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- [00:05]
Shemitah Basu
Good morning. It's Friday, February 14th, Valentine's Day. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News today. On today's show, the complicated airspace around Reagan National Airport, the trial of Spain's former soccer chief ends. And in 50 years of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels has never missed a show. Foreign but first to the Middle east, where Hamas has agreed to release three Israeli hostages on Saturday as scheduled in the planned ceasefire deal. Earlier in the week, Hamas threatened to postpone their release, accusing Israel of violating terms of the agreement related to humanitarian aid and allowing displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza. Hamas also said some Palestinians are still being targeted by gunfire. Israel denied those claims and had threatened to resume attacks on Gaza if Hamas refused to release the hostages as planned.
- [01:05]
Kat Lansdorf
Everyone here on both sides has just been kind of holding their breath for the last few days, waiting to see if this can be worked out.
- [01:14]
Shemitah Basu
Kat Lansdorf is NPR's Middle east correspondent and spoke with us from Tel Aviv. She says although this recent dispute appears to be resolved, there are still questions about how phase two of the ceasefire deal might move forward with we know some of the big picture goals. More Israeli hostages and detained Palestinians could be released, Israeli troops could withdraw from Gaza, and the terms of a permanent ceasefire could be explored. But we don't have many specifics.
- [01:40]
Kat Lansdorf
That's what we're all really watching right now is to see if those talks about phase two do in fact start and what we can hear about what's happening in them.
- [01:51]
Shemitah Basu
President Trump made the precarious ceasefire deal even more delicate by saying last week while hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House that the US Will take over Gaza, displacing millions of Palestinians so the US could build on their land. And the president recently told Fox News Brett Baier that Gazans would not be allowed to return home.
- [02:11]
Donald Trump
Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. Would the Palestinians have the right to return? No, they wouldn't because they're going to have much better housing. Much better. In other words, I'm talking about building a permanent place for them because if they have to return now, it'll be years before you could ever it's not habitable. It will be years before it could happen.
- [02:36]
Shemitah Basu
The reconstruction of Gaza was something Israel and Hamas agreed to discuss for phase three of the ceasefire agreement, at least before Trump weighed in. Lansdorf told us many Palestinians are extremely upset by what Trump is suggesting.
- [02:51]
Kat Lansdorf
I think it is really important to point out that the idea of being relocated is a very emotional and unsettling one for Palestinians. You historically Palestinians have been displaced or forcibly moved from their land and then never allowed to return again. You know, including most Palestinians living in Gaza right now, they're refugees from what was once Palestinian land and is now Israel.
- [03:14]
Shemitah Basu
Hamas has said Trump's plan would, quote, put oil on the fire in the Middle east and it's been rejected by a number of countries in the region. Netanyahu, meanwhile, has said Trump's proposal could change history and called it worth paying attention to. So far, nearly a month into the ceasefire agreement, 16 out of 33 hostages who were scheduled for release have been freed by hamas and over 600 Palestinians have been released by Israel. Let's turn now to air travel and new details about the very complicated airspace around Reagan National Airport just outside Washington, D.C. sea. Last month, an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines plane that was coming in for landing. All 67 people on both aircraft were killed. As we've mentioned before, air travel is one of the safest transportation methods. But in this region, the airspace is particularly complex given the number of civilian and military aircraft sharing space. And the Washington Post reports that air traffic controllers have been warning about the high number of near collisions in the area for years. The Post found over the last decade, airline pilots received over 100 warnings that they were in danger of a possible mid air collision with a helicopter near Reagan National. The most recent came just a day before the fatal crash in January.
- [04:46]
Ian Duncan
We took these findings to experts who've studied aviation safety for years and they were surprised by just the sheer number.
- [04:53]
Shemitah Basu
Ian Duncan covers transportation for the Post.
- [04:56]
Ian Duncan
What people who are familiar with it told us is like not every one of these is necessarily a dire emergency, but like when you have this kind of record were building up year after year over a decade, that is a suggestion that there's something that at the very minimum needs a closer look.
- [05:11]
Shemitah Basu
Some air traffic controllers suggested the need to move helicopter routes farther from airplane flight paths. The routes that were taken by the plane and helicopter in January's crash had only a 15 foot margin of distance at their closest point.
- [05:24]
Ian Duncan
We obviously took all of our findings to the FAA because we wanted to know, were you analyzing this data? Was this a signal that you were paying attention to? And they came back and they basically declined to comment because of the crash investigation. So we don't have a clear sense of what the sort of senior levels of the FAA was doing to kind of keep an eye on this.
- [05:46]
Shemitah Basu
President Trump recently made changes at the FAA Last month, he eliminated all members of an aviation security advisory group that examines safety issues at airlines and airports. In order to move a flight route, the FAA would need to go through an internal process and review what's possible in this airspace, which has been tightly controlled since Sept. And there would also be impacts on people living in the region.
