Apple Sees Value in Its Stand to Protect Security

SAN FRANCISCO — It took six years for Apple to persuade China’s largest wireless carrier, China Mobile, to sell the iPhone. Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, made repeated trips to China to meet with top government officials and executives to woo them personally.

The persistence paid off. In 2013,China Mobile relented, a moment Mr. Cook later described as “a watershed day” for Apple.

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Step by Step on a Desperate Trek by Migrants Through Mexico

ARRIAGA, Mexico — The police truck appeared suddenly, a glint of metal and glass. The migrants broke into a sprint, tripping over cracked pavement as an older woman sweeping her stoop urged them to hurry.

The 10 men rounded the corner and hid behind a row of low-slung trees. Four days into their journey from Central America, the new reality onMexico’s southern border was setting in: Under pressure from the United States, the Mexican authorities were cracking down.

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In Fashion, Fat Is Still a Taboo

Rosy-cheeked and curvy, Madame de St.-Maurice smiles complacently on visitors to the 80WSE Gallery at New York University. The subject of a late-18th-century portrait by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, she flaunts multiple chins, her fleshy arms and bosom becomingly veiled in a demi-sheer frock.

When the original canvas was exhibited, “it was praised for its truthfulness,” said Tracy Jenkins, the curatorial director of “Beyond Measure: Fashion and the Plus-Size Woman,” the new student exhibition showcasing the work. Sure the sitter was chubby. So what?

Flash-forward a couple of centuries, and Madame would as likely have been skewered, her frame regarded as an aesthetic, and perhaps even a moral, affront to polite society.

That assumption is at the heart of this small but affecting exhibition, one that encompasses photographs, mannequins, video and advertising imagery. Organized by graduate students in the costume studies program at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School, the show, which runs though Feb. 3, goes some way toward demonstrating that fat shaming, with roots burrowing deep into the 19th century, was, and remains, a freighted issue.

Portrayed in the popular postcards and ads of the late 19th and early 20th century as grotesque, unseemly and out of control, women of size are represented in the gallery by Nettie the Fat Girl, a sideshow attraction shown in an early-20th-century photograph as a bulbous, childlike creature, her tutu and inflated thighs all but bearing her aloft.

Today that image wouldn’t fly, supplanted, in the popular media at least, by “full figured” role models, among them the defiantly outsize performers Beth Ditto and Melissa McCarthy, Adele and the aggressively curvyTess Holliday, touted on the cover of Peoplelast spring as the first size-22 supermodel.

A tentative acceptance of full-figured models that dates from the early 1990s is highlighted in the exhibition by the emergence of Stella Ellis, known as the first large-size model, a divalike figure who strode Jean Paul Gaultier’s runway in 1992 and was featured in his ad campaign, billowy bosom exposed, hair piled high like an opera star’s.

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Feeling Pinch of Oil Collapse, Some Russians Take to Streets

KRASNODAR, Russia — Last year was bad enough financially for Sergei and Victoria Titov, both music teachers getting along in years. Her government salary was slashed by one third, and rampant inflation put some basic groceries like eggplant and cucumbers out of reach.

Then came Jan. 1, and the abrupt decision by the regional government here in Krasnodar, the capital ofRussia’s southern agricultural heartland, to chop transportation subsidies for older Russians, forcing the couple to limit their trolley rides.

Indignant and fearing worse amid Russia’s accelerating economic problems, Sergei joined an unauthorized demonstration last week by hundreds of older Russians who gathered under the bronze statue of a Cossack horseman on the main square here and chanted, “Return our benefits!”

They were not alone, neither in Krasnodar nor across this vast nation, where illegal protests and wildcat strikes are erupting with increasing frequency by truckers, teachers, factory workers and all sorts of Russians facing steep government cutbacks because of plummeting revenue from oil and gas.

The global collapse in oil prices is reordering economic relations around the world, but the change is particularly daunting for Russia, which relies on energy exports for 50 percent of its federal budget.

In December, President Vladimir V. Putin told the nation that the worst of the recession — the economy shrank 3.9 percent and inflation hit 12.9 percent in 2015 — was over and that modest growth would return in 2016. He has been pushing the oil collapse as an “opportunity” that will wean Russia off energy imports and diversify the economy.

Then in January oil fell below $30 per barrel, with no bottom in sight, andthe ruble hit a record low of nearly 85 to the dollar before recovering slightly.

The last time oil prices dropped so low and stayed there, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Steadily rising prices since 2000 have lifted Russia out of poverty and economic chaos, buoying the prosperity of many Russians with it. Mr. Putin was lucky enough to be president for much of that period, but he now faces an extended decline, with real incomes shrinking.

