Evan Vucci/AP

Sen. Dick Durbin (D) of Illinois, left, and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland, listen as President Trump speaks during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Many of Mr. Trump's policy initiatives during his first year in office have appeared to penalize Democratic states.

After months of wrangling over the fate of young unauthorized immigrant “Dreamers,” both Republicans and Democrats are encouraged. Thanks to a remarkable, mostly public negotiating session with President Trump on Tuesday, they have at least settled on the scope of a deal.

The urgency of the situation – the program ends in March – and the narrowness of the deal are helping to push them along. Both sides also seemed able to accept that a wall does not mean a 2,000-mile concrete barrier across the southern border. But divisions over details remain, with no guarantee that lawmakers will be able to reach a deal.

On the wall, for instance, “the problem is that both sides have been rhetorically locked into positions on things,” says Theresa Brown, immigration policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). “They put it in binary [terms] and that’s not a basis to make compromises.”

Adding to the complexity is a chief executive whose propensity for dealmaking can override both political predictability and party ideology. There's also a federal judge’s injunction issued Tuesday night.

The meeting, hosted by President Trump, included 25 congressional Republicans and Democrats and served to lay out the scope of the debate over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. Former President Barack Obama signed DACA into being in 2012 as an executive action, offering temporary protection to some 700,000 unauthorized immigrants brought to the country as children and giving them the ability to work legally in the United States.

In September, the Trump administration rescinded the program and gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative solution.

Before a crew of surprised reporters, lawmakers and the president hashed out the four issues that they say need to be addressed immediately: DACA, border security, reforms to family-based immigration – also known as chain migration – and an end to the diversity visa lottery program, which awards a restricted number of visas to people from countries that have relatively few immigrants in the US. Nailing down those four points is a crucial step toward any resolution on DACA, both lawmakers and political analysts say.

Some lawmakers came away with a measure of optimism that on DACA, at least, there is a path that doesn’t lead to partisan gridlock. It’s a marked shift from the tone that has long clouded immigration negotiations – such as the comprehensive immigration reform bill that a group of eight bipartisan senators crafted and helped pass in 2013, only to be ignored in the GOP-controlled House.

“It's encouraging that the president seems open to a narrow deal protecting the Dreamers and to tackle some of the more difficult issues down the road as a part of a separate comprehensive immigration reform,” said Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D) of New York, who was part of the 2013 Gang of Eight, to reporters after the meeting. “That's a plan we agree with.”

“As long as we deal with those four issues in a meaningful way, certainly it becomes at least a bill that conservatives can consider supporting,” adds North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows (R), who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus. “It really gives us a basis for having a meaningful conversation and hopefully passing a law that has eluded most other presidents.”

But the meeting with the president also highlighted fault lines on immigration between the two parties, who have not reached a consensus even on the deadline for coming up with legislation: Republicans say they have until March 5, which is when the Trump administration planned to start to shutter DACA, while Democrats are calling for a resolution by Jan. 19, when current government funding is set to run out. Looming over the entire discussion is a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco Tuesday night that temporarily blocks Trump’s plan to wind down DACA while the issue plays out in the courts. What effect that ruling could have on Congress’s efforts to find a bipartisan solution for the immigrants involved remains to be seen.

Further rifts surfaced as talk turned to the definitions of terms like “border security” – is it a wall or isn’t it? – and “chain migration” – would restrictions apply to all unauthorized families, or just beneficiaries of DACA?

Republican lawmakers also urged the president to clarify his own views on the proposed legislation. His apparent flexibility in yesterday’s meeting could either help move negotiations along, observers say, or the lack of clarity could stymie them ­– adding an additional level of complication.

“The lens we need to be looking through is not only what could we agree to among ourselves on a bipartisan basis, but what will you sign into law. Because we all want to get to a solution here, and we realize the clock is ticking,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R) of Iowa told Trump Tuesday. “But if we would write a bill that you don’t like and you veto it, we’re talking about a 67-vote threshold – two-thirds in the United States Senate. So that's the reality of negotiating in good faith and getting something you can sign.”

