Guardian Digest

Diners were tucking into their upmarket Indian lunch when the Ice agents slid through the restaurant’s back fence. Armed with stun guns and clad in stab vests, the 11-strong unit blocked off every entrance before moving in on their target: Mandira’s Kitchen. This wasn’t a scene from California or Texas. It happened near Guildford, England, among the rolling Surrey Hills. Before the Home Office’s immigration compliance and enforcement (Ice) officers stormed the restaurant in September, they came up with a codeword in the event they were attacked with any weapons that might be at hand in a…

Shafeeq Masih* faced an impossible choice: remain trapped for ever by the debt he owed to the owner of the brick kiln where he worked, just outside the Pakistani city of Lahore, or try to pay it off by selling the only thing he had of any value: one of his kidneys. The brick kiln owner was harassing him to repay the debt, which he claimed stood at 900,000 rupees (£2,420), but however hard he worked, it just kept growing. Masih knew the owner was fiddling the books but says, “whatever they put in writing, we can’t question that. They see us as slaves. We just have to obey.” With his children…

A leading Irish metals refinery is part of an international aluminium supply chain that appears to conclude with shipments to arms producers feeding the Kremlin’s war machine in Ukraine, leaked records and public data suggests. Trading records show that shipments to Russian smelters from Aughinish Alumina, which is located on the Shannon estuary in the west of Ireland and has been owned by the Russian aluminium group Rusal since 2006, have increased sharply since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ireland exported $243m (£180m) of alumina to Russia in 2022, according to the Observatory of…

Alagesan, 35, needs liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to run his roadside drink and snack shop in Coimbatore, India, but with the fuel shortage since the US-Israel attacks on Iran, he worries his business could fold. “I am far away from the Middle East, but my life is affected,” he said. “The gas cylinder is not available because of the war. I don’t know what to do.” With the strait of Hormuz – through which one-fifth of the world’s oil travels – nearly impassable, the price of oil has risen to about $100 (£52, A$143) a barrel on international markets. The cost of gasoline/petrol and other…

Eid al-Fitr is meant to bring release. It comes at the end of Ramadan, after a month of fasting and prayer, and in Gaza it has always carried its own kind of joy. The day begins with prayer. Men and boys gather in clean clothes, neighbours congratulate one another, friends embrace, and supplications rise with the first light. Families return home for breakfast, then begin the long round of visits to sisters, daughters, aunts, uncles and neighbours. Children wait for eidiya, the money given to younger relatives. Coffee is poured, sweets are shared and doors remain open. This year, the rituals…

The primary unit of climate collapse is the zettajoule. If you have never heard of this term, you are not alone. Even scientists who work on a planetary scale struggle to relate the immensity of the change measured by this titanic unit of energy. What is a zettajoule? A zettajoule is a billion trillion joules. Typed out on a calculator or computer screen, the row of 21 zeros looks absurdly long – a train of seven carriages, each with three empty windows. Experts often have to resort to abstract terms like “unfathomable”, “almost beyond comprehension” and “really big” to ensure our tiny…