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THE FIX THE FIX

Five Five to watch on impeachment to watch on impeachment A MBER P HILLIPS

budges, then impeachment could be right A MBER P HILLIPS around the corner. budges, then impeachment could be right around the corner. early 60 House Democrats think Conearly 60 House gress should open impeachment pro-Democrats think Con4. James E. Clyburn (S.C.) gress should open impeachment pro4. for James Clyburn ceedings against President Trump.

Clyburn is on our list twoE. reasons: 1) (S.C.) As against on3our list for two reasons: 1) As That sounds like a lot,ceedings but it’s only a President Trump. the House majority whipClyburn he’s the is No. House That sounds like a lot, but it’s only a House majority whip he’s the No. 3 House quarter of all House Democrats.

The Fix Democrat, 2) and he'sthe wavered on impeachof all House Democrat, 2) and he's wavered on impeachcounts more than 100quarter House Democrats who Democrats. The Fix ment within the past week. counts within the past week. haven’t said where they stand.more than 100 House Democrats who In an interview lastment Sunday on CNN when haven’t said they In an interview last Sunday on CNN when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi haswhere refused to stand. asked if he thinks impeachment is inevitable, House Nancy askedexactly if he thinks is inevitable, entertain the idea because she’sSpeaker concerned it Pelosi has refused to Clyburn answered: “That's what Iimpeachment feel.” entertain the idea because she’s concerned it Clyburn answered: “That's exactly what I feel.” would endanger Democrats’ chances of keepBut after meeting with Pelosi on Monday would endanger Democrats’ chances of keepafter impeachment meeting with Pelosi on Monday ing the House majority in 2020 and winning night, when asked if heBut thought ing the majority night, when if he thought impeachment the White House. Caught in House the middle are in 2020 and winning was inevitable, he said no.

“I'masked probably the White Caught in the middle are was inevitable, he said no. “I'm probably House Democratic leaders.

TheseHouse.

Pelosi allies father away from impeachment than anybody leaders. These Pelosi allies are sounding more andHouse more Democratic like they support in our caucus,” he said.father away from impeachment than anybody WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES are sounding more and more like they support in our caucus,” he said. impeachment proceedings.

What are his true feelings, and how could WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES impeachment What are his true feelings, and how could Here are five to watch to get a proceedings. sense of they sway the rest of House Democrats?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has refused — so far — are five to watch to to entertain get a sense of ofSpeaker they sway the rest of House Democrats?

Pelosi has refused — so far — whether impeachment isHere on the horizon. the idea startingNancy impeachment whether impeachment is onproceedings the horizon.against the to entertain impeachment president.the idea of starting 5. Katie Hill (Calif.) proceedings against the president.

5. Katie Much like Bustos, Hill is a Hill voice(Calif.) for more 1. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) Much like Hill is a voice for more Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) over all that, it’s a big deal. He has not publicly moderate Democrats. Elected in Bustos, 2018, she He is the chairman1.of the Judiciary Comover all that, it’s a big deal. He has not publicly Democrats.

He is the chairman Judiciary Comsupported impeachment. represents the party’smoderate newest members as aElected in 2018, she mittee, which is where impeachment proceed-of the supported impeachment. freshman class representative represents which is where impeachment proceedforthe theparty’s Demo-newest members as a ings would start. He’smittee, said that until public freshman class representative for the Demoings would start.

He’s said3.that until public cratic Caucus. opinion supports impeachment, Congress Cheri Bustos (Ill.) cratic Caucus. opinion supports 3. Cheri Bustos (Ill.) Like many freshmen lawmakers, she shouldn’t do it. But The Washington Post impeachment, has She’s inCongress charge of House Democrats’ cammany freshmen lawmakers, she shouldn’t doPelosi it. ButtoThe Post has means She’s in charge of Houseknocked Democrats’ off acamRepublicanLike to win her seat.

She reported that privately, he’s urged let Washington paign arm, which Bustos is entirely knockedlike off aRep. Republican thatinto privately, urged Pelosi to20 letor sopaign arm, which means represents Bustos is entirely new lawmakers Lucy to win her seat. She his committee open upreported an inquiry wheth-he’sfocused on the new House Democrats represents new (Iowa) lawmakers like Rep. Lucy his committee into lose whethfocused the They 20 or so House Democrats (Ga.), or Rep. Abby Finkenauer er they should impeach Trump. Heopen saidup re-an inquiry who could reelection nexton year. arenewMcBath McBath (Ga.), for or Rep. Abby Finkenauer (Iowa) er they should impeach He said re- as who couldand loseIowa, reelection are whoyear. both They won in districts that voted Trump cently there “certainly is” justification for Trump. from states such Kansas in next both wontargets in districts centlyproceedings there “certainly justification for for from states as Kansas and and Iowa, in 2016 areintop who Republican for that voted for Trump beginning impeachment into is”districts that voted Trump for such president, in 2016 and are top Republican targets for beginning proceedings districts voted for Trump 2020.for president, Trump, his strongest language on impeachment the subject. and they are into not calling for that impeachment.

Trump, his strongest language on the subject. andwho theyare arecalling not calling impeachment.

Bustos, Hill 2020. has showed some open(Most of the lawmakers for forUnlike Unlike Bustos, Hill has showed some open(Most of theliberal lawmakers for nessare to calling impeachment proceedings.

She told impeachment represent heavily dis- who 2. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.) to impeachment impeachment represent heavily dis- “Iness Elijah E. Cummings Politicoliberal this week: would say it may be”proceedings. She told tricts.)

He chairs another2.powerful committee,(Md.) Politico this week:But “I Iwould say it may be” He chairs another committee, inevitable. “I wouldn’t say definitely.

Bustos seems to seetricts.) it as her job to remind House Oversight. They have launched severalpowerful inevitable. wouldn’t say definitely. But I seems her job tothink remind House Oversight.

They havethe launched that there’s a good“Ichance.” coastal several Democrats inBustos her party thattoinsee theit as definitely investigations into Trump such as: Did Trump definitely thinkare thatalso there’s a good chance.” theimpeachment coastal Democrats the investigations into as: Did Trump And that someinfreshmen Democrats middle of the country, seemsin her party obstruct justice? Did he illegally inflate hisTrump net such And some freshmen middle the country, seems obstruct Did he illegally net leading impeachment voices, like Reps.

Alex- Democrats are also moreinflate like a his distraction than aofmoral impera- impeachment worth? Did he lie about gettingjustice? his son-in-law leading impeachment more a distraction a moral impera- (N.Y.) worth?