Twenty years ago, both parties were about evenly divided on whether or not immigrants were a strength to or a burden on the country.

“Republicans are conflicted over a number of things to do with immigration,” says Carroll Doherty, director of political research at the Pew Center for People and the Press. In that sense the party maintains the same schisms it had two decades ago, with better-educated Republicans more likely to view immigrants positively, he says.

As their constituencies grew more diverse, however, “You see Democrats taking a more liberal attitude,” Mr. Doherty says. “Among Democrats, there’s overwhelming support for a path to legal status.”

The Tuesday discussion unfolded along similar lines. Democrats trying to provide a path to citizenship to as many unauthorized individuals as possible have to figure out how to concede to tighter border security measures, which will likely include some kind of wall, says Matt Mackowiak, president of political consulting firm Potomac Strategy Group. Republicans, on the other hand, have to straddle an opportunity to earn bipartisan support for immigration reforms they’ve long wanted with calls from hardline constituents who are against any form of amnesty for unauthorized immigrants.

“There’s no doubt there are cross pressures here,” Mr. Mackowiak says.

The president’s actions during the meeting also sparked conflicting reactions that further displayed the yawning gap between the two parties’ perspectives – and their lack of trust in each other. Representative Meadows and Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, both Republicans, lauded Mr. Trump’s efforts to hammer out the scope of the negotiation while giving both sides a chance to say their piece.

“I think the president is clear on what he wants and has led on what he wants,” Meadows says. “The question is: Can we display the intestinal fortitude that it would take to get it done in the House and Senate?”

Others remained skeptical, noting that Trump is known for making sweeping statements on complex policy issues that he later walks back. “We've had good conversations with him about this before only to have him back away when the right wing freaks out,” one Democratic aide says.

The Democratic leadership also insists on tying DACA to spending negotiations set to end Jan. 19, with Senator Schumer noting that he has “very little faith that if it’s not in a must-pass bill, that it will ever pass.”

Despite it all, there is a sense among some that yesterday’s meeting was a step in the right direction. Indeed, the narrower the scope and the longer each side stays open to discussing what they want to achieve within a deal, the better the chances of coming to a political accord, says Ms. Brown at BPC.

“For a compromise to take place, both sides have to be able to claim a win, and on the piece most important to them,” she says. “The easiest thing would be a narrower deal.”

Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir recalls the autumn afternoon when she, along with nearly every woman in Iceland, didn’t show up. To their jobs, to clean their homes, to care for their babies. It was a protest against low wages and undervalued work. It was 1975.

That is widely seen as the start of Icelandic women’s formidable march towards gender equality. Ninety percent of Iceland’s female population joined in, shutting down entire industries. Newspapers shrank that day, and some flights were canceled.

“Women showed their solidarity, that they are many, that they can be a real change factor,” says Ms. Gísladóttir, who was studying history at university at the time and went on to help found the first women’s political party in Iceland's modern history. Later she became mayor of Reykjavik, and then Iceland’s foreign minister.

Yet ironically, despite all the gains women have made since that fall day, the main injustice they were protesting then – unequal pay for equal work – has continued to dog this Nordic nation. Now, more than 40 years later, Iceland has taken a radical new approach: punishing companies that pay women less than men.

A new law requiring companies to earn official certification that they offer equal pay went into effect on January 1 for the country’s largest employers. The first of its kind in the world, the law puts Iceland once again at the forefront of the global women’s rights movement.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Women work in the assembly department of Ossur, an international company that makes prosthetics, in Reykjavik, Iceland. The company did not need to make any changes in employee's salaries as equal pay was already being given to its workers regardless of gender.

And as the #MeToo movement continues to fight from the bottom up against sexual harassment, gender violence, and the sexism that underpins them, for many here the new law in Iceland underlines the vital role that top-down accountability plays in effecting lasting change.

