Salut!

Missing the Geldof wedding but lunching like stars on Marseille's Calanques

Although Bob Geldof lives just down the road - well, OK, a few miles down the road, but we're close enough - my invitation to what Var-Matin calls "a sort of re-confirmation" of his wedding in April to Jeanne Marine must have been lost in the post.

So as Jagger and his ex-Jerry Hall (she's an even nearer neighbour when not on Richmond hill), Sarah Ferguson, Kate Moss, Bono, Demi Moore and Richard Branson joined in the revelries at Le Rayol-Canadel, where the couple have their home, we went west.

Migrants, refugees, Christianity - and a warped form of Islam

It seems like something we read about in history books, of times centuries ago. But of course, persecution on grounds of faith has never really gone away. Muslims are the chief casualties of Islamist terror, as the evidence of weekly atrocities demonstrates, but Christians are suffering, too* ...

Le Grand Tour: Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Menton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Cap d'Ail, Monaco

A great weekend with no football to worry about and lots of very decent food and wine to consume, while also visiting and revisiting a string of locations along the Riviera.

It coincides with the approach to that annual return to London, due at the end of this month.

Minding our language: the King of Morocco puts French journalists in dock

Two French journalists were secretly recorded asking the King of Morocco's lawyer for €2m - the price of silence was actually €3m but came down - in return for abandoning a book containing unspecified but allegedly damaging material. There may be interesting legal battles ahead but the one strong defence I can so far think of, that the writers were wholly innocent but went along with the idea thinking it might give them a wonderful first or last chapter, does not yet seem to have been advanced. From my words column at The National* ...

Terrorism and internment: locking people up before they commit mass murder

I took the image of the Thalys train gunman Ayoub El Khazzani from zamanfrance.fr, but my guess is that it's from his social media presence

Guantanamo and Northern Ireland present poor role models, but is there - can there ever be - a case for internment? As one who spends a good deal of his working life* championing Muslims, or defending their faith against odious attack, I feel uncommonly qualified to offer a controversial view ...

Beyond any deluded claim to be serving Islam, the killer of Muslim French soldiers and Jewish children in southern France had something strikingly in common with the Charlie Hebdo murderers, the assassin at the Jewish museum in Brussels and the Moroccan accused of trying to cause a bloodbath on the Amsterdam-Paris express. Each was known as a potential threat to security.