Did he liedecides about getting son-in-law andria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaibvoices, like Reps. Alextive.his Next to Pelosi, she’s thelike staunchest anti- than a security clearance? So if Cummings andria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib tive.inNext Pelosi, staunchest antia security So if Cummings decides (Mich.) impeachment Democrat the to House.

If she’s she the impeachment proceedings takeclearance? precedence n (Mich.) n impeachment Democrat in the House. If she impeachment proceedings take precedence BY

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CONTENTS

This publication was prepared by editors at The This publication was prepared Washington Post for printing and distribution by our by editors at The Washington Post All forarticles printingand and distribution by our partner publications across the country. partner publications across articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or onthe country. AllPOLITICS have previously appeared in The THE PostNATION or on washingtonpost.com andcolumns have been edited to fit this and have been editedTHE to fitWORLD this format. For questions orwashingtonpost.com comments regarding content, format. For questions or acomments regarding content, please email weekly@washpost.com.

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WEEKLY

CONTENTS 3 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER María Dominga ON THE Romero León, 68, 3sets aside herCOVER María Dominga POLITICS Romero embroidery in her León, 68, sets aside her THE NATION to cook8 lunch embroidery village of Cheran,10 Mexico.

Three of to cook lunch in her THE WORLD her six children now in the of Cheran, Mexico. Three of COVER STORY 12 livevillage six children now live in the United States. Photo SARAH L. TECHNOLOGY 16 byher United VOISIN/The Washington Post States. Photo by SARAH L. BOOKS 18 VOISIN/The Washington Post OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

Stop using that GPS. It’s ruining your brain.

M.R. O’CONNOR is a journalist who writes about science, technology and ethics, and is the author, most recently, of “Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World.” This was written for The Washington Post.

It has become the most natural thing to do: get in the car, type a destination into a smartphone, and let an algorithm using GPS data show the way. Personal GPS­ equipped devices entered the mass market in only the past 15 or so years, but hundreds of millions of people now rarely travel without them. These gadgets are extremely powerful, allowing people to know their location at all times, to explore unknown places and to avoid getting lost. ¶ But they also affect perception and judgment. When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn­by­ turn directions.

In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” AmirHomayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.

The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And, remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us

the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.

Studies have long shown the hippocampus is highly susceptible to experience.

(London’s taxi drivers famously have greater gray-matter volume in the hippocampus as a consequence of memorizing the city’s labyrinthine streets.)

Meanwhile, atrophy in that part of the brain is linked to devastating conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis — the growth of new neurons — in the hippocampal circuit.

What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION/IMAGE BY ISTOCK

is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

How people navigate naturally changes with age.

Navigation aptitude appears to peak around age 19, and after that, most people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead. But neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the hippocampus — paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment — might help offset age-related cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases.

“If we are paying attention to our environment, we are stimulating our hippocampus, and a bigger hippocampus seems to be protective against Alzheimer’s disease,” Bohbot told me in an email. “When we get lost, it activates the hippocampus, it gets us completely out of the habit mode. Getting lost is good!”

Done safely, getting lost could be a good thing.

Saturated with devices, children today might grow up to see navigation from memory or a paper map as anachronistic as rote memorization or typewriting.

But for them especially, independent navigation and the freedom to explore are vital to acquiring spatial knowledge that may improve hippocampal function. Turning off the GPS and teaching them navigational skills could have enormous cognitive benefits later in life.

There are other compelling reasons outside of neuroscience to consider forgoing the GPS. Over the past four years, I’ve spoken with master navigators from different cultures who showed me that practicing navigation is a powerful form of engagement with the environment that can inspire a greater sense of stewardship.

Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical observation and problemsolving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to the world.

And by turning our attention to the physical landscape that sustains and connects us, we can nourish “topophilia,” a sense of attachment and love for place. You’ll never get that from waiting for a satellite to tell you how to find a shortcut. n

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BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Make reading part of the vacation KAREN MACPHERSON is the children’s and teen services coordinator for the Takoma Park, Md., library. This was written for The Washington Post.

Yes, parents, there really is a magic formula to keep your kids reading through the summer and beyond. The secret ingredient? You. Research shows that reading during the summer helps kids minimize the “summer slide,” the drop-off in reading skills that nonsummer readers experience at the start of a new school year.

Troublingly, the recent “Kids and Family Reading Report,” a biennial survey done by Scholastic, a publishing and media company, showed that among kids ages 9 to 11, 14 percent read no books during the summer of 2018, compared with 7 percent in 2016. Among kids ages 15 to 17, 32 percent read no books last summer, compared with 22 percent in 2016. But summer reading need not be a hard sell to kids.

That same survey found that nearly 60 percent of kids ages 6 to 17 agreed with the statement: “I really enjoy reading books over the summer.”

You can help them find that joy.

In the midst of the craziness of daily life — and the distractions of screens and so much else — it’s a challenge for parents to make reading a pleasurable priority in their family’s life. But summertime actually is a perfect — and crucial — time to experiment with some of the following strategies, recommended by children’s librarians and reading experts.

Let kids choose their own books Reading experts say that kids who can choose what to read in their

out-of-school time are more likely to enjoy reading and ultimately become lifelong readers. So, just say yes to whatever books interest your children.

Unfortunately, more schools now than in the past require kids to read only books at their level. That can present a major roadblock to kids’ reading enjoyment because the books often don’t interest them.

It’s up to parents to give their children permission to choose books they really want to read in their own time.

Expand the definition of reading Allow kids to pick their reading format. Audiobooks and ereaders can be gateways to reading for some kids. Graphic

BY SHENEMAN

novels are another popular format that shouldn’t make parents fret.

Make reading a family priority — for everyone Finding even 10 minutes to just sit and read something other than email or social media can feel impossible to busy parents, but modeling reading for pleasure is a critical way to convince a child that reading is fun.

Why not make it an activity for the whole family just to hang out and read? Add “reading time” to that busy list of weekend activities — 30 minutes or so when everyone relaxes and quietly reads. It’s important and easy to schedule.

Make reading social Forget about the quiet and plan some read-aloud time. This could mean reading a book to — or with — a child or listening to an audiobook in the car. This way, kids and adults can share and discuss the same book.

Other ways to make books social: Book clubs in which parents and kids both participate and family-reading meals where everyone either listens to an audiobook or reads their own book. Also, a trip to the movie theater. Make a book the

gateway to seeing the film version of it.

Make it a game Many children’s librarians also recommend adding a “game” aspect to reading. Signing kids up for summer reading programs at the local public library is one easy way to do this.

Creating book-related bingo cards or “Jeopardy”-like questions also boosts the entertainment value of books.

