Excerpt:
A French mayor backed by the far-right National Front was accused of racism on Tuesday after using the names of school children in his town to decide how many were Muslim.
Under France's strict secularism laws, the government does not keep statistics on people's religion or ethnicity.
But Robert Menard, mayor of Beziers in the south of the country, said his administration had used lists of pupils' names to decide how many were Muslim, and claimed the figure came to 64.6 percent.