Research suggests difference in life expectancy between men with highest and lowest quality is nearly three years

Sperm may be the canaries in the coalmine for male health, according to research that reveals men with higher-quality semen live longer.

Danish scientists analysed samples from nearly 80,000 men and found that those who produced more than 120 million swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5 million.

House speaker orders Democratic congressman Al Green to be removed from chamber for early disruption to Trump’s speech

• Full report: Trump says administration ‘just getting started’

Donald Trump’s speech tonight at the front of the House chamber will look just like a State of the Union, but it will actually be a joint address to Congress.

Trump, like all presidents going back to Ronald Reagan, have given an address to Congress early in their term.

International development committee warns of the potential damage cuts may cause in letter to the PM

A cross-party group of MPs has written to Keir Starmer expressing “deep concern” about cuts to the UK’s aid budget, as ministers brace for a potentially stormy debate on Foreign Office spending on Wednesday.

The international development committee warned of the damage the cuts may cause in a letter to the prime minister written by its Labour chair, Sarah Champion. The move will undermine the UK’s soft power and have “dire consequences” for the world’s poorest, it claims.

International development committee warns of the potential damage cuts may cause in letter to the PM

A cross-party group of MPs has written to Keir Starmer expressing “deep concern” about cuts to the UK’s aid budget, as ministers brace for a potentially stormy debate on Foreign Office spending on Wednesday.

The international development committee warned of the damage the cuts may cause in a letter to the prime minister written by its Labour chair, Sarah Champion. The move will undermine the UK’s soft power and have “dire consequences” for the world’s poorest, it claims.

Shona McCarthy says public authorities have routinely ignored needs of world’s largest arts festival

The Edinburgh festival fringe should be given the same status as major sporting events like the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games, its outgoing chief executive has said.

Shona McCarthy, who stands down this week after nine years running the fringe, said its needs were routinely ignored by public authorities, who expected it to fend for itself despite its status as the world’s largest arts festival.

National Gallery, London
This epochal exhibition is full of works so intimate and expressive that the painters of a medieval Italian city 700 years ago suddenly seem close at hand

Seven centuries ago a poet penned the most ecstatic art review ever written. Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, had commissioned the Sienese artist Simone Martini to paint a portrait of his beloved, Laura. The result was so marvellous, he wrote, that if all the famous artists of ancient Greece “competed for a thousand years they wouldn’t have seen a tiny bit of the beauty that’s conquered my heart”.

Petrarch’s rave review has it right. Conquering the heart is what Martini and other 14th-century painters from Siena do in the National Gallery’s devastatingly exact, epochal exhibition about the moment western art came alive. Simone’s painting of Laura is lost but you see why he was the artist for the job. He is so expressive, so tender, exploding any idea of medieval art as remote.