Or try out a game called “Spoilers,” created by children’s librarian Kendra Wight, who works at Sno-Isle’s Library on Wheels in Washington state. The idea is simple: An adult and a kid choose a book they both will read. The adult stops reading exactly halfway through the book, while the kid reads to the end. After finishing the book, the kid comes up with an alternate ending, then presents that ending and the real ending to see if the adult can guess which is correct.

“Too often I think our ‘reading for fun programs’ lead kids to books we have selected, instead of following them to the books they already love,” Wight said.

“And when we read together, even in this asynchronous way, we get to know each other better.” n

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TOM TOLES

On abortion, Biden is out of step KAREN TUMULTY is a columnist for The Washington Post. In her previous role as a national political correspondent for the newspaper, she received the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. She previously worked for Time magazine.

Though former vice president Joe Biden is ahead of the crowded 2020 presidential field in every poll, his greatest vulnerability presents itself again and again: He is a man out of step with his party.

His record on crime has already put him at odds with the Democratic base, as has his praise of bipartisan compromise at a time when there is little appetite for appeasement. But Biden has proved surprisingly skillful at balancing the doubts that Democrats have about his record against a presumption that he might be their strongest bet to oust President Trump from the White House next year.

Last week, Biden opened a new breach — this one potentially irreconcilable.

His campaign announced that the former senator and vice president continues to support the Hyde Amendment, a provision of federal law passed in 1976 that bars the use of federal funds for abortion services, except in rare cases.

The amendment — named for the conservative Illinois congressman, Henry J. Hyde, who initially sponsored it — stipulates that Medicaid, the program that provides health-care services to poor people, does not provide coverage of abortion, except in instances of rape, incest or a risk to the life of the mother. Before it was implemented, Medicaid paid for an estimated 300,000 abortions a year.

No surprise, Biden’s rivals for the nomination piled on, as did Democratic lawmakers and women’s groups. “Repealing the Hyde Amendment is critical so that low-income women in particular can have access to the reproductive care they need and deserve,” presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) tweeted.

For most of Biden’s career, his support for a ban on federal funding of abortion has put him well within the mainstream.

President Barack Obama straddled both sides of the question. In 2008, Obama campaigned on a promise to pass the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have effectively repealed the Hyde Amendment.

Then, in 2010, he signed an executive order that enshrined

Hyde, a deal he had to make to get the Affordable Care Act passed.

But that was then. In 2016, as it prepared to nominate a woman for president, the Democratic Party for the first time added a plank to its platform explicitly calling for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

The abortion issue has since gained more urgency with Democrats. Trump has made two conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, creating the potential that the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion could be overturned. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled state legislatures are passing a spate of highly restrictive laws designed to create the court challenge that could do just that.

With his party having swung so hard on the abortion issue, Biden’s isolation on the Hyde Amendment will no doubt revive other doubts about him with regard to gender-related matters. They include the recent flap over his clueless habit of putting his hands on women who come within reach, and the shabby treatment the Bidenchaired Senate Judiciary Committee gave to Anita Hill during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Biden is far from the first presidential candidate to confront a political landscape that has shifted dramatically over the course of a long career.

Al Gore, the Democrats’ 2000 nominee, had to disavow as vice president some of the positions he had taken as a Tennessee congressman, including support for the tobacco industry and for lax gun laws.

So standing firm on the Hyde Amendment may perhaps pay off for Biden in the long run, as he looks toward a general-election contest against Trump. Polls have long indicated that while overturning the provision is popular among Democrats, most Americans are uncomfortable with providing federal funding for a medical procedure many regard as immoral.

Still, Biden has taken a stand that will undoubtedly make the going rougher as he heads into the first set of Democratic debates and will test his agility as a candidate. And that is not a small challenge for a candidate who has not run in his own right for more than a decade — and one who is not known for being sure-footed.

So now the question is whether this is really Biden’s party to lead or one that has passed him by. n

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He’d have been ‘honored’ to serve BY

M ARC F ISHER

D

onald Trump, Selective Service registrant No. 50-63-46-580, never served in the military during the Vietnam War. Neither did 15 million other young American men who won student deferments or were otherwise disqualified.

But 9 million Americans did serve during the 11-year conflict, and the cultural and political gulf that opened between them and those who avoided involvement in a bloody, unpopular and losing war remains a festering national wound half a century later.

Last week, as world leaders gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, an epic battle in a war that defined national consensus, President Trump said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that he would have been “honored” to serve in Vietnam.

“I would not have minded that at all,” Trump said to British broadcaster Piers Morgan. “I would have been honored. . . .

But I think I make up for it right now . . . because we’re rebuilding our military at a level that it’s never seen before.”

The contradiction between Trump’s actions in the 1960s and his latest statement has reignited the long-simmering debate over how and why he avoided service.

And the question of how he — like two of his 2020 rivals, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden — managed to avoid the war is now being raised by a new generation of presidential contenders who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump steered himself around service in Vietnam by obtaining four student deferments and one medical disqualification — something to do with a bone spur in one or both of his heels — between 1964 and 1972.

In the past, Trump has presented his avoidance of service as an accident of timing — his college years and his draft eligibility coincided with a period when the military was generous

MIKE GROLL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Interview reignites debate over how and why Trump avoided Vietnam with student deferments.

“I was never a fan of that war, I’ll be honest with you,” he told Morgan. “I thought it was a terrible war; I thought it was very far away. You’re talking about Vietnam at that time — nobody ever heard of the country.”

Trump has long said he was against the war, but did not take part in any of the antiwar protests that were regular events on the University of Pennsylvania campus when he was a student.

“The bell rang and Donald Trump was hiding,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University who has written often on Vietnam. “Many

people are proud that they didn’t serve, saying it was an immoral war. But it’s embarrassing that President Trump is in Great Britain honoring the 75th anniversary of D-Day and pretending to be a wannabe service member in Vietnam. If he wanted to, he could have easily served like John [F.] Kerry or John McCain,” the former Democratic senator from Massachusetts and Republican senator from Arizona, respectively, whose Vietnam experiences defined their later political careers.

McCain, who spent five years in captivity by the North Vietnamese after his plane was shot

President Trump’s 1964 yearbook from the New York Military Academy features his photo and a roundup of activities. He was an active athlete, playing baseball, basketball, golf and football.

down, said in 2017 that the inequities of the war had always gnawed at him. “I will never countenance . . . that we drafted the lowest-income level of America and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur. That is wrong.”

Trump until now has presented his avoidance of the draft as a stroke of fortune. “I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number,” he said in a 2011 TV interview. He has said that he felt he had military experience because he went to a high school with a military focus.

