Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 12 March.

Top stories

Donald Trump’s 2020 spending proposal looks set to revive his border wall fight with Congress, while advocating steep spending cuts to environmental protection and key social safety net programs. Trump’s acting budget chief on Monday heralded the budget proposal as a “return to fiscal sanity”. Trump will ask for $8.6bn to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and seek to boost defence expenditure while cutting $2.7tn in non-defence spending over a decade. Fresh off the longest government shutdown in history – and delayed by a month because of it – Trump’s 2020 budget shows he is eager to confront Congress again. Leading Democrats rejected the proposal before it was formally released. “Congress refused to fund his wall and he was forced to admit defeat and reopen the government. The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again,” said the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Independent senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has condemned the budget as “breathtaking in its cruelty”.

Labor is in front of the Morrison government on the two party preferred measure 53% to 47% in the Guardian Essential poll out today. Compared to 52% to 48% two weeks ago, it’s a negative movement inside the poll’s margin of error that coincides with a messy period for the Coalition. And the bad news doesn’t end there for the government. 62% of the sample agreed the climate was changing and human activity was contributing to warming, including 53% of Liberal and National party voters and 48% of people saying they intended to vote for someone other than the major parties in the coming election. Just over half the sample, 51%, said not enough is being done to address the risks associated with climate change. However, Scott Morrison remains ahead of the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, as preferred prime minister 44% to 31%. Meanwhile, moderate Liberals have issued a sharp rebuke to National party MPs pushing the government to fund new coal-fired power stations before the federal election.

Australian electoral authorities say they are powerless to take further action on pro-coal ads linked to a Glencore campaign. Last week, the Guardian revealed that Glencore had funded a vast, covert campaign to bolster support for coal, run by political operatives at the C|T Group. At the centre of the campaign was a Facebook page called Energy in Australia, which spread pro-coal, anti-renewables video, graphics and memes across social media. But electoral authorities say that because the pages, which have now been taken down, were authorised to a former Queensland Liberal National Party MP, Matt McEachan, they are powerless to act.

World

Theresa May could give a planned statement on the current state of the negotiations as late as 10pm on Monday night. Photograph: POOL/Reuters

Theresa May has said the meaningful vote on her Brexit deal will happen on Tuesday, as MPs warned she would lose the confidence of parliament if it was pulled. May made an 11th-hour dash to meet Jean-Claude Juncker in a final bid to find a Brexit compromise late on Monday. And in opinion, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd writes that claims by Brexiters that free trade with Australia or other commonwealth countries will make up for the hit of leaving the EU are fantasy.

Boeing faces further questions over the safety of its 737 Max 8 jet as Ethiopian Airlines joined carriers in China and elsewhere in grounding the planes after its second fatal crash in months. Boeing’s shares fell 13% within minutes of Wall Street opening on Monday morning. More than 300 Boeing 737 Max planes are in operation and more than 5,000 have been ordered worldwide since 2017. Aviation experts, Chinese regulators, and concerned passengers highlighted the fact that Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes involved models that had been in service for only a short time.

Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika has announced he will not run for a fifth term as president after two decades in power, a key demand of protesters who have taken to the streets in recent weeks. Bouteflika announced the dramatic move on Monday in a letter to the Algerian people released by his office.

At least 21 people – six of them babies – have so far died as a result of Venezuela’s shattering nationwide blackout, opposition leaders have claimed as they prepared to hold an emergency debate on the crisis in the capital, Caracas.

A South African marine conservationist has narrowly survived after being caught in the jaws of a whale. Rainer Schimpf, 51, was swept into the mouth of a large Bryde’s whale off the coast of the South African town of Port Elizabeth while snorkelling and filming a sardine run last month.

Opinion and analysis

Cella, by Narelle Benjamin and Paul White, is part of Dance Massive 2019 in Melbourne in March. Photograph: Pippa Samaya

“Of the art forms that vie for our extremely short attention spans, dance has long struggled for the popular enthusiasm it deserves,” writes Ben Eltham. “Official statistics count it as one of the smaller and more specialised of the performing arts. Jokes about it still linger in popular culture. That’s a shame, because contemporary dance might just be Australia’s most exciting art form right now.”

We all know the GDP figures released last week were not good for the government or the country. It was not surprising last Wednesday the treasurer, Josh Frydenburg, did not want to focus on actual GDP growth given how poor the figures were. Instead he tried to shift talk to living standards. But, using a few different measurements, Greg Jericho finds that since the Liberals took office in 2013, our living standards haven’t been so rosy either.

Sport

The week after Real Madrid lost it all, the man who won it all returned. Zinedine Zidane is back. Less than a year since he walked out – insisting that this was a “see you later” not a “goodbye” – he is set to walk in again.

Last week the NRL launched the 2019 season in Sydney with 16 club captains, a box-full of fireworks and one slogan: “A New Era”. Given the horrific off-season the league has just endured, it’s not hard to see why those three words are being pushed as the new campaign’s tagline: it’s make or break time.

Thinking time: Gaslighting in the American south

Chera Sherman-Breland’s parents kicked her out when she was 18 because she fell in love with a black man. Photograph: Imani Khayyam/The Guardian

“I love you,” Chera Sherman’s mother told her before driving away in her Jeep Cherokee, leaving her daughter, then 19, bawling tears in front of her boyfriend’s home in Laurel, Mississippi. It was 1994, and Sherman had made the life-altering choice of falling in love with Jerry Breland, a black 19-year-old she’d met through a friend back when she worked at Kmart. Her mother had finally told her stepfather about their six-month relationship earlier that day after a local cop pulled Breland over while he was driving his girlfriend’s yellow Sunbird. When her stepfather heard she was violating his code against race-mixing, he drove to her job to tell her she had to move out. They allowed her to collect only what she could carry. The teenager couldn’t take her bedding or her jewellery – she even had to leave her car. “I love ya, but I just can’t have this,” her stepfather said as she grabbed random items.

Still happily married after 25 years, Sherman-Breland now believes many women pay the price – through abuse, rejection or public humiliation – for rejecting America’s rat’s nest of conservatism and racism, which, in the Trump era, has exploded into full relief, writes Donna Ladd. The south isn’t alone in its paternalism and sexism, but it is still a high art form here. “It is absolutely taught,” Sherman-Breland says. “You understand as a young girl that your place is behind your man, not in front or beside him. You cannot have your own opinions. That’s the most prevalent way they keep you in check.”

Media roundup

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Labor is seeking answers over the $27m purchase by the Berejiklian government of a historic western Sydney estate whose registered owners are close friends with Stuart Ayres, the minister for Western Sydney. The Australian is leading with Coal war: Barnaby Joyce sparks showdown with Liberal party. Polling for the Sydney Morning Herald has 57.5% of voters saying they will be swayed by climate change when deciding who to vote for in the NSW election on 23 March.

Coming up

Refugee footballer Hakeem Al-Araibi will receive his Australian citizenship in a special ceremony in Melbourne.

The ABS will release data on lending to households and businesses for January, which should give a picture of the overall health of the Australian economy after unexpectedly poor GDP figures.