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Indian police say more than 200 bodies have been recovered after a plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad. Most of the 242 people on board were Indian or British. DW has the latest.

A Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, en route to London’s Gatwick Airport. Some 242 people were on board

Flight 171, including 169 Indians, 53 Britons, 7 Portuguese, and 1 Canadian

The cause of the crash has yet to be determined

Ahmedabad police have said more than 200 bodies have been recovered, and there appear to be no survivors. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the incident was ‘heartbreaking beyond words.’ The crash is the first fatal incident involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner had strong safety record before Ahmedabad crash

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which crashed in Ahmedabad, is one the world’s most advanced aircraft.

Unlike Boeing’s 737 Max series, the Dreamliner has had a strong safety record, with no fatal accidents until Thursday’s crash, in which all 242 people on board died.

The plane that crashed in Ahmedabad is the smallest of three types of 787, and was delivered in 2014.

The 787 Dreamliner entered commercial service in 2011. Boeing has sold more than 2,500 787s, of which 47 were sold to Air India.

The plane can normally hold up to 248 passengers, while the larger 787-9 can carry up to 296 people, according to Boeing.

The 787 is powered by twin engines, which are supplied by American firm GE Aerospace or Rolls-Royce from the UK.

The engines on the plane that crashed were provided by GE. In a post on X, GE said it was “deeply saddened” by the incident, adding that the company is “prepared to support our customer and the investigation.”

While this is the first fatal incident involving a Dreamliner, there have been previous accidents.

In July 2013, an Ethiopian Airlines flight, which had no one on board, caught fire while on the ground at London’s Heathrow airport after a short-circuit.

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Sperm have to wiggle vigorously to reach an egg, and that motion is key to a clever new fertility test. The technique, tested with bull semen and detailed in Advanced Materials Interfaces, harnesses physics to make fertility testing easier and more cost-effective—and, if it works for human sperm, too, it might eventually help people tackle some conception issues from home.

“Fifty percent of families are facing a big challenge in terms of addressing fertility,” says Sushanta Mitra, a mechanical engineer at the University of Waterloo and co-author of the recent study. “Our aim is to democratize that process.”

Current laboratory tests for male fertility involve examining a semen sample under a microscope. Experts check the sperm cells’ liveliness, which is considered a good proxy for fertility because the gametes need to quickly swim more than 1,000 times their body length to reach an egg. But these lab tests can be expensive and time-consuming. Meanwhile, at-home tests tend to be less accurate because they often only detect the presence of certain proteins in sperm rather than assessing how the cells move.

The newly described method uses basic physics to measure sperm activity without costly equipment. The researchers placed droplets of bull semen at the end of a flexible plastic strip suspended next to a water-resistant surface. Next, they moved the surface toward the drop until it made contact and then moved it back to its original position. They measured how strongly each semen droplet stuck to the surface, via weak hydrogen bonds, as it was pulled away. If many highly active sperm were wiggling around inside the fluid, the hydrogen bonds broke more quickly, disrupting the drop’s surface adhesion and making it break away earlier; the livelier the sperm, the less sticky the drop. “It’s exciting to be able to come up with a way to quantify sperm mobility at home,” says Stanford University urologist Tony Chen, who was not involved in the study.

Mitra and his team hope to develop this technique into a cheaper, easier and more accurate home fertility test. “There is a lot of stigma around male fertility,” Mitra says. Easier private testing could encourage people to evaluate semen quality more often, allowing them to check in while making lifestyle adjustments to perk up lethargic sperm, such as quitting smoking or reducing alcohol use. Such tests could also potentially be useful for breeding livestock.

The researchers’ next steps will be to standardize the tests and obtain benchmarks for different types of sperm, including human and bovine. Chen says clinical trials that evaluate droplets from many different patients will also be necessary to ensure the tests work with samples that have varying pH levels, white blood cell counts, and fructose concentrations. “There’s more than just sperm in semen,” he says.

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As immigration raids continued across the country, a curfew went into effect Tuesday night in Los Angeles, the epicenter of protests that spread coast to coast against the detention and removal of suspected undocumented migrants.

