The Vatican and Church of Greece did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

Visitors looks at the Cariatyds of Erechtheion in Athens on April 6, 2022. – The new director of the Acropolis Museum has called for an end to the long-running dispute for the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece, noting that London’s parliament could rule on the issue.

LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images

Greece has long sought the return of artifacts taken from the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena located on the Athenian Acropolis, an ancient citadel, now one of the most famous ancient archaeological sites in the world.  Marble fragments were taken from the historical site by Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the central government of the Ottoman Empire. Elgin sold the relics to the Vatican Museum in 1803 and additional fragments to the British Museum in 1816. 

“Our position is very clear,” The Guardian reported Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek Prime Minister, said. “The marbles were stolen in the 19th century; they belong in the Acropolis Museum and we need to discuss this issue in earnest.” 

The British Museum holds in its collection 15 metopes, 17 pedimental figures, and 75 meters of the original 160-meter-long frieze, a long, decorative, horizontal panel taken from the same structure as the fragments from the Vatican.

While there are fragments in Paris, Copenhagen, Munich, Vienna, Palermo, and Würzburg — in addition to the Vatican and the British Museum — about half of the surviving original sculptures are housed in the British Museum.

British Museum officials have maintained the fragments were “removed from rubble” of the Parthenon, not removed from the temple’s surface and were thus legally acquired, The Guardian reported.

“Over the years, Greek authorities and the international scientific community have demonstrated with unshakeable arguments the true events surrounding the removal of the Parthenon sculptures,” Greece’s culture minister, Lina Mendoni, said in a statement to The Guardian. “Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft.”

The British Museum did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Elon Musk (left) and Donald Trump.

Andrew Kelly, Gaelen Morse/Reuters

• Donald Trump thinks Elon Musk knew he would lose the poll on whether he should remain the CEO of Twitter.
• “I think he wanted to step down,” Trump told One America News.
• Trump said Musk should find a new CEO with “business sense” and who wears “a lot of different hats.”

Former President Donald Trump thinks Elon Musk polled people about whether he should remain the CEO of Twitter knowing he would lose.

“I think he wanted to step down. I think that’s a good way of stepping down, you know, just losing a poll and saying: ‘I’m outta here,'” Trump said of Musk during an appearance on One America News on Tuesday.

Trump was referring to the poll Musk posted on Twitter on Sunday, where 57.5% of over 17.5 million people voted for him to step down as the CEO of Twitter. On Tuesday, Musk tweeted that he’ll step down as Twitter CEO when he finds someone “foolish” enough to replace him.

When asked on One America News if he had any advice for Musk, Trump said Musk needs a replacement who wears “a lot of different hats.”

“That’s not an easy thing to find in that world, you need technology, you need politics. You need, sort of, everything,” Trump said. “And you have to have business sense, a good business sense. So it’s going to be interesting to see who that is.”

Trump also lauded Musk for releasing the “Twitter Files,” which showed then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign asking Twitter in 2020 to remove tweets — including nude photos and videos — about Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

“It’s a very important part of his legacy, I’ll tell you that,” Trump said of the “Twitter Files,” calling them “more important” than anything else Musk has done.

“I’d say he’s a hero,” Trump added. 

Trump and Musk have had a rocky relationship over the years. Before the 2016 election, Musk told CNBC Trump shouldn’t be president.

In December 2016, Musk was appointed to two economic advisory councils under the Trump administration. Musk left the posts on June 2, 2017, when Trump said the US would pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The two started to feud openly in 2022. In July, Trump called Musk a “bullshit artist” and accused him of lying about his voting history. After Trump’s comments, Musk tweeted that it might be time for Trump to give up on being president again.

“I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” Musk tweeted on July 11. “Dems should also call off the attack – don’t make it so that Trump’s only way to survive is to regain the Presidency.”

In November, Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account. Trump has not tweeted from his reinstated account, sticking instead to posting from his own platform, Truth Social.

Representatives for Trump and Musk did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. 

Donald Trump walks down a set of stairs during an election night event at Mar-a-Lago on November 08, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• The House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday voted to release Donald Trump’s tax materials.
• While the full files have not yet been released, a summary report showed the IRS failed to audit.
• During his first two years in office, Trump was not subjected to mandatory audits, the report said.

Despite an internal policy that mandates the review of presidential finances, the IRS failed to audit former President Donald Trump during the first two years of his presidency. 

The House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday voted to publish redacted versions of Trump’s tax returns, sharing a summary report prior to the complete release of the documents that revealed the Internal Revenue Service’s failure.