This year, some of Trump’s

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POLITICS younger Democratic opponents have slammed him for avoiding service.

Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor who is seeking the Democratic nomination, recently called Trump “somebody who, I think it’s fairly obvious to most of us, took advantage of the fact that he was a child of a multimillionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place.” Buttigieg, 37, was an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.

Another presidential candidate, Rep. Seth Moulton (DMass.), last week said he’d “like to meet the American hero who went in Donald Trump’s place to Vietnam. I hope he’s still alive.”

Moulton, 40, served in Iraq as a Marine Corps captain.

With septuagenarians Trump, Sanders (I-Vt.) and Biden in the race, this is likely to be the last presidential election in which candidates’ decisions about serving in Vietnam will be a political issue. Sanders, 77, a vocal opponent of the war while he was at the University of Chicago, applied for conscientious objector status, but aged out of draft eligibility before his application was processed. Biden, 76, got student deferments when he was at the University of Delaware and was then reclassified as disqualified for service because he had asthma.

“We used to elect presidents on the basis of their service, from George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and JFK’s PT-109,” Brinkley said. “But starting with Bill Clinton, what the Vietnam generation did became a litmus test. How did you deal with that era? It tells us a lot about somebody’s character.”

Politicians close to Trump’s age have struggled to explain why they did not serve. President George W. Bush, who like Trump is 72, avoided the draft by signing up for Texas’s National Guard.

President Bill Clinton, also 72, got student deferments while he was at Georgetown University from 1964 to 1968, after which a family friend in Arkansas arranged for him to enlist in the Naval Reserve to avoid the draft.

Clinton later wrote a thank-you note to an Army ROTC officer for “saving me from the draft.” The

fact-checking service Snopes concluded that the fact “that Clinton went to great lengths to avoid the Vietnam-era draft [is] beyond dispute.”

Trump got four student deferments while he was enrolled at Fordham University in New York and then as a transfer student at Penn. As a student at New York Military Academy and in college, he was an active athlete, playing baseball, basketball, golf and football. He was 6-foot-2, 180 pounds, lean and strong. He described himself as “the best baseball player in New York.”

After he graduated from the Wharton School at Penn in spring 1968, he was reclassified 1-A — prime eligibility for the draft. He had an Armed Forces physical in September; records of

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SCOTT MORGAN/REUTERS

ADAM SCHULTZ/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

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that exam show only that he was declared “DISQ” for “disqualified.”

During the 2016 campaign, when Trump was asked what had held him back from serving, he said he could not recall which heel had the spur.

“You’ll have to look it up,” he told reporters. His campaign later issued a statement saying it was both heels.

On the draft registration card he filled out in 1964, Trump listed his only “obvious physical characteristic” that might aid in identifying his body as “birthmark on both heels.”

Trump acknowledged during the 2016 campaign that he got out of the draft by providing Selective Service officials with “a very strong letter on the heels.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, former vice president Joe Biden, former president George W. Bush and former president Bill Clinton all did not serve in the Vietnam War.

The New York Times reported last year that the Queens podiatrist who diagnosed Trump with bone spurs did so as a favor to the doctor’s landlord — the president’s father, real estate magnate Fred Trump.

In 2016, Trump’s campaign said his medical deferment was temporary and when his name was entered into the draft lottery in 1969, he drew a 356 out of 365, making it exceedingly unlikely that he would be drafted.

In 1998, Trump said on Howard Stern’s radio show that sex in the 1980s New York dating scene was his version of Vietnam.

“It is a dangerous world out there,” he said. “It’s like Vietnam.

It’s my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” n

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Iran anxious about economy, not war B Y T AMER E L- G HOBASHY

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ranians have been growing increasingly anxious amid threats of military action by the Trump administration but say they are already struggling with daily life in a war economy regardless of whether there’s a war.

Many Iranians consider themselves to be on a war footing, thanks to an economy battered by a year of U.S. sanctions that have contributed to inflation and shortages of medicine and other vital goods — without any sense that relief is coming anytime soon.

Residents of Tehran, the capital, interviewed over the phone and through recorded voice notes, said that middle-class Iranians are taking menial jobs or second jobs to make ends meet, lining up for increasingly scarce goods and hoarding essentials in case of shortages or war. All the Iranians interviewed spoke on the condition that they be identified only by their first name, if by any name at all, so they could share their views in a country where expression is tightly controlled.

Mogjan, a 32-year-old pharmaceutical company employee, said many around her are girding for a year of continued hardships by stockpiling basic necessities such as canned food, cooking oil and rice, and trying to buy dollars and euros as the Iranian rial continues its slide.

Amid the fresh escalation of tensions in the 40-year dispute between the United States and Iran, Mogjan said the uncertainty has been nearly as unsettling as her shrinking quality of life. But she sees the prospect of war as remote, given Iran’s status as a regional power and the impact such a conflict could have on the wider Middle East, including U.S. allies.

Indeed, none of the Iranians interviewed said they expected a full-scale armed conflict.

“People around me are not particularly concerned with a possibility of a military war, but are very pessimistic about the economic situation,” said Elham, 35.

ATTA KENARE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Many already consider themselves on war footing because of hardships under U.S. sanctions Some officials in the Trump administration suggest that economic pain will inspire Iranians to revolt against their leaders, but Iranians say that hope is naive.

They say they are simply trying to adapt to life without some necessities and aiming to ride out this period of hardship.

Since the United States withdrew from the landmark nuclear deal with Iran a year ago and started imposing wide-reaching economic sanctions, Iran’s currency has lost 60 percent of its value and the price of staples such as red meat and onions has skyrocketed 120 percent. Imported medicines have disappeared from pharmacies, and the cost of travel has become out of reach for most.

Faced with the decimation of Iran’s crucial oil exports and its banking and steel industries, Iranian leaders have conceded that the nation is facing a crisis. In recent weeks, President Hassan Rouhani likened the economic

impact of U.S. sanctions to that of the ruinous war with Iraq in the 1980s — a comparison that landed with frightening effect for many in Iran’s struggling middle class.

U.S. officials have taken steps in recent weeks in response to what they described as credible intelligence of Iran’s intention to target American interests in the region.

Though no evidence of Iranian threats has been made public, the Pentagon announced recently that it was sending an additional 1,500 troops to the Middle East.

That followed an accelerated deployment of an aircraft carrier group and a bomber wing to the Persian Gulf.

Senior White House officials also blamed Iran for the sabotage of four oil tankers in the gulf belonging to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Norway. Iran has denied responsibility for the attacks, but analysts have said they seem to fit into Tehran’s strategy of trying to drive

Iranians wait for a bus in Tehran. Many residents in Tehran say U.S. sanctions have contributed to inflation and shortages of food.

up oil prices in response to U.S. sanctions.