“I think our experience shows us how important legal measures are, because gender equality doesn’t happen of its own accord, it simply doesn’t,” says Rósa Guðrún Erlingsdóttir, head of the equality unit at Iceland’s Ministry of Welfare. “If politicians decide to wait until the people are ready, or until nobody is going to oppose some legislative changes, nothing will happen.”

Still no gender paradise

By many measures, Iceland is already the best place to be a woman. The World Economic Forum has ranked it the most gender equal nation in the world for nine consecutive years for women’s workforce participation, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment.

The notion of the “strong Icelandic woman” dates back centuries, some even say to paganism when goddesses and priestesses commanded religious respect. It persisted culturally as men went to sea and left women with full authority at home.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Valur Hlidberg plays on frozen lake Tjornin, locally known as "the Pond," in Reykjavik, Iceland. Hlidberg took parental leave from his job as a pilot when his boys were younger. Parental leave, which gives both moms and dads non-transferrable time off, is considered one of the most significant policies for gender equality in Iceland.

Launching one of the earliest suffragist movements, Icelandic women won the right to vote in 1915. But the modern women’s rights movement crystallized on the 1975 march. Five years later Iceland was the first country to directly elect a female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. Two years after that, women founded the Women’s List, a feminist political party that paved the way to political empowerment.

Iceland's 2008 banking crisis – for which women bore practically no responsibility because all the top bankers were men – marked the start of a renewed push toward political parity, says Brynhildur Heiðar-og Ómarsdóttir, the executive manager of the Icelandic Women’s Rights Association.

In 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Iceland’s first female prime minister. Feminist-friendly legislation quickly followed. The purchase of sex was criminalized, penalizing prostitutes’ clients, not the women themselves. The next year Iceland mandated that women should fill 40 percent of seats on company boards. Strip clubs were banned in 2010. In the 2016 election, women won nearly half the seats in parliament, one of the highest percentages in the world.

This has not made Iceland into a gender paradise. The #MeToo campaign has arrived here with a fury, since sexual harassment and violence against women remain problems as stubborn as the pay gap. On October 24th 2016, Icelandic women made international headlines when they organized a variation of the 1975 march, leaving their jobs at exactly 2:38 p.m., after which time they said women worked for free for the rest of the day, compared to men’s wages.

“We’ve now been at the top of the World Economic Forum list for the gender gap for nine years running,” says Ms. Ómarsdóttir. “That fact doesn’t say anything about how good things are in Iceland, but how bad things are in the rest of the world.”

Pay the women or pay a fine

Now Iceland is raising the stakes on the pay front. The Equal Pay Standard certification is mandatory for public and private companies with 25 or more employees, an estimated 2,000 entities. The law, which went into effect for the biggest employers in Iceland on January 1st, will be monitored by the government’s Center for Gender Equality, and if a company fails to comply it will face hefty daily fines.

When the certification was conceived in talks among unions, employers and the government about ten years ago, it was designed as a voluntary measure. And Hannes Sigurðsson, deputy director general at the Confederation of Icelandic Employers, says it should have stayed that way. The new legal obligation is a drastic and costly step that will not necessarily narrow the pay gap, he says.

Yet Maríanna Traustadóttir, who specializes in gender issues at the Icelandic Confederation of Labor and who was also involved in the original negotiations, says she was frustrated by how slowly companies adopted the voluntary certification. The average adjusted pay gap between men and women has been stuck at around 7.6 percent for many years.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Maríanna Traustadóttir, with the Icelandic Confederation of Labor, speaks about equal pay for equal work.

“We have been fighting the gender pay gap for decades, we have tried everything,” Ms. Traustadóttir says. She says the most important principle behind the new law is to ensure equal pay for work of equal value. “The companies and institutions, when they reclassify their whole job…system, have to ask, are the women working in the canteen serving food, and the driver, doing work of equal value?”

