Word: sahara
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...California." The Sahara has captured the imagination of all France. At least a million French families have invested in Saharan oil stocks, and every month thousands of young Frenchmen apply for jobs in the Sahara fields. French newspapers refer to the Sahara as "our California," and the man most responsible for the Sahara agrees. Says France's Minister Delegate Jacques Soustelle: "This desert should come to mean to France what the Far West meant at a certain period to the American states on the Atlantic coast...
...have experienced the Sahara's killing climate and awesome aridity -temperatures around the year range from below freezing up to more than 130°F. ; in some areas the normal interval between rains is five years or more-comparison with any part of California except Death Valley seems ridiculous. The political comparison is not so farfetched. The hope that De Gaulle has held out to war-weary Algeria in his "Constantine Plan" (TIME, Oct. 13) depends on his assurances to the poor Moslem population that they have a prosperous future to share in economic and political equality with Metropolitan...
Just Like Chicago. Officially, Soustelle is Minister Delegate to the Premier, with four responsibilities-the Sahara, atomic energy ("but not the bomb"), overseas territories and overseas departments-but he prefers to be known by his unofficial title, Minister of the Sahara. A solidly built, wavy-haired man with blandly skeptical eyes half-hidden behind owlish glasses, Soustelle calls himself "a typical Frenchman," and in some respects looks the part. But at various times in his meteoric career this tough, confident and shrewd man has been described as "the Molotov of Gaullism," "Jacques the Wrecker," "the Big Alley Cat," "a born...
...Soustelle-swept to an overwhelming majority in the Assembly of the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle continued to regard Soustelle as too controversial to have conspicuous power. The premiership went to Gaullist Lawyer Michel Debré, a relative unknown; for Soustelle there was an agglomeration of odd jobs-including the Sahara. Mockingly, some Frenchmen dubbed Soustelle "the Minister of the Future," and when in last March's municipal elections he failed to win the mayoralty of Lyon-which would have given him a local political power base-many pundits concluded that his star was setting...
...quick-tempered as he often seems, Soustelle is a man who bides his time. As De Gaulle almost surely did, he too saw in the Sahara job great long-range political and economic potential. If, as he believed, the Sahara could provide both France and Algeria with unprecedented prosperity, the Minister of the Sahara would be a man to reckon with in the France of a decade hence...