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?