Nobody could really want to see "young lives wasted", so David Cameron was on safe ground yesterday when he called for the adoption process to be speeded up, particularly with regard to mixed-race and black children.

The most alarming incident that ever interrupted our House of Commons was a purple flour bomb thrown at Tony Blair – very tame compared with a ghastly incident that brought prime minister's questions to a bloody halt in Armenia in October 1999.

Murderous monologues from the citizens of Making-Ends-Meet

The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday renewed his personal attack on Nicolas Sarkozy, accusing the French President of racism and anti-Turkish behaviour after the French parliament passed a Bill making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide. Mr Sarkozy's office said that the law would come into effect in two weeks.

Turkey threatened more sanctions for France if the Senate in Paris votes to make it a crime to deny the 20th-century killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks constitutes a genocide.

A French Senate panel dealt a blow Wednesday to the government's plans to make it illegal to deny that mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago amounted to genocide.

A Christmas cleaning of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem descended into violence as scuffles broke out between rival Christian clerics zealously guarding denominational turf at the holy site.

A Christmas cleaning of the Church of the Nativity turned into scuffles today between rival Christian clerics zealously guarding denominational turf at the holy site.

Turkey responded to French genocide allegations with a charge of its own yesterday, accusing France of committing genocide during its colonial occupation of Algeria.

Just for a moment, put aside the current Franco-Turkish war over the 20th century's first Holocaust – of the Armenians – and remember that Nicolas Sarkozy's electoral venality (500,000 French-Armenian voters want to hear him tell the truth) and Turkish nationalism (which feeds on holocaust denial) make a bad cocktail.

Tony Wheeler follows the 14-point star to a place of pilgrimage – and dispute

Turkey has retaliated against France after MPs there passed a bill to make it a crime to deny the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by Ottoman Turks amounted to genocide.

Republic of Ireland boss Giovanni Trapattoni could head into next month's Euro 2012 play-offs without first-choice striker pairing Robbie Keane and Kevin Doyle.

The music for piano written in the 1920s by the exotic guru-figure Gurdjieff and his pupil, the Russian modernist-composer Thomas de Hartmann is returned to the east from whence it came in these startling new arrangements for an orchestra of folk instruments by fellow Armenian Levon Eskenian.