“The individual tax returns for the President and the Vice President are subject to mandatory review and will be closed directly to the ’employee audit reviewer’ in Baltimore Employee Audit Contacts,” the internal IRS policy reads, indicating the specific process by which the audit should be conducted and how it should be monitored.

The preliminary report on Trump’s taxes indicated the IRS only began to audit the former president after a request to view his taxes was submitted by Rep. Richard Neal, the committee’s Democratic chairman, in 2019.

Though it may be days before the redacted set of documents, which contain returns from 2015 to 2020, will be released to the public, the disclosure of Trump’s tax filings will end a years-long legal battle surrounding his finances.

In 2016, as he bucked tradition and became the first president since Richard Nixon to decline to publicly disclose his tax documents, Trump said he would do so after a “routine audit” was completed. The preliminary report on his taxes contradicts that any such audit was conducted.

Representatives for the IRS and Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

• The January 6 committee claimed a witness had been advised to alter their testimony, CNN reported.
• Per CNN, the witness was Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
• The attorney denied the allegations to Insider, saying he represented Hutchinson “honorably.”

An attorney who previously represented a key January 6 witness told them to mislead the January 6 committee about what she knew, CNN reported. 

During Monday’s final January 6 committee hearing, Rep. Zoe Lofgren claimed an unnamed witness had been advised by someone close to Trump to make statements in an attempt to deceive the committee. And in the executive summary of the January 6 hearings, the committee wrote that an unnamed lawyer had advised their client to “tell the Committee that she did not recall facts when she actually did recall them.”

The committee did not name either the witness or the person they claimed tried to influence the testimony.

However, multiple unnamed sources told CNN that Stefan Passantino, a former White House lawyer who served as chief ethics lawyer under former President Donald Trump’s administration, was the attorney. CNN reported that Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide who gave bombshell public testimony earlier this year, was the witness. Unnamed sources familiar with the matter also confirmed to The New York Times that Hutchinson was the witness in question.

Two sources told CNN that Hutchinson had relayed the incident to the Department of Justice. Passantino has not been charged with a crime.

In a statement to Insider, Passantino denied the accusations, and accused the committee of not reaching out to him “to get the facts.” 

“As with all my clients during my 30 years of practice, I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me. I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her,” Passantino told Insider.

Passantino represented Hutchinson from 2021, when the House committee began its investigation, up until a month before her public testimony with the Jan. 6 committee in June, the Washington Post reported. For her public testimony, Passantino was replaced with attorney Jody Hunt of Alston & Bird, Politico reported.

Sources told CNN that Trump’s Save America PAC paid for Passantino to represent Hutchinson through Passantino’s law firm Elections LLC.

Passantino also denied he shared Hutchinson’s testimony with outside entities without her permission and contended that it was normal for PACs to pay client fees “at the client’s request.”

Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, the law firm that listed Passantino as a partner, told CNN it was not involved in the situation. In Passantino’s statement, he said he decided to take a “leave of absence” from the firm, but would continue working at Elections LLC. 

The Jan. 6 committee, a representative for Hutchinson, and Michael Best & Friedrich, LLC did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Justin Bieber said he didn’t approve H&M merch that features his image.

Evan Agostini/AP

• Canadian singer Justin Bieber on Monday hit out at H&M for selling “trash” merchandise featuring his image.
• H&M said it has “followed all approval stages” and is checking with all concerned parties.
• The Swedish retailer has removed the items from sale at its stores.

Canadian singer Justin Bieber has slammed fast fashion giant H&M for selling “trash” merchandise featuring his imagery. 

“The H&M merch they made of me is trash and I didn’t approve it,” Bieber posted on his Instagram stories on Monday. “Don’t buy it,” he told his 270 million followers.

H&M’s online store was offering hoodies, t-shirts and sweatshirts with pictures of Bieber or quotes from his lyrics such as “I miss you more than life” from the song “Ghost” for prices between $49.80-$114. The retailer has since taken down the collection.

“We have followed all approval stages, but while we are still checking this with all concerned parties, items have been removed from selling,” H&M told Reuters on Tuesday. The Swedish retailer did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

The fracas surrounding H&M came amid weak sales at the company, as consumers tighten spending in the uncertain market environment. In November, H&M started laying off 1,500 staff to cut costs.

H&M is the world’s second-largest fashion retailer after Inditex, the owner of Zara.

H&M shares are down about 40% this year so far.