David Cameron and William Hague were today involved in high-level international talks to ratchet up pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad in the wake of the massacre of more than 100 people, including women and small children.

A Foreign Office minister called for the international community to unite to take further action against Syria following the “revolting” massacre at Houla.

An emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council was convened last night to co-ordinate the international community's response to the growing bloodshed in Syria amid widespread condemnation of the Houla massacre, in which 116 people, including at least 34 children, were killed.

David Cameron is meeting leading business figures today after ministers hit out at companies over their unwillingness to invest in the future.

There was a brief ceremony at the House of Commons yesterday to mark the 200th anniversary of the murder of Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated. In The Daily Telegraph that same morning there was a letter marking the event from Lord Lexden, formerly known as Alistair Cooke, historian of the Conservative Party.

Take a very close look at the Queen's Speech. Its contents will have as much impact on the fate of the Coalition as will the state of the economy. I am not referring to yesterday's Queen's Speech, a ragbag of measures. I refer to the first legislative programme announced soon after the general election, the most radical Queen's Speech in recent history. The proposals announced then are being implemented now or in the coming months. They contain unexploded landmines that could erupt at any time as David Cameron also faces a fragile economy and the revelatory Leveson Inquiry.

The occasion was today’s launch of the Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights, and William Hague was keen not to let the media monopolise the questioning. So he turned to a lady sitting on the front row, among the great and the good at Lancaster House

The Foreign Secretary has denied that Neil Heywood, the British businessman thought to have been murdered in China, was a British secret agent.

A Bahraini politician who defended the Gulf state's government's torture and jailing of doctors was invited to privately discuss bilateral security cooperation with the UK by a London think-tank last month.

Britain will provide a further £500,000 to support Syria's political opposition in the face of president Bashar Assad's regime, the Foreign Secretary said.

Judith Tebbutt was kidnapped from a resort island on the Kenyan coast on September 11 2011 by Somali pirates, who killed her husband David during the attack.

If Iran obtains nuclear weapons capability, "I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons".

Warnings from Syrian activists of a humanitarian catastrophe in Homs grew more desperate today as government forces resumed shelling an opposition stronghold in the restive central city, where hundreds have died in a week long siege.

G overnments and commentators keen on promoting a war against Iran should be stridently opposed, not so much because of the threat to world peace, but because their reasons display a shocking lack of imagination. The most common one is that Iran has "Weapons of Mass Destruction". How pathetic to pick the same excuse twice in a row. They should make it more interesting, by revealing evidence that Ahmadinejad has built a Terminator, or plans to fill the Strait of Hormuz with a giant Alka-Seltzer so the Persian Gulf fizzes over Kuwait.