18 injured after Delta Air Lines plane crashes, flips at Toronto airport | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: A regional jet flipped upside down upon arrival at Canada's Toronto Pearson Airport on Monday. Paste BN National Correspondent Terry Collins discusses this week's protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Pope Francis remains in the hospital as doctors treat an infection. El Paso Times Border and Immigration Reporter Jeff Abbott breaks down a lawsuit over the elimination of ICE's sensitive locations policy. As sports betting skyrockets, more Americans search for addiction help, according to a new study.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson. And today is Tuesday, February 18th, 2025. This is The Excerpt.
Today, taking a look at yesterday's flight that ended flipped upside down. Plus, why protesters hit the streets yesterday. And faith groups are suing the Trump administration over the elimination of ICE's sensitive locations policy.
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There's been another scary aviation incident, a Delta Airlines regional jet flipped upside down on arrival in Toronto yesterday, all 80 people on board the flight from Minneapolis survived and were accounted for, though 18 people on board were reported injured and transported to area hospitals. The airport said earlier yesterday that it was dealing with frigid temperatures and high winds as airlines attempted to catch up with missed flights following a weekend snowstorm. Experts said top-notch engineering, the size of the aircraft, and seat belts all likely played a factor in protecting people on board.
While it's extremely rare for an aircraft to flip on its back, they are engineered to handle it, said Mike McCormick, associate professor and program coordinator for air Traffic Management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. He said the structural elements of an aircraft are designed so that the wings and the tail will break off and away in the event of a tip over. And seats are designed to withstand impacts up to 16 times the force of gravity so they will remain in place when the plane is upside down. Experts have also given major props to the flight's cabin crew, which appeared to swiftly and efficiently evacuate the passengers. You can read more on usatoday.com.
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Thousands of protesters gathered around the country yesterday from outside the US Capitol and Washington to Texas and Colorado.
Audio:
Democracy is under attack, what do we do?
Stand up. Fight back.
When the Constitution is under attack? What do we do?
Stand up. Fight back.
Taylor Wilson:
I spoke with Paste BN national correspondent Terry Collins for more.
Hey there, Terry.
Terry Collins:
Hey, Taylor. How's it going?
Taylor Wilson:
Good. Good. Thanks for hopping on today, Terry. So would you just start by telling us about these protests we saw around the country yesterday? I mean, what exactly, Terry, were people protesting and who was out there?
Terry Collins:
The demonstrations held across the country yesterday were organized by the 50501 Movement, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one movement. Organizers say they started forming on various social media platforms last month. It's all in response to what organizers said the anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration after the President's series of executive orders, including those led by billionaire Elon Musk, who was overseeing the controversial DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Attendees who came yesterday range in age from 16 to 66. They held signs that said, "Not my President's Day" and "No King's Day." They chanted "stop the coup" and "no dictators."
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So Terry, this isn't the first time we've heard or seen protests during this Trump 2.0 era. How did these protests compare to other similar ones we've already seen so far during the second Trump administration?
Terry Collins:
These first demonstrations didn't attract the hundreds of thousands of protesters seen during the early days of Trump's administration in 2017, where reportedly hundreds of thousands of people participated in protests nationwide. 50501 estimates that there were close to 80 protests across 88 cities during its first round a couple of weeks ago.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. And were there any notable, I guess, political leaders or lawmakers out there, Terry?
Terry Collins:
Yeah, Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said he would attend the rally in Annapolis. The senator said he's been attacking Trump and Musk in what he calls efforts to harm the merit based civil service in order to implement a system of political cronyism. The senator said he'll continue to express his commitment to fight for federal workers' rights and he believe we're under threat by the Trump administration.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. And in terms of where this goes, I mean we saw this Florida protests on Monday. Is that the expectation as well for the rest of the week, Terry? I mean, just kind of where do we go from here?
Terry Collins:
I'm sure what we're witnessing is just the start of a growing movement, especially if the Trump administration continues its goal of downsizing the federal government by slashing jobs, cutting federal programs. The organizers for 50501 described Monday's protest as a critical moment, so I'm sure we're going to see more protests [inaudible 00:04:17] and the like to come.
Taylor Wilson:
Terry Collins is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you Terry.
Terry Collins:
Thanks, Taylor.
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Taylor Wilson:
Pope Francis remains in the hospital as doctors have changed treatment for his respiratory tract infection. He's been suffering from the infection for over a week and was admitted to a hospital in Rome on Friday. Last night, the Vatican said Francis was in stable condition with no fever. Vatican officials said he was able to do some work as well yesterday, but that he'll remain in hospital as long as necessary.
