What happened
After weeks of back and forth, the House of Lords has finally passed Labour’s Employment Rights Bill. The legislation, a centrepiece of the government’s election platform, is expected to receive royal assent tomorrow. Its passage followed weeks of resistance from Conservative and crossbench members, forcing government ministers to compromise in order to meet their timetable and begin rolling out changes from April.

Who said what
This is “a historic day” for working people, said TUC general secretary Paul Nowak. Business secretary Peter Kyle said the reforms would modernise Britain’s employment framework and extend “dignity and respect” to millions.

But the “big quarrels over the workers’ rights bill have barely started”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Many critical details have been “deliberately left to be resolved in secondary legislation”.

What next?
The new laws will introduce guaranteed hours protections, curb fire-and-rehire practices, expand parental leave entitlements and strengthen union rights. Some elements, including unfair dismissal protections, have been scaled back, with further details still to come.

What happened
The Food Standards Agency has issued a major warning of allergy risk for certain “Dubai-style” chocolate products as it reviews samples from items currently on sale to ensure that they meet food safety standards.

Who said what
The bars are typically filled with pistachio, tahini and shredded filo pastry known as angel hair, said The Telegraph. But Rebecca Sudworth, director of policy at the food watchdog, said some “contain peanut and sesame that aren’t declared on the label”. Such products are “dangerous” to sufferers of “all allergies, not just peanut and sesame”.

To meet soaring demand, unscrupulous manufacturers have been churning out “cheap” and “dangerous knock-offs” laced with undeclared allergens, as well as “illegal food dyes, toxins produced by moulds and even chemicals thought to be carcinogenic”, said the Daily Mail.

What next?
Jessica Merryfield, head of policy and campaigns at the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, has urged all food businesses to “take immediate steps to comply” with labelling requirements. For those without an allergy, Dubai-style chocolate products remain safe to consume.

The world’s supply of glacial ice is quickly approaching an alarming milestone. In a striking study published this week in Nature Climate Change, researchers modelling multiple warming scenarios predicted that the number of glaciers that disappear annually is set to dramatically increase in the coming decades.

The paper introduces the concept of “peak glacier extinction”, defined by researchers as the year in which the “largest number of glaciers is projected to disappear between now and the end of the century”. With the Alps leading our planet’s glacial disappearing act, the next few years may be a turning point for much of the Earth’s ice.

Although typical glacier studies concentrate on “mass and area loss”, the new research focuses on the disappearance of “individual glaciers” – a trend that “directly threatens culturally, spiritually and touristically significant landscapes”, said the study’s authors.

Unsurprisingly, areas featuring the “smallest and fastest-melting glaciers” are “most vulnerable”, with about 3,200 glaciers in central Europe set to shrink by 87% by the coming century – “even if the global temperature rise is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius”.

The study shows that we are at a “point of no return”, Eric Rignot, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, told CNN. “Reforming a glacier would take decades if not centuries.” The researchers behind the study hope that their paper – along with an accompanying database showing the “projected survival rate of each of the world’s 211,000 glaciers” – will help “assess climate impacts on local economies and ecosystems”, said Politico.