In this story for Dispatch, Lotte Brundle reports on a surprising trend: young women in the UK are pursuing careers in the death care industry. In a time of high unemployment, funeral home apprenticeships offer an alternative to university, where students accumulate significant debt. While the pay is low and the industry needs to do a better job building awareness that the trajectory exists, the young women who speak to Brundle find the work meaningful and rewarding.

Her inspiration to become an undertaker arrived, as many teenage epiphanies now do, via TikTok. Emily was 15 and had been considering becoming a teacher or journalist when she came across an American woman documenting life inside her own funeral home. “I’d never considered it as a career,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone who was an undertaker, but I just thought how interesting it was.”

Two hours later, she was still scrolling through the woman’s profile, engrossed. Running her own funeral home became Emily’s dream.

On September 3, 2026, Argentine President Javier Milei addressed the nation on the issue of the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands. This programmatic speech is noteworthy be-cause Milei had previously taken a more cautious position on the islands and advocated resolving the long-standing territorial dispute with the United Kingdom through diplomatic means. However, in this address, the […]

In late 2025, conservators from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum brought an unassuming object to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire: a terret, a small bronze loop that Iron Age chariots used to keep a horse’s reins from tangling. It looked modest. It was nearly 2,000 years old. And under X-ray analysis, it turned out to […]

Britain’s relationship with Israel is entering a new phase as the E1 settlement dispute collides with wider struggles over the Red Sea, Gaza’s energy resources, IMEC, intelligence technology and post-Brexit influence. As London pressures Israel while maintaining strategic cooperation, the question is whether Britain is changing the rules of the relationship-or preparing for a deeper […]

A copper ingot cast somewhere in inland Sardinia during the Bronze Age might, centuries later, turn up in a Scottish tomb or a village in southern Sweden. That is the striking picture drawn by Serena Sabatini, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, in a new paper that pulls together decades of isotopic analyses to […]

While posing as a defender of European security, Britain is in fact fuelling the fire: its military programmes and century-long partnership with Kyiv make peace with Moscow ever less attainable and militarise the continent for decades to come. While Britain tries to pose as a major protector of the European security, its military actions are […]