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This National Youth Sports Organization Is Failing to Protect Kids From Sexual Abuse

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Ashlee Orndorff played basketball as a teen. In the competitive world of youth sports, few organizations have a reach as vast as the Amateur Athletic Union.  With 760,000 athletes and coaches nationwide, the AAU hosts competitions in dozens of sports across the country. This summer alone, hundreds of thousands of children competed in AAU events for elite young athletes: a staggering 100,000 at the world’s largest volleyball championship in Orlando, Florida; 8,000 at its storied basketball championships at Disney World; more than 15,000 at the Junior Olympics in Iowa.  To the hundreds of thousands of parents whose children play under the red, white and blue AAU badge, the organization offers more than a place to compete. The AAU promises their children will be safe — that its coaches are vetted, monitored and trained; that strict rules govern how adults interact with children; and that it responds effectively to allegations of abuse within its ranks.  ...
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Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing

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Alex Bandoni and Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Corbis, AFP and Weegee (Arthur Fellig)/International Center of Photography/Getty Images. A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week. Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But...
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