"USA Today’s investigative team found the EPA failed to tell people about or take action on hundreds of former lead smelting sites they’d known about for years. Alison Young and Pete Eisler tested the soil around former plants in 13 states and found potentially dangerous levels of lead remain in people’s yards and in parks."

This multi-part look into long-forgotten lead factories includes nearly 370 site-related documents, using DocumentCloud; video interviews with parents whose children play in their lead contaminated back yards; an interactive map telling you where smelters once were in your area; tips on how ...

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Aly Van Dyke of The Topeka Capital Journal has found, using computer-assisted reporting, a startling connection between property values and the city of Topeka's, as well as any city's, health.

Using the data she collected, Van Dyke has included a slide-show of the 50 highest-valued homes in Topeka's county and a database to search residential properties with a map of the highest property values in the Topeka and surrounding areas.

"Tucson's housing market has fallen so hard so fast that more than one in three homes sold last year went for less than $100,000.

Nearly 6,400 homes in Pima County, Arizona were sold for five figures in 2011 - that's more than 35 percent of the 18,000 homes sold last year, an Arizona Daily Star analysis shows."

Included in the report is an interactive map showing the areas of town with the most sales under $100,000 and under $25,000.

"A review by The Salt Lake Tribune has found that perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars of Utah's beer tax money have been diverted to other causes or rolled into everyday city or county activities in.

In some cases, the recipients seemingly stretched the interpretation of the statute to justify how they spent the money. Other municipalities didn’t even try to explain how their purchases comply with the law."

Matt Haag from The Dallas Morning News reports that several schools (most in southern Dallas) in the Independent School District (ISD) have halted their construction projects.

One school, Pearl C. Anderson, already paid $400,000 for renovations before the construction was called off, said  District spokesman Jon Dahlander.  But he said some of the money went toward buying supplies, which can be used at other schools under construction.

Haag used Google Fusion Tables to examine Dallas’ planned school closings and which schools are underused. You can check out the data he used here:http://cl.ly/8g0P And you can ...

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In a two-part story on North Caroina's satellite-based monitoring of sex offenders program, the Winston-Salem Journal newspaper found that technological limitations create a system that some say does nothing more than create a false feeling of security. Additionally, legal challenges may reduce the number of offenders who will have to enroll. The Journal built an in-house spreadsheet to track more than a year's worth of decisions out of the state Court of Appeals, which showed that GPS monitoring was overturned in more than half the cases the court considered. The Journal also used a database of statistics provided ... Read more ...

WBEZ radio in Chicago takes an in-depth look at food deserts in Chicago — areas where people using food stamps have little or no access to full-service grocery stores. Despite violations of the food-stamp program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has not cited any vendors for problems. Liquor stores, gas stations and dollar stores make up 30 percent of food-stamp sales in Chicago, the station's Natalie Moore found in her investigation. The online version of the radio story includes maps showing types of food-stamp vendors by location.

The Hidden Life of Guns, a year-long investigation by The Washington Post, traced guns recovered in crimes in the region. The Post's analysis found a small number of gun stores in the region were linked to a vast majority of the guns recovered in crimes. "Since 1992, more than 2,500 guns recovered by police and tied to crimes in the Washington area have been traced back to their original sale at Realco Guns in Forestville, Md. The total is four times that of the dealer with the next highest number of gun traces." In Virginia, 60 percent of ... Read more ...

The Tennessean's three-part series on gangs reveals a growing problem across the state, particularly in suburbia and small towns. Law enforcement is overwhelmed and schools are ripe recruiting grounds in what's part of a national trend of gangs expanding their influence to areas outside the urban core to sell drugs. The newspaper gained access to gangs, taking readers inside their world, while providing the most complete public accounting to date of gang activity across the state. Included in the online presentation is an interactive map of known gangs that operate in each of Tennessee's 95 counties. Relying ... Read more ...

Using Oklahoma Lottery Commission sales data and U.S. Census Bureau data, the Tulsa World found that some of Tulsa County's poorest areas spend the most money on lottery tickets per capita, according to a report by Gavin Off. An interactive map showing income vs. lottery spending can be found here.