- [06:11]
Ian Duncan
You just have people living in neighborhoods who don't want a bunch of helicopters flying over them because it's noisy and disruptive. And that might sort of sound a bit glib after a tragedy like this, but it is sort of the reality of managing airspace in a big city.
- [06:27]
Shemitah Basu
At the end of this month, the National Transportation and Safety Board is expected to release a preliminary report on what caused last month's crash. But Duncan told us he doesn't expect all of the outstanding questions to be answered.
- [06:39]
Ian Duncan
It will take them, you know, a year or more probably to finally untangle all of this. But I think the hope will be that by the end of it, we will have a kind of full picture of all the context here.
- [07:03]
Shemitah Basu
The trial of Luis Rubiales, the former president of the Spanish Football Federation, ends today after two weeks of testimony. He's accused of sexually assaulting Spanish soccer player Jenny Hermoso by kissing her without consent after they won the World cup in 2023. Hermoso testified about the incident in a Spanish court. She says the kiss stained one of the happiest moments of her life. Rubialis, on the stand, testified the kiss was spontaneous and consensual. He says, I asked her if I could give her a little kiss and she said yes. Hermoso refuted that account.
- [07:50]
Dermot Corrigan
She said that she did not consent at all. She said she didn't hear him ask her any questions, that she felt him grab her ears, put his hands on her head, pull her towards him and give her a kiss.
- [08:03]
Shemitah Basu
Dermot Corrigan with the Athletic has been in the courtroom throughout this trial.
- [08:07]
Dermot Corrigan
He admitted that he got carried away in the moment, that some of his behavior was inappropriate for a president of a federation, that he acted more like a player than like an official in that moment. But he said it's a long way from there to having committed a crime.
- [08:21]
Shemitah Basu
The prosecution, meanwhile, also argued that Rubiales and three other employees of the football club who were also on trial in this case, tried to coerce Hermoso into saying the kiss was consensual.
- [08:32]
Dermot Corrigan
After the kiss, he attempted to persuade her persecution, say, forced her to agree to his aversion of the events of what happened, especially because people were calling for him to resign and he was trying to get her to back up his story.
- [08:45]
Shemitah Basu
A number of Hermoso's teammates took the stand during the trial to support her. Two of them testified that she cried on the plane ride home from the World cup because she felt pressured to support Rubiales because the incident happened in Australia. This case is being heard by a special court in Spain. There's no jury involved, but Corrigan says the case will be decided by the judge over the next few weeks. Rubiales faces at maximum a two in a half year prison sentence. Before we let you go, a few other stories were following key resignations at the Justice Department yesterday, including Manhattan's top federal prosecutor and five other senior officials after they refused to follow through with an order from the department to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Manhattan U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon said she's confident Adams committed the crimes spelled out in his indictment and accused Adams lawyers of proposing what amounted to a quid pro quo, suggesting Adams could help carry out Trump's immigration agenda if the indictment were dismissed. A lawyer for Adams called the idea of there being a quid pro quo a total lie. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emile Beauvais accepted Sassoon's resignation and put the team who worked on prosecuting Adams on administrative leave, saying they'll be investigated by the attorneys general. The New York Times notes this spree of resignations is the most high profile repudiation of President Trump's tightening control over the Justice Department. In other news, President Trump is proposing that the US Increase its tariffs to match the tax rates that other countries charge on American imports. Reuters reports that the move toward reciprocal tariffs could set the stage for a global trade war. The administration says this will level the playing field for American companies and kick off new trade negotiations with other countries. But as the AP notes, it might drive up prices and could backfire if it pushes up inflation and slows growth. And finally, this weekend, Saturday night live turns 50. And on Sunday, it'll broadcast a three hour live anniversary special featuring dozens of stars and musical guests. The show has come a long way from its very first chaotic episode in 1975. Live from New York, it's Saturday Night. The man behind the scenes for all 50 years is creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, who, if you can believe it, has never missed a single Saturday night. Susan Morrison, an editor at the New Yorker, got unique access to the show for her new biography on Michaels. And she told me, despite having run the same production for five decades. The show is so ambitious and hard to pull off that it still comes down to the wire every week.
- [11:36]
Susan Morrison
One of the things that people in the current group of writers said to me is they would see him on Friday looking at the index cards on his bulletin board where he has the sketches arrayed in three acts and still seem scared. The idea that after 50 years, he cares so much that he could still feel on Friday morning like, oh, my God, I don't have a first act.
- [11:59]
Shemitah Basu
Morrison is my guest on this week's episode of Apple News in Conversation, where she told me all about Michael's singular vision for a new kind of comedy show. And of course, we talked about our favorite SNL sketches. If you're listening in the Apple News app right now, that's queued up to play for you next, enjoy the weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.