Iran’s leaders say they do not want war with the United States, but have said their military is fully capable of defending the nation against attack — a message, analysts say, that is directed as much at Washington as at Iranians.

The economic uncertainty has forced some Iranians who considered themselves comfortable or even well-to-do into situations they had never considered: driving a taxi during off hours to make ends meet or trying to find a few hours’ work in a shrinking construction market.

For one 33-year-old woman who runs her own catering company in Tehran, the dizzying inflation in the price of food means she is losing money on nearly every contract. She said that the cost of ingredients increases almost every day and that she cannot pass that on to clients who are already strapped for cash.

With her profits way down, her family must forgo certain comforts, while storing essential items such as rice, pasta, oil and canned food “because there is a concern over shortages or war,” she said.

She and others said Tehran is jittery. Whenever rumors spread that an essential item is disappearing, Iranians make a wild dash to the markets. A few weeks ago, it was sanitary napkins and diapers that had people lining up at stores. More recently, it was sugar, she said.

“I don’t know how much of it is because of the scarcity of raw materials because of the sanctions and how much of it are games being played by distributors,” she said.

She and others said they hear more relatives, friends and neighbors talk about leaving Iran for good. Some people who have been able to save enough money to travel have applied for asylum in Europe, Canada and countries in the gulf region.

“Personally, I feel trapped, because the more the economic pressure gets, the more we have to work,” the caterer said. “And I cannot find the time or energy to study and plan for immigration.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

A top predator that refuses to die BY

D ARRYL F EARS

O

n a cold, miserable morning in May, Stan Gehrt was leading a team of wildlife biologists on a mission to find an animal with a gift for not being seen.

The team didn’t have to travel far from its headquarters for the search. A female coyote had made a den within sight of Chicago’s skyline. They were only “about five kilometers” from America’s busiest airport, O’Hare International, Gehrt said as he advanced toward the den.

Like every state east of the Mississippi River, Illinois is worried about its growing population of city-slicker coyotes. The animals surged from their original habitat in the West after what many now consider a colossal mistake — government-sanctioned predator removal programs that virtually wiped out red and gray wolves.

Coyotes have been taking over the territory of wolves, their mortal enemies, ever since. It is a textbook example of what the recent United Nations biodiversity report said: Humans are creating chaos for wildlife, placing a million species in danger of going extinct. The report warned that the mismanagement of nature would come back to haunt humans in a variety of ways, including in the form of food and water shortages, and disruptions by invasive species.

As the Trump administration seeks to strip away legal protections for the last remaining wolves, state officials are contending with the consequences of a massacre carried out without regard to science.

People were fascinated when coyotes started showing up in Maryland, but complaints about nuisance animals increased as the coyote population grew. The situation was worse for native wildlife. Coyotes became the top predator and changed the ecosystem. Maryland’s red foxes were pushed to the edge of their territory, and their numbers declined.

KAREN NICHOLS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Government hunting programs that killed off wolves cleared a path for coyotes to surge east Wildlife officials across the East are trying to reduce coyote populations with tactics similar to those used to destroy wolves, but the cash bounties, hunting contests and unlimited daily harvests are not working on an animal that is more resilient.

Coyotes have a unique way of responding to population pressure: They make more coyotes.

Kill half a million one year, experts say, and that many will pop up the next.

Early American settlers started killing wolves, mountain lions and other apex predators centuries ago, largely to protect livestock. Modern developers mounted a far more ambitious effort to remove wolves for urban expansion, which accelerated their decline by erasing large portions of their habitat. In the process, humans unwittingly opened a gateway for one of the most resilient predators in the wild.

“You’ve probably heard the cliche that nature abhors a vacu-

um,” said DeLene Beeland, author of “The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf.” “Of course they’re going to come in; it’s open habitat.”

As early as the mid-to-late 1940s, coyote populations started to creep upward in the Midwest. Early settlers “would never have known anything about a coyote,” Gehrt said. But now, residents in Chicago, New York, Washington, Charlotte and Atlanta are living with them, even if most people don’t know it. By the 1990s, coyotes had pushed all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, establishing a presence in Virginia and the Carolinas. They roamed as far north as New Hampshire and as far south as Florida, places where they didn’t exist 50 years ago.

Coyotes have even ventured into Mexico and Central America. They recently became the first new animal species in a thousand years known to cross the isthmus into Panama, where camera traps spotted them heading toward

Coyotes have been taking over the territory of wolves, their mortal enemies, since a governmentsanctioned program virtually wiped out red and gray wolves.

South America.

Unlike wolves, coyotes don’t need to bring down a grown deer, elk or bison to survive. They’ll eat fruit. Or a rabbit. Or swipe an occasional fawn. Mostly they eat rodents, Gehrt said. “I think . . . what we’ve learned in general is the removal of large apex predators have unintended consequences,” Gehrt said.

Now Illinois is trying the manage coyotes with science.

“Every year we try to locate the den where the coyotes are trying to raise a litter,” he said. “If we are successful in finding the den, we can extract the pups, microchip them, and put them back.”

But a scientific approach is not being used in every state.

In South Carolina, state Sen. Stephen Goldfinch (R-Georgetown) issued a call to arms.

Goldfinch did not respond to requests for comment, but he told WMBF News in Myrtle Beach that killing coyotes should be South Carolina’s top priority.

“The state’s perspective is every coyote needs to be a dead coyote. Trap them, shoot them . . . however you want to get rid of them,” Goldfinch said.

In Georgia, where the coyote population grew from near zero to thousands after the turn of the century, officials backed away from Goldfinch’s approach.

Georgia fought coyotes with hunting events that offered prizes for the most animals killed.

When that failed, the state turned to educational programs to raise public awareness.

“We wanted to remind people of all the tools they have to keep them away,” said Charlie Killmaster, the state’s deer and feralhog biologist. “A number of states have shown that governmentsponsored programs to eradicate coyote populations are huge money pits that result in failure.”

It’s not too late to learn from the past, he said.

“Looking back on our predecessors that were anti-predator in general . . . that created this,” Killmaster said. “Absolutely they paved the way for coyotes to come in.” n

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COVER STORY

‘Now you can finally be together again.’

Program gives parents in Mexico a chance to visit undocumented children in the U.S. after years apart

M

aría Dominga Romero León bent over a small black suitcase and packed her things, one by one: A folder of photographs, a half-finished blouse, a bag of wooden toys for the grandchildren she’d never met.

She sighed.

“They’re probably used to America by now,” she said.

