Salut!

Minding our language: Brexit's not the only ugly word in EU referendum

When considering the EU leave or stay options, I try to rise above the feeling that with enemies like UKIP, Iain Duncan Smith and, in France, the Le Pen tribe - no real distinction save that young Marion may be the most dangerous of the lot - the union must be OK. Essentially, I succeed in that effort while still feeling that, substantial warts and all, we're better off in than we would be out. Not that the debate so far helps enormously in making up minds ...

The lily-painting Monet's role in the life of Monette, the globe-trotting cat

See also how this story appears, in slightly different form and with a decidedly US approach to commas, at Cat McMahon's Cat's Stories website: http://www.catsstories.com/from-monet-to-monette-the-art-of-being-a-globetrotting-cat.html

Had it all happened 80 years earlier, the generously bearded Claude Monet might have been standing there in his magnificent gardens at Giverny, 40 miles outside Paris, including Monette in one of the final works of his long life as an artist.

At the Royal Academy in London, however, there was no trace of this delightful creature of Giverny, the cat that lived there briefly at the start of an eventful life.

Sticks and carrots and how an imaginative society should handle disillusioned 'Jihadists'

Learn more about Hervé Gourdel's activities, and see his photography, at http://www.hervegourdel.com/

The picture above is a useful reminder that ISIL and its offshoots and likeminded terror groups have absolutely nothing to offer humanity beyond barbarism and time travel (ie centuries in reverse). Hervé Gourdel was yet another innocent cynically murdered in the name - quite falsely - of Islam. In his case, the butchers were Islamic State-allied terrorists in Algeria, their victim, to repeat my own words, "a much-loved and honourable man, who lived for the mountains and who was due to share his passion and expertise with an Algerian group".

Why any product of civilised society, even a petty criminal, should wish to throw in their lot with ISIL is baffling enough. When educated people do so, it is mind-boggling.

Yet I still would not change a word of what appears below and first appeared at Salut in September 2014, my contribution as published at The National, Any Dhabi to how we should deal with those who succum to ISIL;s clever indoctrination techniques, make the trip to Syria but then come back.

Mr Justice Inman, clearly, is not a reader or at any an approving reader, judging by the six-year sentence he passed on Tareena Shakil, notoriously the first British woman convicted of joining ISIL. She acted stupidly and criminally, for which punishment was merited, but the length of the jail term seems on the face of it - even taking account of the judge's withering sentencing speech - to attach far too little weight to her obvious change of heart, swift return and the history of an abusive domestic relationship that may have contributed to her decision to go. We need Britain's Muslim community on the side of discouragement as well as deterrence and I fear this sentences send out a disturbing signal

While I can see why others would disagree, this is what I still believe. It starts with a reference to another British woman who pledged herself to ISIL ...

Manchester Men: we've introduced Louis van Gaal. Now for Pep Guardiola

Buy from the Salut! Amazon link at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00NVFNIS2/salusund-21

Try as I might, there was no way of injecting a sly Sunderland link (like that one, say) into a profile of Pep Guardiola*, the impossibly rich, handsome and talented manager-in-waiting of moneybags Manchester City. My profile of Louis van Gaal, when he was appointed manager of Manchester United, still attracts loads of visitors to Salut. Let's hope Pep is a little more mature in his dealings with the press; fabulously rewarded men and women in very public roles simply have to learn the law of rough and smooth ...

As Pep Guardiola prepares for the latest challenge of a mighty career, entrusted with the task of completing Manchester City’s rise to footballing world-beaters, he might come across words attributed to the Victorian statesman Benjamin Disraeli.

“What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow,” Disraeli, twice Britain’s prime minister, reputedly said in praise of the city’s reputation for innovation and example.