Þórunn Auðunsdóttir, a human resources manager at Össur, a manufacturer of prosthetics, says her company agreed to voluntary certification last year. While the process was time consuming, she says, the firm was found to be in compliance with certification standards.

“We always have gender glasses on,” she says. “We always try for equality in each department; people like it like that, it’s more fun for everyone.”

But Mr. Sigurðsson says that the law is controversial among his 2,000 business members, even if they do not dare to speak up.

“No one wants to stand up and say, ‘I’m against this measure that has this good intention,’” he says. "But I know that in their hearts, most business leaders are not in favor of such a measure.”

Nonetheless, the law is essential, insists Gísladóttir, who is now the human rights and democracy boss at the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Achieving gender parity takes political will, funding and a strong women’s movement like #MeToo, she says. But legal enforcement is key.

“I have seen through my work that somehow legislation (on women’s rights) is not taken as seriously as other legislation, that somehow it is not seen as binding,” she says. “So enforcing it is really important." 

AP

Ri Son-kwon (c.), head of the North Korean delegation, is greeted by South Korean officials after he crosses the border line to attend their meeting at Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone in Paju, South Korea, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018.

Ri Son-kwon, the head of the North Korean delegation that met with South Korean negotiators on Tuesday, wanted his counterparts to know that it’s been an unusually cold winter in the North. So cold, he told them, that rivers and mountains are frozen.

“But it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that inter-Korean relations have been frozen more than the cold weather,” he said in a rhetorical flourish. “However, regardless of how cold it is, the people’s hope for the improvement of the relations between the North and the South is like the water flowing under the frozen rivers.”

It didn’t take long for signs of a much-needed thaw to emerge from the meeting held in the border village of Panmunjom. The biggest breakthrough, the North’s decision to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics, was announced before noon. The day ended with the reopening of a military hotline between the two countries, an agreement to hold talks on easing military tensions – and an offer from the South to resume reunions for families caught on either side of the border, separated now for almost 70 years.

After months of rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, the immediate outcomes of Tuesday's talks may seem starkly inadequate in comparison to the enormous challenge posed by the North’s rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs. In the past year, Pyongyang has test-launched a series of ballistic missiles and conducted its sixth nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb; leader Kim Jong-un declared the program complete in his New Year's address.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has warned that North Korea would face harsher sanctions if it resumes weapons tests. But for now, he appears to be focused on incremental, unity-building moves – like the symbolically powerful reunions – to lay the foundation for better ties and tougher discussions.

“We must seek to realize the resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue while improving inter-Korean relations,” he said during a news conference in Seoul on Wednesday. “These two issues cannot be separated.”

'The timing is perfect' 

The significance of North Korea's participation in the Winter Olympics, and in any future family reunions, is largely symbolic. South Korea hopes that the talks in Panmunjom will lead to broader negotiations, involving the United States, about how to end the North’s nuclear program. On Wednesday, Mr. Moon said he was willing to meet Mr. Kim under certain conditions to resolve the nuclear standoff.

Such a meeting, if one were to occur, is months if not years away. The North has so far ignored the South’s pleas to discuss the nuclear issue, warning that raising it could derail efforts to improve inter-Korean relations.

A more likely next step would be for the two sides to resume temporary family reunions for relatives in the North and South who have not seen each other since they were separated during the Korean War. For more than six decades, hundreds of thousands of family members have been forbidden to exchange letters, phone calls, or emails, much less meet. More than 60 percent of those in South Korea are now in their 80s or older. Time is not on their side.

Divided-family reunions have been a standard feature of negotiations between South and North Korea for decades. They’re a relatively low-hanging fruit loaded with symbolism about cooperation, forgiveness, and unity, says Scott Snyder, a senior fellow in Korean Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“They can always go to [family reunions] when there is nothing else really available,” Mr. Snyder says. “Both sides recognize family reunions as a way to send a signal about the desire for a better relationship.”

