How can our understanding of mortality shape the way we live? Palliative care doctors and death doulas share the lessons they have learned

We will all face death one day, but our attitude towards this is individual. How can our understanding of mortality shape our approach to life? Here, palliative care doctors and death doulas share what they know about the end – and how it informs the way they live.

This summer’s extreme weather and wars in Iran and Ukraine have made our need for food stockpiles more pressing than ever

When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes long-term plans, they call it communism. Any sustained state intervention attracts the prefix “Soviet-style”, and triggers vicious attacks across the billionaire media. So governments have developed a bias against long-term thinking. This may explain why we no longer maintain strategic food reserves.

In Britain, where soils have parched, market analysts warn that we’re facing the most severe food security crisis in decades. In normal years, crop failures at home don’t threaten our security, thanks to global trade. This is one of the reasons why hunger and famines are rarer and less deadly than they used to be. But this is not a normal year, because the problem is now global.

Despite outcry from musicians, AI slop is creeping into the charts as record labels scramble to adapt to a new normal where hits can be made at the click of a button

This year, the battle for song of the summer has been eclipsed by a much more complicated – some would even say disturbing – debate. That’s because we find ourselves asking not “What’s the song of the summer?” but rather “Is the song of the summer even real?”

Among the top contenders for the title is Fenix Flexin’s Rubberz, a single released in June that has ascended to No 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and racked up more than 35m Spotify streams. It’s not the sort of fare Fenix usually cooks up. The artist is known for his trap music as part of the rap duo Shoreline Mafia, but Rubberz is a mildly noirish, 80s-inspired synth-pop track featuring a voice nothing like his. The song has drawn comparisons to Morrissey, but it more closely resembles Men at Work’s Down Under, or a Weird Al Yankovic parody of Men at Work. It’s pretty awful. But more importantly, it has an uncanny quality to it. It sounds off.

Biological factors mean a child’s core temperature rises faster than an adult’s – and that can result in a medical emergency

Children and babies are more vulnerable in heatwaves than healthy adults. As temperatures rise again, how do we keep children safe?

In the 1990s, the photographer took portraits of punks, partiers and late-night lovers on the underground. His images show city life before smartphones – when people still had to rush to make the final train

Mark McEvoy’s tube photographs, taken in London Underground carriages at around 11pm on Friday and Saturday nights from 1992 to 1995, capture moments that may seem superficially frivolous, but might be the most significant of our lives. These are the golden hours of the end of the week, where friendships are found and sealed; gabbled conversation rolls along with the sway of the carriages; and new lovers meet up en route for an encounter that may turn out to be a fleeting one-off, or in fact the beginnings of a lifelong companionship.

All are swept along in the scramble to hop onboard the last tube – a panic that ended when all-night services began on some lines 10 years ago this month. The night tube arrived when my time of going out all weekend was fading, and gave me a slight feeling of missing out. Looking at photos of other people’s social lives can make one feel like that too; at the same time, it’s not hard to see ourselves in these tired, happy and thoughtful faces.

When exiled Russian opposition campaigner Igor Rogov was accused of working for the Kremlin, his friends were shocked. Could this young activist have really been an undercover agent?

• The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order

The police came for Igor Rogov because someone had mailed him a bomb-making kit. The eclectic mix of items – a chrome vacuum flask, a pair of marker pens, a power bank and a bottle of antifreeze fluid – might have seemed innocuous to an untrained eye, but Poland was on high alert in July 2024. Two months previously, a shopping mall in Warsaw had burned down in an arson attack; an Ikea in neighbouring Lithuania was also set on fire. Authorities believed it was a sabotage campaign masterminded by Russia’s intelligence services, intended to sow panic and undermine support for Ukraine. They feared it was only a matter of time before the Kremlin escalated further.

A security officer at the parcel company’s warehouse was suspicious enough about the package to call in the authorities, who arrived with sniffer dogs and special equipment. X-rays of the marker pens showed they had 1980s Soviet-produced detonators concealed inside, while the flask had a false bottom containing a sachet of metallic powder. The power bank appeared to have been tampered with in some way, and a probe of the bottled liquid showed it contained a highly volatile nitroglycerine solution. With the right expertise, the items could be turned into a powerful bomb.

Northern Ireland best performing with 30.7% of grades being As and A*s but Wales and England close behind

• A-level results – latest updates

Sixth-formers have basked in a summer of record-breaking exam results in academic and vocational subjects, allowing more than a quarter of a million 18-year-olds to go on to higher education.

The proportion of students in England gaining the highest grade of A* in A-level subjects rose to 9.7%, up from 9.4% last year, setting a new record outside the pandemic era, when exams were scrapped.

The Reform UK leader resigned as the MP for Clacton at the start of July and forced a byelection

Yesterday Michael Shanks, a UK energy minister, criticised John Swinney, the SNP Scottish first miniser, for trying to get Andy Burnham to lift a ban on the Chinese firm Ming Yang building a wind turbine factory in the Highlands.

Today Stephen Gethins, energy minister in the Scottish government, defended his boss. In an interview on BBC Radio Scotland’s Breakfast programme, Gethins said:

The first minister is right to ask about this. This is 1,500 jobs in the north of Scotland. It’s also an area that is being transformed by that move towards offshore renewables, Scotland continuing to contribute.

It’s an area which is, in general terms, important for security. Scotland is contributing to European energy security, which is a concern across Europe when you speak to leaders there.

Why should I be judged, today or in history in the future, by Sky News and their ilk? Why should they be the people that decide my fate when, as I repeat, I’ve done nothing wrong.

I’m being judged as being guilty every single day by newspapers, broadcasters and elsewhere.

A former UK government scientific adviser warned amid the ‘shattering’ heat that worse is still to come

Met Office has just offered an update on temperatures across the UK, with several stations already reporting temperatures above 30C – and it’s not even 11am.

It’s 30.4C in Wych Cross, 30.3C in Charlwood, 30.2C at Kenly Airfield.

Mina Smallman, whose daughters were killed in north London park in 2020, says force ‘decides who matters’

The Metropolitan police does not take all cases of violence against women seriously and instead “decides who matters”, the mother of two murdered women has said.

Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were killed in a north London park in 2020, also said Britain’s biggest police force was incapable of change. Two police officers were jailed in 2021 after taking photographs of the dead bodies of her daughters and sharing the images in WhatsApp groups, referring to them as “dead birds”.