Chiara Sottile

ABC News' Linsey Davis investigates more than 2,500 claims of abuse at juvenile probation facilities. Oversight officials say the system is broken beyond repair -- and children are in danger.

Chef Crystal Wahpepah’s kitchen serves up seasonal and sustainable Native American foods that reclaim traditions disrupted by European settlers. Aired November 27, 2022 on Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist. Pitched and produced by Chiara Sottile.

On the Navajo Nation, farmers, chefs and entrepreneurs are rebuilding their traditional food practices, despite a lack of supply chain access and the U.S. government trying to systematically destroy their culture. Watch and read the full story on NBCNews.com.

Dr. Michelle Tom is one of the few doctors in her Navajo community on the front lines of the pandemic, and she has taken every precaution to try to stay healthy, including buying her own protective suit, goggles and face shield. But long before the virus started threatening her people, she was already facing a different sort of crisis: limited access to running water, a severely understaffed and underfunded health care system and underlying health conditions among her patients.

With a steady increase in cases, people on the Navajo Nation are testing positive for the coronavirus at a rate more than nine times higher than people in the entire state of Arizona, based on reported cases and 2010 census data.

Watch the TODAY Show story and read my full original digital story on NBCNews.com.

We give out our cell phone numbers all the time, but those 10 digits are in many ways more valuable, and more personal, than a social security number. By using your number to sign up for a loyalty program, for example, companies receive a whole host of information about you—like the names of your family members, where you live, and your interests.

While ostensibly social media was created to make people feel more connected, it may actually be having the opposite effect.

On any given day, the customer service Twitter account for ride-hailing company Lyft receives comments from a cascade of women alleging sexual harassment by the company’s drivers.

“This man is using lyft to try and kidnap females,” one Twitter user recently wrote. “My ride with him was the most scariest thing that ever happened to me and it’s not just me that he done this to I have screenshots of plenty of women saying he did the same to them.”

Another user pleaded for a response from the company: “Some of your drivers are sexual harassers and you respond by not responding to valid complaints. Seriously?!”

Almost every tweet receives a form of the same response: “The safety of our community is our top priority.”

But women who spoke with NBC News say that their complaints of harassment by Lyft drivers have not been taken seriously by the company, leaving them to turn to social media as a last resort. Though the company made itself known for bright pink mustaches and a brand built on “social good,” some riders say Lyft is yet to address an ongoing pattern of sexual harassment by drivers on its platform.

Read and watch the full story on NBCNews.com.

According to FBI data, after a steady decline since 2008, hate crimes are back on an alarming rise. Our NBC News team investigated how these white supremacist groups recruit -- and just how easy it is for young people to be radicalized. (MSNBC)

This new, quiet, cordless breast pump fits right in your bra—and is a game-changer for working moms like me. Check out my review of the Elvie pump from a company leading the way for FemTech.

Pedophiles are taking over the comment sections of videos of young children and the Google-owned site’s algorithm suggests similar videos for them to watch. YouTube says it took “immediate action,” but several companies have pulled ads from the site in response. And, children’s advocates warn parents should steer clear of the platform altogether.

Facebook’s team of content reviewers focused mainly on violence and pornography, making it "incredibly easy" for Russian trolls to fly under the radar with their fake news, according to a former Facebook content monitor who worked at the social network for eight months in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"As long as these stories didn't contain anything pornographic or incredibly violent, they [would] be left alone, because Facebook has billions of users and there's no way that the content moderators are going to peruse every single news article for valid facts," Sarah Katz, who worked under contract as a Facebook spam analyst and content monitor from March 2016 to that October.

We spoke with Katz about her time as a content moderator for this story on NBCNews.com.

In our exclusive interviews with tech employees who helped build the company, three tech insiders criticize Facebook for prioritizing "user growth and making money over protecting users" against disinformation and fake news. They say with more than 2 billion users that they helped build a monster that even its own engineers can no longer control. Watch our story from former Facebook and Google employees and advisers who say social media platforms sow discord among Americans and haven't done enough to prevent meddling in our elections.

It has been a privilege to bear witness to the brave stories of my hometown in the wake of the wildfires. When NBC News issued me fire gear, I never thought I would use it to report from my neighbors' lost homes in Sonoma. Along Highway 12 in Northern California's wine country, whole neighborhoods are now just sidewalks and stone driveways; the hills around are charred. Block after block of multistory homes have collapsed into piles of soot. Brick chimneys jut skyward toward roofs that are no longer there.

For residents of these devastated communities, the speed of recovery depends entirely on geography; the luck of the land and how fire tore through it.

At Santa Rosa's Paradise Ridge Winery, owned by the Byck family since 1978, the vineyards are intact — but the winery building that housed up to 8,000 cases of wine and the tasting room burned to the ground.

I visited three vineyards in hard-hit Sonoma County to show how many wineries have already been able to reopen their doors and how others won't be back from the devastating wildfires for at least two years.

Read the full story and see the video here.

#SonomaStrong

In his family’s four decades of farming vineyards on Sonoma Mountain, Chris Benziger of Benziger Family Winery says he’s never experienced weather like this year.

It’s just after 10 o’clock in the morning, and the Benziger crush pad is humming. Huge white bins of dark, dense clusters of grapes zoom by on forklifts, a sorting machine sputters and spits out unwanted stems, and the uniformly sized fruit tumbles out layer upon layer into a waiting vat.

But — perhaps more than ever before — their journey to the winery this year has been difficult.

"The intensity and duration of our heat spikes was unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like that before, so it really was a challenging harvest," says Benziger, trying to speak up over the buzz of machines. "We're seeing hotter periods, longer heat spikes, less rain, and then when it does rain, a lot of rain at once."

Climate extremes and record-breaking temperatures in Napa and Sonoma valleys have put vintners to the test this year. At Benziger Family Winery, the estate vineyards suffered from 12 days of temperatures above 100 degrees and spikes beyond 115 degrees this summer, the hottest many here can remember.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

The labor shortage in Santa Barbara County, California agriculture is so severe that last year, farmers left $13 million in crops to rot in the fields.

 According to the region’s Grower-Shipper Association, $13 million of strawberries, broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower and other specialty crops that must be hand-harvested were plowed under last year. And that number has been on the rise over the last few years. Farmers in the county reported needing 22 percent more workers to fill vacant positions and harvest their crops in 2016.

Most of the agriculture workers in Santa Barbara County are from Mexico, but according to Pew Research Center, more Mexican immigrants have been leaving the United States than are arriving.

Claire Wineman, the President of the Association, told us that, “This chronic and severe labor shortage will be detrimental to agriculture, and it’s not unique to central California or even California."

The cause? It could be the political climate. Watch our NBC Nightly News story.

More than ever, we are shopping with a scroll and a click online instead of in our local brick-and-mortar stores. Lucrative same-day shipping deals and the convenience of shopping from home have propelled the growth of e-commerce: up nearly 25 percent last year, according to an analysis by Slice Intelligence.

But our online cravings have cardboard consequences. From boots to bananas, meal kits to makeup, we receive so many packages it's actually changing the very color of material collected at our recycling facilities.

Reporting on this story changed how I felt about online shopping and online services like Blue Apron. Read more and watch our NBC Nightly News report here.

A convenience for some, new technology connecting a range of devices and appliances in smart homes is changing the lives of people who have disabilities. Todd Stabelfeldt is a complete quadriplegic who uses tech like Apple's HomeKit and Switch Control to run a business, help around the house - and perhaps most importantly to him - care for his family.