The reunions of war-torn families are highly emotional affairs and are often viewed as an indicator of relations between the North and South. The last ones were held in 2015 at a mountain resort in southeastern North Korea. Hundreds of elderly Koreans from each country were allowed to meet their spouses, children, and parents on the other side of the border for three days in tightly-regimented, emotional events. 

An estimated 18,800 Koreans have been allowed to participate in 19 face-to-face reunions since 1985, when the first ones were held. Of the more than 131,000 South Koreans who have registered for the gatherings over the last three decades, 72,300 have passed away and 59,000 are still waiting for their chance to attend. 

South Korean officials suggested during the meeting on Tuesday that the two Koreas hold talks on the possibility of organizing a new round of reunions, but the North has yet to respond. Mr. Moon made a similar request during a speech he delivered in Germany last July.

“This is a very emotionally appealing issue to South Koreans, especially among conservatives who are skeptical of the Moon Jae-in administration,” says Bong Young-shik, a research fellow at the Institute for North Korean Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul. “It’s a humanitarian issue that fits nicely with Moon’s overarching slogan that people should come first.” 

With the Lunar New Year only five weeks away, Dr. Bong says, “the timing is perfect.” The beginning of the new year is a traditional time for family gatherings in Korea. That it also happens to fall in the middle of the Olympics only adds to its significance.

Familiar pattern

Despite all of this, observers question whether North Korea will agree to allow family reunions without demanding some sort of concession in return. Jenny Town, assistant director of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, says the North is less interested in the reunions themselves than in what comes after them. Will South Korea lift some economic sanctions? Will the US and South Korea scale back or halt their joint military drills? 

Tensions over North Korea's nuclear program may be high, but in its seeming bid for a thaw, many experts see a well-worn pattern they say is unlikely to produce lasting breakthroughs. Pyongyang has previous turned up pressure, then reached out for talks and concessions in apparent detentes that later looked like bids for time. 

Moreover, some analysts see Kim’s offer of talks with Seoul as an attempt to hinder cooperation between South Korea and the United States, as Washington leads the push for firm global sanctions against his regime. While Moon has championed dialogue with the North, US President Trump has threatened military action – and Kim used the same New Year's speech in which he extended an olive branch south to Seoul to remind Washington of the “nuclear button” in his office. 

The White House initially appeared lukewarm at the prospect of Tuesday's talks. Then, last Thursday, it announced that it had agreed with Seoul to delay joint military exercises until after the Olympics.

“I think President Trump deserves big credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks, I want to show my gratitude,” Moon said on Wednesday.

For now, however, South Korea is waiting for agreement on the reunions. 

“There's a lot of skepticism about what it leads to,” Ms. Town says, referring to such an agreement. “But in and of itself, it's always a positive measure.”

While that is undoubtedly true for the families involved, convincing North Korea is another matter. If Kim decides that the Olympics, family reunions, or any other conciliatory gesture won’t lead to his ultimate goal – that is, being accepted as a nuclear power – he may again fall back on ratcheting up his weapons program. 

“Once you get over the easy issues, where do the two sides go from there?” asks Town. “That is where you're really going to start to see a much tougher discussion and more ambiguity in what can be achieved and what each side is really willing to do.”

Doug Struck

Petra Cervantes is still recovering from hurricane Harvey. Her family lived in a tent for three months as volunteers helped them gut their house after hurricane Harvey.

When the morning arrived, the sleepy bayou near Petra Cervantes’ home had arisen in fury, and the water in her house covered her ankles. In 30 minutes, it was up to her knees. Soon, it was up to her chest.  

“It was time to leave,” she says.

Her daughter, a paramedic, had planned ahead for hurricane Harvey.  She had bought three plastic boats – toys, really, but buoyant. Cervantes and her family scrambled aboard. Ms. Cervantes brought what was important: two grandchildren, her son and daughter, her disabled husband, and 18 animals – five Chihuahua puppies, two chickens, a pheasant, rabbits.

