MPs will vote this afternoon on the final stage of the assisted dying bill, which would allow terminally ill adults with less than six months to live to end their lives with medical assistance. The bill’s proposer, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, says she’s “confident” it will pass, though at least a dozen MPs who backed the legislation or abstained in the last vote plan to oppose it. The foreign ministers of Britain, Germany and France are meeting their Iranian counterpart in Geneva today for the first high-level talks since Israel attacked Iran last week. Donald Trump says he will decide whether to join Israeli strikes “within the next two weeks”. Too much sleep could be worse for you than not enough. Scientists who analysed data from more than 2.1 million people found that those who regularly get less than the recommended seven hours of shut-eye are 14% more likely to die from any cause, but those who generally kip for more than nine hours are 34% likelier to croak.

The perils of meddling in the Middle East

More or less every US president in the past 50 years has been undone by “ill-fated embroilment in the Greater Middle East”, says Gerard Baker in The Times. For Jimmy Carter it was the US embassy hostage crisis in Iran; for Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra “debacle” and the 1983 bombing of a Beirut barracks that killed 241 Americans. Bill Clinton’s underwhelming response to Islamist terror – from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 to the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen seven years later – “led directly” to 9/11. George W Bush’s legacy will forever be stained by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For Barack Obama, it was failures in Libya and his refusal to enforce his “red line” warning to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Joe Biden’s presidency was “doomed” after his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

You could argue the only president to achieve any sustained success in the region – besides perhaps George Bush Sr – is Donald Trump in his first term. He did that by staying out of wars and keeping intervention to “surgical” strikes with limited objectives, such as the 2020 drone attack that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. You can see why Trump might think a few “bunker-busting” bombs in Iran would be a similarly limited operation. But that’s exactly the sort of belief that led so many of his predecessors into “hopeless and heartbreaking wars”. What if the Iranian regime survives and launches retaliatory assaults on American military bases or terror attacks in the US itself? Would that lead to “more steps up the escalation ladder”? That’s the question America’s commander-in-chief must ask himself: how can he be sure this time will be different?

The MCC relaxed its dress code at Lord’s on Wednesday, “lest men fry in their egg-and-bacon jackets”, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. But not all places are as compromising. During one heatwave at Henley Royal Regatta, an announcement was made: “Members may remove their jackets – gentlemen will prefer not to.”

The gardening website Almanac has put together a helpful “companion planting chart” explaining which garden vegetables make “good neighbours”. Beans, for example, work well next to sunflowers, which act like a “living trellis”, and rosemary, because it “repels common garden pests”. Cucumbers tend to thrive next to radishes, which are able to stave off “cucumber beetles”; peas benefit lettuce by adding lots of nitrogen to the soil. And the perfect garlic-to-potato ratio is 3:1 – that provides the best disease suppression and the most bountiful yields. Find more pairings here.

How I miss the human touch

A new book by the American writer Christine Rosen – The Extinction of Experience – details the ways in which we are “losing touch with the real world”, says Mary Wakefield in The Spectator. All the scrolling and texting means we’re fast forgetting the look and feel of the life – “unmediated by screens” – that we evolved for. What happens to society when we’ve sunk so deep into our “separate, virtual worlds” that we feel no comradeship with those around us? The little wave of gratitude a pedestrian gives a stopped car at a zebra crossing is the “bedrock of civilisation”. Today, barely one in five does it. Nobody looks at each other in the street. Worse, police in America and the UK have had to issue statements begging people who witness an assault to call for help before they record it on their phones. Rosen recounts the story of a woman in New York who saw a man about to jump from a bridge and turned around to take a selfie.

It’s remarkable how often my friends and I find ourselves reminiscing about our “pre-smartphone, reality-based childhoods”, like refugees remembering a lost homeland. We look back fondly on the “endless waiting” and the various ways we passed the endless time. We became deeply involved in the world around us, examining paving stones, peering into cracks and picking satisfying paint flakes from walls. We bit our own forearms, “inspecting the little dented marks”; spent hours face-down on lawns, studying grass. If you’d asked us back then, we’d have said we were bored to death. But in retrospect, “it was sort of wonderful”.

Deloitte US has come up with a new way to help employees handle stress, says Polly Thompson in Business Insider: Lego. The plastic bricks have been added to the company’s “approved list” of what workers can spend their $1,000 annual “well-being subsidy” on. “Lego?!?!? Finally!” joked one employee on an internal chat, while others commented on now being able to “rationalise” buying the $850 Millennium Falcon Star Wars set. Other new additions to the approved list include puzzles, spa treatments, fitness classes, pillows, and games consoles such as the Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation.

Turning the world’s closed coal mines into solar plants could generate enough energy to power a country as “big and power hungry” as Germany, says Damien Gayle in The Guardian. Researchers from the American NGO Global Energy Monitor identified 312 surface coal mines that have closed since 2020 and 134 more which are likely to be shut down by the end of the decade. They calculated that if all these were covered in solar panels rather than left as “wastelands”, they could generate 300GW of renewable energy and create hundreds of thousands of jobs in former coal communities.

It’s the first “artificial solar eclipse”, says Alex Wilkins in the New Scientist. The effect was achieved by two European Space Agency satellites flying 150 metres apart for several hours with one perfectly lined up in front of the other. The first craft, the Occulter, carried a 1.4-metre-wide disc, completely blocking the sunlight for the second probe, the Coronograph. The precision operation – their positioning was accurate to within a single millimetre – is part of a mission to improve our understanding of the sun’s corona, the outermost part of its atmosphere, which can reach temperatures “millions of degrees hotter than its surface”.