Israel’s campaign to destroy Iran’s leadership is relentless, says The Wall Street Journal. At first, Israeli forces were “systematically” hitting headquarters and command centres used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp, the Basij militia and special police forces. But then the targets broadened. The Israelis waited for those bombed out of their HQs to regroup at local sport complexes, as per their backup plan – and then launched devastating attacks on the sports complexes. The country’s top security official, Ali Larijani, was killed in a missile strike this week, four days after strolling confidently through a Tehran rally in his first public appearance of the war. The leader of the feared Basij militia, Gholamreza Soleimani, was taken out the same night in a wooded area of Tehran following a tip-off from “ordinary Iranians”.

These attacks are hammering rank-and-file morale. Some members of the security forces are so scared of their homes being hit that they have taken to sleeping in their cars, in buses or at mosques. Police are setting up their checkpoints and roadblocks beneath highway bridges to avoid being targeted by the deadly drones “loitering” in the skies above. Israeli intelligence officers have even taken to calling individual Iranian commanders, threatening them and their families by name if they don’t stand aside in the event of an uprising. “We know everything about you,” a Mossad agent can be heard telling a police commander in Farsi in a recording. “You are on our blacklist.” “Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the man replies. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”

If I ever had to film a sex scene, says Carol Midgley in The Times, I can’t decide whether an intimacy co-ordinator would make things better or worse. It would be nice to have someone batting for you, telling the director: “No, Carol doesn’t want to pull the orgasm face again.” But there’s also a danger it could prolong the whole ordeal if they kept butting in to say they’d seen an “accidental flash of tuppence”. The actress Rebecca Ferguson, who has a “marathon bedroom scene” with Cillian Murphy in the new Peaky Blinders film, says she finds them “off-putting”, and Gwyneth Paltrow felt the same about her sex scenes with Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. “Girl,” said Paltrow, “I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.”

Can I suggest a radical solution? “Bin sex scenes altogether.” There are more full frontal appendages on show these days than you can shake a stick at. More often than not, these “fist-chewingly awful” moments are just “lazy filler” in a shoddy script that forces you to dive for the remote if you are watching with a teen or your Aunty Val. You could still have all the romance and snogging, but as soon as the dog is about to meet the rabbit, so to speak, the camera could just pan away to the sound of violins like it did in the 1950s. No need for nipple daisies, merkins and those special “gentleman socks”. No need for half-deflated netballs. And the truth is, apart from a few “seedy mouth-breathers”, no one would really care.

When my recent flight out of Dubai was cancelled due to drone strikes, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, I decided to make the most of it by going on a snorkelling trip in the Strait of Hormuz. I chartered a dhow – a 45ft wooden ship lavishly arrayed with red carpets and cushions – and we ventured a mile or so into the water, “though we could have gone much farther without any derring-do”. A pod of humpback dolphins swarmed around us, leaping out of the water and drifting along the bow, and we meandered through the rugged inlets known as khors, stopping to snorkel among the neon damselfish. At one point, the captain eased into the water himself “and speared a five-pound cuttlefish for his supper”. Towards the end of the day, I swam ashore and hiked up a cliffside for a view out over the rugged landscapes of the Persian Gulf. In the peaceful shade, it was easy to forget that “World War Three might be starting on the other side of the cliffs”.