“I love animals,” she says simply. “I grew up on a ranch.”

Four months later, the Cervantes family and most of her pets are living a camping existence in her East Houston home. The walls have been torn out, the appliances thrown away, all fouled by five feet of water.

After sleeping in a tent beside the home for three months, living in a carport draped by tarps, the family moved inside a few weeks ago and put donated mattresses on the bare floors as the winter cold arrived. Cervantes cooks huge pots of tamales over a propane stove outside, and feeds the volunteers who still come to help repair the simple one-story home.

It has, she concedes, been “a bad year.”

Yet, Petra Cervantes is thankful to be here. She came from Mexico four decades ago as a teenager, first to California, then to Boston, and finally to Texas. Her husband, Raul, put in hard-labor years as a landscaper and later loading shipping containers, until the work broke his body. Their son served in the Navy. Both her son and her daughter gave her a grandson. Cervantes worked throughout, pressing clothes at dry cleaning shops, operating the big mechanical steam machines six days a week even in the brutal heat.

It’s a good country, she says. They could work here, buy a home, raise kids. Keep animals. They were wiped out in 2001 by tropical storm Allison and again by Harvey. Still, she says, it is better than being in Mexico.

“There’s no money over there, there’s no jobs. A lot of people are so poor. And a lot of killing. They’ve been killing so many people,” she says.

If the Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow to help – she finally got a check in late November to pay a small part of her rebuilding costs – others have not been slow. Neighbors who remained share anything they have, she says. And volunteers have come from Tennessee and Ohio, Massachusetts and Nevada and other places to help her family rip out the molding walls, haul out debris, and hang new drywall.

“Wonderful. Wonderful people,” she says.

She is hesitant to offer any complaints, and leaves criticisms of the relief efforts to others. Like Christine Clinkenbeard.

“For wealthy communities, the waters have receded, the sun is shining, and they are starting to carry on. In the poor communities, it’s not going that well. There are still people at Day 5” of recovery, Ms. Clinkenbeard says.

She was a Houston mother devoted to caring for her daughter, who has a rare kidney disease, when Harvey hit. “The situation was so out of control I felt I had to do something” for victims, she says. She took to Facebook and her kitchen. “I didn’t realize I had started a business. One day I was making 150 bologna sandwiches to give out, the next day it was 3,000, and the next day I was buying an RV.”

Deluged by offers, she has helped organize the distribution of thousands of pounds of food, clothing, blankets, appliances, and furniture, and has funneled donations to get people into apartments and make car payments. There are other stories in Houston of volunteers such as Clinkenbeard who who stepped up. FEMA, she says, “finally showed up 17 weeks after the hurricane. They have kids out here who have been through a 12-hour training. They don’t understand anything.”

She has helped the Cervantes family and thrown the spotlight on victims still living in tents and vehicles while they try to rebuild. Around Cervantes’s neighborhood, campers sit in driveways, housing families. Mounds of debris and ripped-out drywall crowd the simple frame houses, and some homes have piles of bricks and lumber.  But some stand mute to any revival.

“It is really dark around here at night. It’s like a zombie neighborhood,” says Cervantes. Many people have left for good. One family of six from the next street over died when they tried and failed to flee the water in a van. Others were plucked off rooftops by helicopters, and never came back.

Cervantes and her family lived in a shelter for only five days before returning to their ruined home. “Somebody called me and said that my parakeets were still alive – their cages were pretty high. And my duck was still waiting for me,” she says.  

“I couldn’t wait to come back.”

Sewage from the dirty water was everywhere. She has been cleaning ever since.

Now, she says, “I feel better. It’s a house now – not completely a house. Now I feel like home. I feel like we are going up.”

Cindy Solar, wearing hot pink Minnie Mouse fleece pajamas, is having her hair and make-up done under the glare of chandeliers in Paris’s grandiose City Hall. In one corner of the room a woman in black – all curves – practices her strut.

