Word: saints
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...Exceptions to the author's reserve mostly center on Gandhi's limitations as a family man. Where the world sees a saint, Rajmohan Gandhi sees a cruel husband and a mostly absent father, paying scant attention to his children's schooling and dragging wife Kasturba across continents at will, belittling her desire for the simplest of material possessions, then expecting her to comply when he turns from amorous husband to platonic companion to apparent adulterer. Gandhi took on a magnetic personality in the presence of young women, and was able to persuade them to join him in peculiar experiments...
...years, many Saint-Gilles residents have been transfixed by a central issue: immigration. In the 1960s and '70s, Saint-Gilles's agricultural sector recruited armies of foreign workers until the growth boom went bust in the early 1980s. Jobs here and across France have been in short supply ever since. Nearly 20% of Saint-Gilles's residents are jobless, and practically all of those live on state assistance. Roughly 25% of the town's population of nearly 12,000 are immigrant or first-generation French citizens--virtually all of North African origin. Most live in the Sabatot housing projects uphill...
Tourists have long admired Saint-Gilles for its ancient center: narrow streets, tightly packed stone buildings and 12th century monastery ruins. Its more recent political history, however, has given this Languedoc town a kind of ill fame across France. In 1989, Saint-Gilles became the first town to elect a mayor from the extreme-right National Front party. The National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a perennial loser in presidential elections, has consistently placed first in Saint-Gilles. In short, the town has voted for the kind of xenophobic zealotry that for many years was disavowed by polite French...
...Before, immigrants like the Spanish and Portuguese worked hard and integrated, but that's just not happening with the Arabs," says Yvonne Bovetto, 87, a retiree and native of Saint-Gilles. "Sabatot is the biggest problem for us today. Lots of people just feel overrun, fed up or both." As if in reply, Morit (who would give only his first name), an 18-year-old first-generation Saint-Gilles citizen of Moroccan descent, says, "We feel the racism and scorn everywhere...
...based around one of France's most famous daughters. The Joan of Arc Museum in Chinon, where the alleged relics were previously exhibited, is set to move to new, larger premises in 2009. The new museum will house an expanded exhibition featuring previously-unseen written documents that chart the saint's tumultuous life. Despite having exhibited the remains for decades, the museum denied it was red-faced after receiving the results of the forensic tests. "Some people did think they were genuine," said former museum director Anne-Marie Salichon, "but I knew all along they were fake...