On today’s show: Hamas says it will release hostages as scheduled this weekend. But the future of the ceasefire deal is still somewhat uncertain. NPR’s Kat Lonsdorf explains what’s going on. New reporting details frequent issues in the airspace near Reagan National Airport, where a helicopter collided with a passenger plane last month. The Washington Post’s Ian Duncan has the story. Luis Rubiales, the former Spanish Football Federation president, is on trial for alleged sexual assault and coercion after kissing soccer player Jenni Hermoso following a match. Dermot Corrigan, of The Athletic, has been in the courtroom and joins to discuss. Plus, the DOJ’s order to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams prompts mass resignations, Trump announces reciprocal tariffs, and ‘Saturday Night Live’ turns 50. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What are the key issues in Gaza's ceasefire deal?
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.
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.
Kat Lonsdorff 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. 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.
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.
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 U.S. will take over Gaza, displacing millions of Palestinians so the U.S. could build on their land. And the president recently told Fox News' Brett Baier that Gazans would not be allowed to return home.
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 would be years before it could happen.
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Chapter 2: How is the airspace near Reagan National Airport a risk?
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.
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.
We took these findings to experts who've studied aviation safety for years, and they were surprised by just the sheer number.
Ian Duncan covers transportation for The Post.
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Chapter 3: What incidents have occurred in D.C.'s airspace recently?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 September 11th.
And there would also be impacts on people living in the region.
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.
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Chapter 4: What are the proposed solutions to D.C.'s airspace safety issues?
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.
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.
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.
Ruby Alice 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.
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.
Dermot Corrigan with The Athletic has been in the courtroom throughout this trial.
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.
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.
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