She and Ms. Solar are getting ready for a plus-sized fashion show in a city-run campaign to fight fatphobia, or what the French call “grossophobie.”

“Until I was about 13 years old, I got called fat and ugly all the time, then I rebelled,” says Solar, who has piercing green eyes and hopes to pursue a modeling career. “Now I use the word ‘fat’ to describe myself. Why should being fat be considered an insult?”

She is part of a growing trend in France towards fat acceptance, a pioneer of a body-positive movement that is challenging French ideals of beauty. In a country where being thin is such a vaunted quality that it has inspired book titles such as “French Women Don’t Get Fat” and defined the nation’s image worldwide, the winds of change are blowing.

According to a 2016 report by the publicly-funded BEH health journal, nearly half of all French people are overweight, including 15 percent who are obese. That alarms public health professionals who point to negative effects, but growing numbers of overweight French people are taking a different tack, finding positive ways to describe themselves.

A new breed of body-positive activists are working to create a politically correct lexicon to include words like “full-figured” (rond), “fleshy” (pulpeux), “plump” (bien en chair), and “curvy” (the English word, pronounced with a French accent), all the while working to take back the word “fat” (gros).

“Overweight French people want to show that they can talk about their lives on social media and post photos of themselves,” says Solenn Carof, a sociologist at the EHESS university in Paris. “There is a positive evolution towards people who want to reclaim their right to exist.”

That evolution has been influenced by the fat-liberation movement which first took root in New York in the late 1960s, though it has been given a “French touch.”

'Fat ... so what?'

In America, the focus of what the French call the allegro fortissimo (heavy and happy) movement is on “being accepted for who you are,” says Jean-Pierre Poulain, a professor of gastronomy and public health at the University of Toulouse II. “In France, the slogan has been the right to be ignored,” and to be treated just like anyone else.

Panoramic/ZUMA Press/Newscom

Jes Baker, activist, blogger, and pioneer of body positivity, speaks during a salon to fight against grossophobia at a salon of the Hotel de Ville, Paris, in December 2017.

Jes Baker, a US-based body-positive activist and blogger, says she’s excited to see France moving towards broader body acceptance.

“In France, the conversation up until now has been basically non-existent, but things are changing,” says Ms. Baker, who toured Europe in December to discuss fat-phobia and weight discrimination. “To have this happening at a government level is amazing.”

Stamping out discrimination against plus-sized people in France has been part and parcel of the city of Paris’s mission to fight “grossophobie.” In addition to holding an anti-fatphobia event in December, city hall has also launched an ad campaign featuring a full-figured woman and, separately, an equally full-figured man above the words “Fat … so what?”

Unsurprisingly, campaigners see France’s famed fashion industry as a major vehicle for changing peoples’ views of body image. French designers are increasingly outfitting plus-sized women, and in May lawmakers went even further, passing a law to ban super-thin models and oblige advertisers to label images that have been “Photoshopped.” 

This year, a private production company organized France’s first “Miss Body Pulp” competition, a national beauty pageant for full-figured women named for the French word for ‘plump,’ pulpeux.

But the fat-acceptance movement in France has come in for some criticism too. The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) regards obesity as a growing public health problem with economic consequences.

According to figures from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, obese people in rich countries live on average ten years fewer than their healthier counterparts, earn 18 percent less, and incur 25 percent more health care costs.

“For a lot of people in France, being body-positive when you’re fat means you are promoting obesity,” says Daria Marx, a 30-something activist and co-founder of the “Political Fat Collective,” a fat-acceptance activist group. “They don’t understand that we just want to be treated equally.”

“More and more people are concerned by obesity … but the norm for weight is traditionally lower in France and the ideal for being thin is higher” than elsewhere, says Ms. Carof, “and a large number of women diet to attain that ideal.”

No French Oprah

That makes fat-shaming hard to beat here, especially in the job market. Ms Marx says she was rejected for a waitressing job in her twenties because her interviewer felt that her weight would bother clients.

