Salut!

Pussy Riot exclusive: Judge Syrova, Putin and a shabby justice that travels

Image: Yuri Ostromentsky

Journalists sometimes get things wrong or adopt questionable methods. Courts - and the law in general - do likewise, with police, judges and lawyers sharing the responsibility, though their risk of being investigated over many months by Lord Justice Leveson is slight.

The despicable two-year sentences inflicted on members of the Russian punk trio Pussy Riot uphold a dishonourable tradition that knows no international boundaries. In the UK, think Timothy Evans, the Guildford Four, Maguires, Birmingham Six, extraditions. Overseas? Mickey Mouse sentencing in multiples of life expectancy in the US and more recently The Hague, IRA kangaroo courts (not so long ago), alleged adulterers stoned to death in Mali (now).

There are many, many more examples of miscarriages of justice or scandalous sentences passed. And just as there are examples - Judge Timothy Workman in the Lotfi Raissi case - of judges and lawyers striving to prevent or remedy them, journalists often play their part in putting these aberrations right.

Of course you would have known nothing of the disproportionate punishment of Pussy Riot's conduct, offensive to some, maybe many, but no more, without the existence of a free-ish press in its different forms.

And in another Salut! exclusive, following our disclosure of the draft Leveson recommendations in favour of strengthening press freedom, Judge Marina Syrova now explains Vladimir Putin's decision, sorry her decision, that Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, should be carted off to a harsh gulag for staging a protest in a Russian Orthodox cathedral against the church's support for Putin.

(Nearly) all the presidents - and their men - soak up the Riviera sun

Rioting in Amiens, zero growth, Syria, widespread job fears.Plenty of dossiers chauds await Francois Hollande. But Mr Normal has been rubbing shoulders with two predecessors among the millions of other M/Mme/Mlle Tout le Mondes holidaying in the Var ...

A great son of Ulster: Neil Johnston RIP

Today I was going to forget about Lord Leveson, Mitt Romney and the Mormons and write a jolly little piece about the sudden congestion of French presidents on holiday in the Var.

François Hollande is taking the air - and keeping an eye on Valérie's tweeting - on the seafront of my own Le Lavandou, Nicolas Sarkozy is next door in Cap Nègre at Chateau Bruni and old Jacques Chirac is back supping his favourite apéritif, le Tomate (generous on the Pernod), to wash down shrimps, foie gras and salmon amuses gueules in Saint-Tropez.

This would all have amused Neil Johnston, about whom I have decided to write instead.

Manacled Mormons and Mitt Romney's French connection

As a function of age and experience, I cannot hear the word Mormon without thinking back to Kirk Anderson, Joyce McKinney and the court case that hugely entertained the British nation (or scandalised it as The Guardian has primly suggested) in 1977.

Shock Leveson exclusive: report 'to boost press freedom'

Image: NS Newsflash

The imagination has been working overtime. I even dreamed that the Government was launching equally intensive inquiries into the working practices of lawyers, plumbers, accountants, football managers and agents, garages, public relations officers, company directors, estate agents and police officers ...

Lord Justice Leveson comes down heavily on the side of press freedom in a draft of his report seen by Salut!