Romero León, 68, hadn’t seen her daughter Guillermina in so long that she was starting to lose track of the years. Had it been 15 or 20? She wasn’t sure. What she knew was that Guillermina was an undocumented immigrant in a place called Germantown in Illinois with three children of her own. Two were U.S. citizens; one was a beneficiary of the federal program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Romero León knew that U.S. immigration laws made it impossible for her daughter to come back to Cheran without jeopardizing the life she had built in the United States because she didn’t have papers to move back and forth across the border.

That’s why Romero León was packing her bags. She had never been on an airplane, or been to an airport, or

seen an escalator — she’d never left her home state of Michoacan. But now she was getting ready to fly to America.

The U.S. government — the same government from which Romero León’s daughter was hiding — had surprised her with a tourist visa.

Officials in Michoacan call them Palomas Mensajeras (Messenger Pigeons.) They are parents and grandparents in Mexico who have not seen their undocumented children in the United States for years, even decades. Since 2017, officials here have been working with the U.S. State Department to reunite those families for three-week visits in cities and towns across the United States.

For many here, it is an unlikely American olive branch amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But it has been welcomed by immigrant families grappling with a crisis that has rippled across both countries: The elderly parents of the estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States are dying alone in Mexico while their children remain stuck on the other side of the border.

BY KEVIN SIEFF in Cheran, Mexico

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PHOTOS BY SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

In Cheran, María Dominga Romero León, 68, waits as her daughter Angelina Sánchez, 47, irons handmade pillow cases that are to be taken to the United Sates as gifts. Sánchez’s granddaughter Valeria Masias Fabian, 8, watches.

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COVER STORY

Romero León’s husband died of complications from diabetes a year ago. During his final days, she held a phone to his ear so their children could speak to him from the United States. Three of the couple’s six children were undocumented immigrants living across the border.

“It was hard for him,” Romero León said, “to be sick, to be dying so far away from them.

“I thought, ‘Will it be the same for me?’ ” Still, when she learned that she would be joining 21 other elderly residents from around Cheran on a flight to Chicago, she found it hard to understand. Why had the United States granted her a visa? Was it a trick to apprehend her daughter?

“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said.

“Are they going to use this to arrest them?”

Warnings The U.S. government hasn’t specifically endorsed the program, a State Department spokesman said in a statement. But officials last year began designating special interview days at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City for elderly visa applicants who “frequently travel in groups to the United States for a variety of reasons including tourism, cultural programs, and to visit friends and family such as U.S. citizen grandchildren.”

The State Department spokesman declined to answer questions about why the United States is facilitating reunions between Mexicans and their undocumented children.

The department has been issuing 10-year, multiple-entry visas to Michoacanos age 60 and older who have not themselves been in the United States illegally. The families pay for the visas and flights themselves. The program has sent more than 5,000 visitors to the United States in the past 30 months.

“We believe we have between 600,000 and 800,000 undocumented Michoacanos living in the United States, and this program is for them,” said José Luis Gutiérrez, the secretary of migration in Michoacan.

Gutiérrez said he met with the State Department several times leading up to the program’s creation in 2017 and explained “the importance of what we were trying to do.”

Not a single participant has overstayed a visa, he said.

Other Mexican states have started similar programs. In Zacatecas, it’s known as “Heart of Silver.” In Puebla, it’s “Roots of Puebla.”

Organizers warn the undocumented children not to meet their parents at the airport, where they might be asked for identification. Parents applying for visas are encouraged to list the addresses of relatives or friends who are in the United States legally, rather than provide contact information for their children illegally in the country.

Romero León tried to remember what the program’s organizers had told her about what she could take to the United States.

She held the bag of wooden toys.

“Is this okay?” she asked.

“It’s so complicated.”

She decided to pack only one change of clothes and zipped the black bag shut.

She was still trying to make sense of the program, to figure out what she would do with her three weeks in America.

“They say this is about reuniting families, that it’s safe for them even though they don’t have papers. But I don’t know,” she said.

“I’ll tell her, ‘It’s time for you to move back.’ ” ‘There was no work here’ Cheran, a town of 16,000 in the hills of central Mexico, is the ancestral home of the Purépecha indigenous people. For centuries, it was an isolated dot in the state of Michoacan where the native, pre-Hispanic language was more common than Spanish.

Then, in the 1980s and ’90s, young men and women started leaving for the United States — the beginning of a migration that would remake Cheran. The town lost thousands of sons and daughters but gained millions of dollars in remittances. Suddenly it was connected to the outside world. Cherani clustered in Chicago, St. Louis, Raleigh, N.C. Guillermina Sánchez, Romero León’s daughter, left on New Year’s Day 2002, carrying her six-month-old daughter and a tourist visa she planned to overstay. They would reunite with Guillermina’s husband, Abdias, who had sneaked across the border a few weeks earlier and was waiting in Chicago.

“They said it would be two years, and then they would be back,” Romero León said.

Maria Dominga Romero León, center, hugs her grandson Oswaldo Guardian, 13, whom she had never met.

Her granddaughter Chelsy Guardian, 18, left Mexico when she was an infant.

Romero Leon’s daughter Guillermina Sanchez, 38, right, left on New Year’s Day 2002. Andrew Guardian, 5, meets his grandmother for the first time.

“I’m not mad. I understand why they stayed.

There was no work here. But, still, it’s a long time.”

She took up her black bag and began walking to the center of town. The small woman with long, straight hair that she’d never once cut headed for the bus that would take the Palomas away.

Every few steps, she was stopped by a friend or neighbor.

“I’m going to the United States,” she told one woman.

“I’ll tell everyone you said hello,” she promised another.

She climbed onto the bus and waved goodbye through the window. The trip organizers are now experts in shepherding the elderly travelers through international airports, translating between Spanish, English and Purépecha, holding on to passports, reassuring nervous old men and women that the plane won’t crash.

It was late at night when Romero León and her 21 fellow pilgrims were guided through customs and security at the Guadalajara airport and into the terminal.

Airport workers looked at the group with curiosity.

Romero León spotted an escalator. She was bewildered.

“Is it a game?” she whispered.

Romero León took her place on the plane and quietly said a little prayer. The plane took off, and she fell asleep, the bag of photos and toys in the overhead compartment.

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COVER STORY ‘I’m not going to cry’ Guillermina Sánchez waited with Abdias and their children at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Winfield, Ill., a few miles outside Chicago.

The bus carrying Romero León and the rest of the group would be arriving any minute.

“Do you think we’ll even recognize her?”

Chelsy Guardian, 18, Sánchez’s daughter, asked her brother Oswaldo, 13.

“I think so,” he said, shrugging.