“She told me, ‘The clients won’t be able to order cake because they’ll be thinking if they eat the cake, they’ll get fat like you,’ ” says Marx, whose dyed blond hair brushes her tattooed arms.

“Culture has told us what a fat body means,” says Baker, who like many French activists says being overweight is not always a choice – that thyroid conditions, medical treatments, and just plain genetics can make losing weight difficult if not impossible for some people, even if they eat sensibly and take exercise.

Mainstreaming tolerance of unusual body shapes will not be easy, though. Unlike in the US, where a plethora of full-figured pop culture personalities such as Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O’Donnell are household names, overweight people are extremely rare in French media and political circles.

But as French designers, advertisers, politicians, and pop stars come to terms with diverse body shapes and sizes, they send a message that there are more ways to be attractive than the stereotypical international myth of the waif-like woman or the slender and dashing man.

At the end of November, Leslie Lauthelin became Miss Body Pulp 2017. She says that beyond being overweight, she is just a woman and has the right to express her femininity.

“I used to take the comments about my weight badly, but now I see that it’s part of my identity,” says Ms. Lauthelin. “I feel good in my body and I wouldn’t want to be thin for anything.”

AP Photo

A girl plays with a mobile phone while riding in a New York subway. Two major Apple investors have urged the iPhone maker to take action to curb growing smartphone use among children, highlighting growing concern about the effects of gadgets and social media on youngsters.

If you’re reading this on a smartphone or tablet, especially an iPhone or iPad, we’ll try to keep it short.

You see, two of the biggest investors in Apple sent a letter to the tech giant last week asking it to look at the negative effects of its products on users, principally excessive screen time among children and teens.

Such public concerns shared by investors about the social consequences of technology on youths may be a first for Silicon Valley. The shareholders, a hedge fund and a teachers’ benefits organization, wrote that it is no secret “that social media sites and applications for which the iPhone and iPad are a primary gateway are usually designed to be as addictive and time-consuming as possible, as many of their original creators have publicly acknowledged.”

The letter asks Apple to have a more sensitive approach to children and to provide better tools to help parents guide their kids. “We believe the long-term health of its youngest customers and the health of society, our economy and the company itself are inextricably linked,” the investors stated. (Apple responded by saying it is committed to “exceeding our customers’ expectations, especially when it comes to protecting kids.”)

The letter echoes a rising chorus around the world about the impact of the digital industry on young people – even though many tech firms such as Facebook already have various safeguards in place.

Last week, the World Health Organization listed “gaming disorder” as a mental health condition, in which excessive video gaming is seen as taking “precedence over other life interests.” South Korea bans access for children under 16 to online games between midnight and 6 a.m. France is weighing a measure to require children under 16 to obtain their parents’ approval to open an account on social media sites. It already plans to ban any use of mobile phones by students in primary and middle schools.

And last November, Britain’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, called on social media and technology companies “to show us how they can be the solution to the issue of mental ill health among teenagers, and not the cause of the problem.”

Such calls for reform are not a Luddite rejection of technology but fundamentally an embrace of the innocence of children and a desire to enhance their capacity to self-regulate and to guard their consciousness.

They also point to the need for a closer look at how children really use their devices.

A recent study from the University of Oxford found that children primarily use such technology to enhance their daily activities, such as homework. “People think that children are addicted to technology and in front of these screens 24/7, to the exclusion of other activities – and we now know that is not the case,” says researcher Killian Mullan. 

In addition, adults need to react carefully to their concerns. A study out of the University of Chicago found that teens who voluntarily take breaks from social media fare better in their friendships than teens whose devices are taken away from them.

The solutions may lie less in Silicon Valley and more in society’s attention to the inherent abilities of children.

“We should promote children’s critical spirit and their ability to analyze and distance themselves from over-using their phones,” Rachel Delacour, co-president of industry body France Digital, tells the Financial Times.

Actually, right now may be a good time to take a break from your screen ... and think on these things.