With the federal budget approved in December based on oil at $50 a barrel, Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, announced that the country faced a budget deficit of about $40 billion, and ministries were ordered to cut spending 10 percent. Budgets were similarly guillotined last year.

In Krasnodar, Mr. Titov, 64, braced for harder times. “I do not know what they will cut, but I know it will affect us,” he said. “We are watching all this with alarm. It is clear that the government lacks the necessary resources to give us a normal life.”

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‘Races of Mankind’ Sculptures, Long Exiled, Return to Display at Chicago’s Field Museum

CHICAGO — For decades, the bronzes created by the artist Malvina Hoffman for the Field Museum’s “Races of Mankind” exhibit have had a ghostly afterlife at the institution. Hailed at their unveiling in 1933 as “the finest racial portraiture the world has yet seen” and viewed by millions of visitors, the sculptures were banished to storage in 1969, embarrassing relics of discredited ideas about human difference.

Some were later scattered through the museum, like the Australian aboriginal man who stood guard for a time outside a McDonald’s on the ground floor, minus his original boomerang and spear. But to curators they remained strangely compelling, if troubling, objects.

“When I first came here, I sort of fell in love with them,” Alaka Wali, an anthropologist at the museum, recalled recently. “But there was always debate about what the museum should do with them. They were problematic objects.”

Now the Field Museum has put 50 of the 104 sculptures back on display as part of “Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman,” an exhibition exploring both Hoffman’s artistry and the vexed history of the dubious scientific ideas that her talent was enlisted to serve. At the time of the bronzes’ creation, many anthropologists believed that the world’s people could be divided into distinct racial types, whose visible differences in skin tone, hair texture and bone structure explained differences in behavior.

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Rival Factions of Top Donors Get Behind Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz

The wealthy donors who have built a powerful shadow Republican Party of outside groups are rapidly cleaving into two mutually hostile and deep-pocketed factions, complicating efforts to deny the party’s nomination to Donald J. Trump, reports filed with the Federal Election Commissionon Sunday showed.

Many of the Wall Street financiers who have been mainstays of Republican “super PACs” in the six years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision have rallied behind Senator Marco Rubioof Florida, betting that he is the party’s best chance to win a general election battle against Hillary Clinton.

In the last six months of 2015, F.E.C. records show, a “super PAC” backing Mr. Rubio raised $14.3 million, including $2.5 million each from the hedge fund founders Paul Singer and Ken Griffin. The super PAC also drew significant support from donors who previously gave to groups backing Jeb Bush, among them Chris Cline, a coal executive, and Brian Ballard, a prominent Florida lobbyist.

But the steady rise of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Tea Party favorite reviled by party leaders, has unleashed a new counter-establishment of conservative donors, some from outside the universe of traditional Republican giving. They include wealthy evangelicals, libertarian businessmen, Israel hawks and others disenchanted by the party’s past nominees, and are drawn to Mr. Cruz’s uncompromising social conservatism and his promise to disrupt the party’s traditional power brokers in Washington.

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Obama, in Mosque Visit, Denounces Anti-Muslim Bias

WASHINGTON — President Obama reached out to Muslims in the United States on Wednesday in an impassioned speech, embracing them as part of “one American family,” implicitly criticizing the Republican presidential candidates and warning citizens not to be “bystanders to bigotry.’’

In a visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, his first to a mosque in the United States as president, Mr. Obama recited phrases from the Quran and he praised American Muslims as a crucial part of America’s history and vital to the nation’s future. “If we’re serious about freedom of religion — and I’m talking to my fellow Christians who are the majority in this country — we have to understand that an attack on one faith is an attack on all faiths,” he said.

Although Mr. Obama never mentioned Republican presidential candidates like Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson, the targets of his remarks were clear. “We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate bigotry,” Mr. Obama said.

Citing Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who he said had had their own copies of the Quran, Mr. Obama reminded his audience that Muslims had been a part of the United States since its founding. “So this is not a new thing,” he said. “Generations of Muslim Americans helped to build our nation.”

But he said that too many Americans only heard about Islam after terrorist attacks, and that this must change. “Our television shows should have some Muslim characters that are unrelated to national security,” he said. “It’s not that hard to do. There was a time when there was no black people on television.”

Mr. Obama said that anyone who suggested that the United States was at war with Islam not only legitimized such groups as the Islamic State but also played into their hands. “That kind of mind-set helps our enemies,” he said. “It helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe.”

For Mr. Obama, the remarks were an implicit admission of how little progress has been made since he opened his presidency with a 2009 speech he delivered in Cairo that sought to reach out to the world’s Muslims by calling for “a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground.”

Seven years after the Cairo address, which the White House titled, “A New Beginning,” Mr. Obama is nearing the end of his presidency at a time when respect and common ground have often been overtaken by suspicion and angry political rhetoric.

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