“I think it’s going to be a little awkward for a while,” Chelsy said.

When the bus pulled up to the church, she saw her grandmother through the window.

“It was like seeing a mirage in the desert,” she said later.

Inside a church hall, dozens of children formed a receiving line. Chelsy held a sign: “Bienvenidos Mama Minga.”

Pedro Tomás, one of the program’s organizers, wielded a microphone like a master of ceremonies.

“These are families that haven’t seen each other for 15, 20 or 30 years,” he said. “It’s been difficult for all of you. But now you can finally be together again.”

The elderly men and women entered the hall one at a time, each looking a little confused and a little unsteady until their children and grandchildren came up and embraced them in a shock of flowers and balloons.

Romero León was one of the last to be introduced.

“I’m not going to cry,” she said. Then she walked into the room, standing up straight.

Guillermina took her mother’s hand and pulled her close. Chelsy burst into tears and threw her arms around her grandmother. Then Oswaldo, whose own tears flowed down his face, hugged her, resting his head on her shoulder.

Romero León tried to remain in control of her own emotions. She didn’t want her family to think she was fragile. And she worried that if she got too emotional, it might make her sick.

But then she felt it, all at once. She covered her face with a scarf and wept.

“My daughter,” she said through tears. “My grandchildren.”

‘It’s time to return’ The next morning, Romero León’s first full day in America, she sat on the couch in front of a big-screen television in the family’s two-bedroom home, Oswaldo next to her on his iPad. “You’ll lose an eye from looking at that,” she said and handed out the wooden toys she’d brought from Cheran.

The family lives just off Main Street in Germantown, Ill., a town of 1,300 outside St. Louis, surrounded by farmland, its streets lined with placards bearing the names of sons and daughters serving in the military. American flags are on everything. Seventy-seven percent of the town’s voters in 2016 cast their ballots for Donald Trump.

Guillermina and Abdias moved here in 2002 because it was a safe place to raise children.

They found work easily — she at a plant

KLMNO WEEKLY

Romero León asked.

“Over the years, we’ve become more confident, little by little,” she said.

Romero León had her own secret. She was planning, at some point, to push the family to move back to Cheran. She had her argument ready. It was safer there, she would say. They had already saved up and built a house in the town, and it was sitting empty, waiting for them. Then there was the other obvious truth: She was getting older.

“I’ll tell her that,” she said. “I’ll tell her it’s time to return.”

But not yet, she decided.

From top: Romero León takes her first step onto an escalator at a shopping mall in Fairview Heights, Ill., with her daughter Guillermina Sánchez. Chelsy Guardian, 18, holds a top that her grandmother made for her. Romero León plays with her grandson Andrew Guardian, 5.

nursery, he at a landscaping company. For a while, their children were the only Hispanic students in their schools. Oswaldo and Andrew, 5, speak almost no Spanish.

Not long after they arrived here, immigration agents raided their home. The family happened to be staying with friends at the time. They hid at the friends’ house for a few days until two police officers knocked on the door.

“They told us to send Chelsy back to school,” Guillermina said. “They said they wouldn’t arrest us.”

She was carefully choosing which parts of her life to share with her mother. That was a part that she decided to keep to herself.

But a few hours later, when the family took Romero León for her first visit to an American shopping mall, the issue came up.

“You don’t feel like you need to hide?”

‘They have their lives here’ The program books the Palomas’ first visit to the United States to last three weeks. But the visas allow them to return for as long as six months in a year. In theory, they can continue to visit their families in the United States. But that often doesn’t happen.

The travel is expensive, the logistics complicated. Sometimes, the Palomas are too infirm for second visits. Sometimes, one visit is enough.

“What we’ve seen a lot is that the parents die soon after returning to Mexico,” organizer Joaquín Márquez said. “It’s like they were living to see their children and grandchildren, and after that, they are ready to pass on.”

Romero León and her family knew that at some point, they would have to find a way forward. Would Guillermina, Abdias and the children return to Cheran? That was the hope Romero León had been nurturing.

But the more time she spent in Germantown, the more she realized it would be a difficult pitch. Not only did the two youngest children not speak Spanish, but Chelsy was about to enroll in college. At breakfast one morning, she told her family her new goal: She would become a dentist.

Romero León looked at the family’s three cars parked outside. On the refrigerator, there was a newspaper article naming Chelsy student of the week. There was a photo of Guillermina’s basketball team. There was a tax form from the IRS. “They have their lives here,” Romero León said.

Some of the Palomas react poorly to seeing their families’ American lives up close. Romero León was adapting. She had five new American blouses, purchased at Macy’s. She had found the Spanish channels on the television.

Her two sons in Pennsylvania were planning to visit soon. She had taken a few superhero masks from a family birthday party and played with her grandchildren as Captain America.

Guillermina was watching her, and thinking over the family’s plans.

“There’s always been something to stop us from returning home,” she said. “First it was work. Then the kids’ education.”

She paused, considering the newest factor in the family’s calculus.

“And now that my mom has a visa, we have another reason to stay.” n

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TECHNOLOGY / PERSPECTIVE

Do you know where your data goes?

BY

G EOFFREY A . F OWLER

accountable for bad behavior — including inevitable breaches.

I

t’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m asleep, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.

Our data has a secret life in many devices we use every day, from Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.

Apps that I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service called Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.

And your iPhone doesn’t feed data trackers just while you sleep.

In a single week, I encountered more than 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of a basic wireless service plan from AT&T. “This is your data. Why should it even leave your phone? Why should it be collected by someone when you don’t know what they’re going to do with it?” says Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is the chief technology officer for Disconnect. He hooked my iPhone into special software so we could examine traffic. “I know the value of data, and I don’t want mine in any hands where it

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION/ISTOCK

An iPhone privacy experiment reveals astounding tally of hidden trackers running while you sleep doesn’t need to be,” he said.

In a world of data brokers, Jackson is a data breaker. He developed an app called Privacy Pro that identifies and blocks many trackers. Part of Jackson’s objection to trackers is that many feed the personal-data economy, used to target us for marketing and political messaging. Jackson’s biggest concern is transparency: If we don’t know where our data is going, how can we ever hope to keep it private?

The app gap Why do trackers activate in the middle of the night? Some appmakers have them call home at times when the phone is plugged in or when they might not interfere with other functions. These late-night encounters happen on the iPhone if you have allowed “background app refresh,” which is Apple’s default.

With Yelp, the company says the behavior I uncovered wasn’t a tracker but rather an “unintended issue” that’s been acting like a

tracker. At best, it is shoddy software that sent Yelp data it didn’t need. At worst, Yelp was amassing a trove that could be used to map people’s travels, even when they aren’t using its app.