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Faith groups are suing the Trump administration over the elimination of ICE's sensitive locations policy. The original protections against border patrol targeting places like churches and schools has its roots in one of the oldest high schools in El Paso, Texas. I spoke with El Paso Times' border and immigration reporter Jeff Abbott to learn more.
Jeff, thank you so much for hopping on today.
Jeff Abbott:
Thank you so much for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So Jeff, let's just start with the lawsuit itself. I mean, what is the suit center on and who are the major players here?
Jeff Abbott:
27 church religious organizations and churches from both Jewish and evangelical and other Christian denominations including the Mennonites, the Quakers, and a number of other groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over concerns of the reversal or really the elimination of the sensitive locations policy, which has been in place for years, which has protected churches, schools, hospitals, other places that provide public services from intends or really any forms of immigration enforcement by ICE.
Taylor Wilson:
Okay. And then Bowie High School is right here in the headline of this story, tell us a little bit about Bowie for folks not from the El Paso area and kind of its place in this conversation.
Jeff Abbott:
Bowie High School is a historic school that's literally right on the border. You can see what is right from the football stadium. It's across the highway. In the early '90s Border Patrol did a lot of very intense immigration enforcement there. This is before ICE existed, so this is the INS, the Immigration Nationalists and Services. This is Border Patrol. ICE was formed in 2003 after 9/11.
But Border Patrol did a lot of enforcement in this area and there was racial profiling of people of Mexican heritage, Latino heritage, and basically it kept escalating. There was an incident where the football coach was stopped by a poor patrol who had a gun pulled on them. The coach had two students in the car. Eventually, the situation was de-escalated, but this contributed to a lawsuit.
As people were being racially profiled, they began speaking amongst themselves and they began to realize that everyone was going through the same thing. So they filed a lawsuit against Border Patrol for this heavy-handed immigration enforcement policy. And that was '92.
But in 93, the new chief of the Border Patrol sector there issued a sensitive locations policy where any Asians had to get special permission to do any type of immigration enforcement operations in churches, schools, funerals, other places like that. In many regards, this was one of the first. It should be important to note, and this is actually not in the article, but there's been groups organizing for these sensitive location policies for decades, going back to the 1980s. So this current lawsuit is part of a trend that you see going back for years. People are trying to protect the immigrants, especially within church communities because the churches provide social services, they provide houses of worship, et cetera. So trying to protect their congregations and their communities.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Well, makes sense. Fast-forward to this moment, Jeff, and we've seen a lot already moving through the courts here early in the second Trump administration. Can you just update us a little bit? Stepping back from this lawsuit specifically, I mean, how have we seen the courts way in so far really when it comes to immigration and the Trump administration writ large?
Jeff Abbott:
There's been a number of lawsuits that have been carried out. The major ones that I can remember off the top of my head, because there's been so many of them, are the various courts who've actually blocked the Trump administration's attempts to reverse birthright citizenship. Up to this point, there have been four courts that have blocked the executive order.
There's also a group in El Paso called Las Americas, which has been challenging the administration's attempts to basically dismantle the asylum system. And those are two of the major cases. But there's also other groups that have voiced their concerns, including the El Paso diocese has voiced the concern with the reversal of the sensitive location's policy. And even the Pope has spoken out against the Trump administration's attacks on immigrants.
Taylor Wilson:
So in terms of this suit itself, do we have any sense on how this moves forward from here?
Jeff Abbott:
There has to be a federal hearing in the Washington, DC District Court. I don't know when it's going to go before the court. I spoke with my contacts and they couldn't give me an actual date of when it was going to be heard by the judge.
Taylor Wilson:
Jeff Abbott covers the border and immigration for the El Paso Times, part of the Paste BN Network. Thank you, Jeff.
Jeff Abbott:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
After the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a ban on sports gambling, the betting has spread to all but a dozen states. But a new study links its proliferation to a rise in the number of people who might be addicted to gambling. A study published yesterday in the peer-reviewed JAMA Internal Medicine reported a 23% jump in people searching for the phrase, "Am I addicted to gambling?" Meanwhile, sports wagering skyrocketed from $4.9 billion in 2017 to more than 121 billion in 2023. And most of those bets were on mobile apps or other online sites. The study said 94% of sports bets in 2023 were online. You can dig deeper into the study's findings with a link in today's show notes.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.