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Photo illustration by ProPublica. Photos by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica. The U.S. Center for SafeSport is taking steps to stop coaches banned over allegations of sexual abuse from working with children, part of an initiative that the organization said it is launching because of reporting by ProPublica and The Washington Post about gaps in the child protection system in youth sports. Charged by Congress with investigating allegations of sexual abuse in sports, SafeSport has the power to suspend or permanently bar coaches from contact with athletes and place their names on a public disciplinary list . But the center has authority only over the country’s national sports governing bodies, which are overseen by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Elementary and high schools, colleges and many independent youth sports leagues are not required to follow SafeSport’s bans, though some opt to do so. Parents and other caregivers only know if a coach has been sanctioned if t...

People enjoying the water at North Beach on Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont. The beach occasionally gets closed because of algae blooms. Caleb Kenna for ProPublica Despite being an iconic part of Vermont’s landscape and a large source of the state’s drinking water, Lake Champlain has been polluted for decades. Phosphorus runoff from farm fields, rural roads, parking lots, stormwater drains and wastewater treatment plants flows into the lake, fueling algae blooms that frequently choke its bays and shorelines. Vermont is halfway through a 20-year effort to clean up the lake. In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency established new, stricter requirements for reducing phosphorus runoff that the state must meet by 2036. But more than a decade in, after spending nearly a billion dollars, the state is lagging behind. Water quality has not improved dramatically, and in some parts of the lake, it is getting worse. This past summer algae blooms shut down swimming at pub...

Early voting for the midterms in New York last month Ryan Murphy/AFP via Getty Images This has been a midterm election cycle unlike any other. Wealthy donors spent staggering sums . Both parties moved to redraw congressional district lines . President Donald Trump and his allies relentlessly questioned whether the results could be trusted even before a single ballot was counted. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit that said the federal government would contest any outcome in which Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent in Alaska, was not victorious. Newsrooms, including ours, have tried to plan how we will cover an election in which the losing side refuses to accept the will of the voters. Was the Alaska lawsuit a single data point or a harbinger? As we prepare to write about Nov. 3 and beyond, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to game out what might happen in the future — not our strong suit. The record shows that ...

A flash flood along the Rio Ruidoso on July 30, 2025 Three summers ago, over Father’s Day weekend, my family and I went camping in the Lincoln National Forest, just a few hours drive north of our home in El Paso, Texas. It’s a beautiful area that’s long served as a getaway for the region, with skiing in the winter, and golf and hiking in the summer. My daughter played under the trees, and I rode my bike down mountain trails that, I noticed, seemed concerningly dry.  The next evening, after we left to drive home, two fires started in forests surrounding the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, around 25 miles away from where we’d been. I watched horrifying videos online of fire lapping the mountains behind the village’s strip malls and parking lots. The fires were eventually suppressed by a combination of human effort and the late summer monsoon season. But when the downpour of rain hit the burnt landscape around Ruidoso, it created another problem: Recurring floods then ripped t...