Mayor Karen Bass said the curfew, which begins at 8 p.m. and expires at 6 a.m. for an undetermined length of time, was necessary to quell unrest. “If you drive through downtown L.A., the graffiti is everywhere and has caused significant damages,” Bass said, adding that 29 businesses were looted Monday night alone.

Activists had also gathered in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere, rebuking the Trump administration’s tough stance against migrants and its aggressive round-up efforts, which Democratic leaders in California have criticized as contributing to a sense of fear across communities. 

NBC News has counted at least 25 rallies and demonstrations coast to coast since Monday. Some involved only a few dozen people, while others attracted thousands.

The protests took place as federal immigration raids continued nationwide Tuesday, including a “targeted enforcement operation” in Los Angeles, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as a raid at a meat processing facility in Omaha, Nebraska.

ICE posted a photo on X showing a person wearing military fatigues alongside federal agents, one with “DEA” emblazoned on his vest, standing near a handcuffed person, and a military Humvee painted in camouflage parked next to them. The arrest happened in Los Angeles, ICE said.

In Omaha, two businesses were targeted for federal immigration enforcement operations, local officials said. Mayor John Ewing Jr.’s office said federal agents arrested 80 people at Glenn Valley Foods and Lala Dairy.

Cellphone video of the scene at Glenn Valley Foods showed agents in green uniforms, camouflage clothing and plainclothes appearing to detain several workers, hands cuffed, in the facility’s lunchroom, where a motto was painted on a wall: “Together we achieve more.”

Chad Hartmann, a spokesperson for Glenn Valley Foods, said in a statement that federal agents searched the company’s facility “for persons believed to be using fraudulent documents to gain employment.”

He said that the company strives to operate within the law, that it is cooperating with agents and that it “is not being charged with any crime.”

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As president, Donald Trump pretty much checks all the warning boxes for an autocrat. Last September, Scientific American warned of Trump’s “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies,” that he “ignores the climate crisis” and has fondness for “unqualified ideologues,” whom he would appoint should he become president again. It’s now May, and sadly, that all checks out.

The U.S. is in a bad place and, scholars warn, looks to be headed for worse.

Worse even than Trump’s relentless attacks on science have been his administration’s assaults on the law. His officials have illegally fired federal workers, impounded congressional appropriations, and seized people off the street for deportations to foreign prisons, threatening the same for all U.S. citizens. “The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers, and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime,” law professor David Pozen of the Columbia University School of Law told the New York Times in April.

We should all be worried that the U.S. is headed toward an autocracy—government by one person, even without political science offering a warning. But scholarship on how nations descend into this unfortunate state, seen in places like Turkey and Hungary, might not surprise you with what it suggests about the U.S.

“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the country has embarked on the slippery slope toward autocracy,” concludes political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa, in a May report in Politics & Policy. Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants, and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes,

one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of the Dresden University of Technology. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.

The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.

The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case, Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.

The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.

That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power.

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Chinese exports of rare earth minerals, which are crucial for modern technology, were high on the agenda of the meetings.

Last month, Washington and Beijing agreed a temporary truce over trade tariffs, but each country has since accused the other of breaching the deal.

The US has said China has been slow to release exports of rare earth metals and magnets, which are essential for manufacturing everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, Washington has restricted China’s access to US goods such as semiconductors and other related technologies linked to artificial intelligence (AI).

“We have reached a framework to implement the Geneva consensus,” Lutnick told reporters.

“Once the presidents approve it, we will then seek to implement it,” he added.

The new round of negotiations followed a phone call between Donald Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping last week, which the US President described as a “very good talk”.

“The two sides have, in principle, reached a framework for implementing the consensus reached by the two heads of state during the phone call on June 5th and the consensus reached at the Geneva meeting,” China’s Vice Commerce Minister Li

When Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from a number of countries earlier this year, China was the hardest hit. Beijing responded with its own higher rates on US imports, and this triggered tit-for-tat increases that peaked at 145%.

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Top officials from the US and China have been meeting in London

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