Appmakers often use trackers because they’re shortcuts to research or revenue. They run the gamut from innocuous to insidious. Some are like consultants that appmakers pay to analyze what people tap on and look at.

Other trackers pay the appmakers, squeezing value out of our data to target ads.

Microsoft, Nike and the Weather Channel told me they were using the trackers I uncovered to improve performance. Mint, owned by Intuit, said it uses an Adobe marketing tracker to help figure out how to advertise to Mint users. The Post said its trackers were used to make sure ads work. Spotify pointed me to its privacy policy.

The problem is, the more places personal data flies, the harder it becomes to hold companies

“This is your data. Why should it even leave your phone?”

Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is the chief technology officer for Disconnect

The letdown What disappoints me is that the data free-for-all I discovered is happening on an iPhone. Isn’t Apple supposed to be better at privacy?

“At Apple we do a great deal to help users keep their data private,” the company said in a statement. “Apple hardware and software are designed to provide advanced security and privacy at every level of the system.”

In some areas, Apple is ahead.

Most of its own apps and services take care to either encrypt data or, even better, not collect it in the first place. Apple is strict about requiring permission to access your camera, microphone, location, health information, photos and contacts. But Apple turns more of a blind eye to what apps do with data that we provide them or that they generate about us — witness the sorts of tracking I found by looking under the covers .

“For the data and services that apps create on their own, our App Store Guidelines require developers to have clearly posted privacy policies and to ask users for permission to collect data before doing so,” Apple said.

Yet very few apps I found using third-party trackers disclosed the names of those companies or how they protect my data. What we need is accountability.

Getting more deeply involved in app data practices is complicated for Apple. Today’s technology frequently is built on thirdparty services, so Apple couldn’t simply ban all connections to outside servers. And some companies are so big, they don’t even need outsiders to track us.

Jackson suggests that Apple could add controls to iOS like the ones built into Privacy Pro to give everyone more visibility.

Or perhaps Apple could require apps to disclose when they’re using third-party trackers.

If I opened an app and saw nine tracker notices, it might make me think twice about using it. n

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SPORTS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Baseball fans sitting in a danger zone Line drives can reach seats not covered by nets with great force in just over a second

BY

N EIL G REENBERG

C

alls for more protective netting at Major League Baseball ballparks are increasing after a 4-year-old girl was struck by a foul ball and hospitalized in Houston’s Minute Maid Park during a game between the Cubs and Astros on May 29.

Since 2017, there have been several other alarming incidents in which fans have been struck by foul balls lined into seats not protected by netting. In 2017, a girl was struck by a foul ball at Yankee Stadium and in August 2018, a 79-year-old died four days after being rushed to the hospital following a similar incident at Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium.

Major League Baseball required that all franchises extend protective netting at least as far as the dugouts for the 2018 season.

The question now is whether that provides a reasonable level of protection given these incidents.

Although the Astros complied and installed nets extending over the dugouts in 2017, the girl’s seating area, Section 111, is the first section not protected by netting.

The incident illustrates just how little time anyone has to react to an incoming missile, such as the one hit by the Cubs’ Albert Almora Jr. in Houston.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred says structural issues would make it difficult for teams to make changes and extend the netting during this season.

“I think it is important that we continue to focus on fan safety,” Manfred said in Seattle last week, noting that he expects the issue to be discussed both now and in the offseason. “If that means that the netting has to go beyond the dugouts, so be it. Each ballpark is different. The reason I hesitate with ‘beyond the dugout,’ I mean, a lot of clubs are beyond the dugout already. But there is a balance here. We do have fans that are vocal about the fact that they don’t want to sit behind nets. I think that we have struck the balance in favor of fan safety so far, and I think we will continue to do that going forward.”

In this most recent instance, the ball left Almora’s bat at 106.3 mph and covered a distance of 158 feet, per MLB’s data. The ball took just 1.2 seconds to reach the seats, according to John Eric Goff, professor of physics at the University of Lynchburg and author of “Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports.”

To put that reaction time in perspective, if you were driving a car traveling at 55 mph, you would have just 1.2 seconds to swerve if an object fell off the back of a truck 97 feet in front of you. But that’s if the driver is paying rapt attention.

In 2011, Consumer Reports found that a distraction like texting while driving doubles reaction times.

Given that a fan may not be focused on every batted ball, they may have only 0.6 seconds to get out of the way of a 106-mph line drive.

That’s particularly concerning

in a year in which average exit velocities are the highest they’ve been since the league started tracking how fast balls flew from the point of contact.

“If your eyes are away from home plate and you hear the crack of that bat — sound is going to reach you later than the light will — before you know it there’s a ball coming at you,” Goff said. “So a person might have a great reaction time but, if they’re not watching, it’s not going to help them much.”

Assuming a fan is giving undivided attention to the game, the above graphic, which uses the same seven-degree launch angle as Almora’s line drive, illustrates that the fan would have between 1 and 1.5 seconds to dodge such a foul ball. That’s a lot to ask of anyone — particularly when distracted.

In addition to the game itself, baseball fans are also faced with

advertisement signage, scoreboard displays, vendors in the aisles, mascots, social interactions and a number of other stimuli during live game action.

In the 2010 case Edward C. v.

City of Albuquerque, the Supreme Court of New Mexico found a fan “must exercise ordinary care to protect himself or herself from the inherent risk of being hit by a projectile that leaves the field of play and the owner/occupant must exercise ordinary care not to increase that inherent risk.”

Does “ordinary care” cover people who must dodge incoming balls at 100 mph in a second and a half or less when sitting in exposed seating areas just beyond the edge of the netting? As the graphic on this page illustrates, that potential danger exists for anyone in those sections.

Goldbloom’s death shows the highest stakes in this conversation. Goff estimates the kinetic energy, or energy that results via any form of motion, from a 100mph line drive to be about 145 joules. That kinetic energy is roughly equal to the impact of a 10-pound weight dropped on you from nearly 11 feet above your head.

The threat is not a rare one, either: There were at least 1,020 line-drive foul balls with exit velocities of 100 mph or greater through June 3. Not all of those found their way to the seats, but that number represents only what we can see from the data publicly available. In 2015, Major League Baseball introduced a tracking system for batted balls, Statcast, that follows batted balls and records the type of hit (groundball, line drive, flyball, etc.) and landing spot. But foul balls are not always recorded, meaning while we can see a minimum of more than 1,000 instances of foul-ball line drives traveling over 100 mph, the total number is probably higher.

While Manfred and MLB’s teams wrestle with the balance of protective netting, any fan sitting just beyond its edge should be well aware that danger could be a mere second away. n

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