In this week’s roundup, we feature new details on the pesticide industry’s push to influence international policy, this year’s Golden Padlock winner, and gestures toward transparency across the country.

DocumentCloud has long offered a number of options when it comes to making documents easier to search, including support for OCR, which “reads” through text that’s saved as images to make it searchable. With the latest upgrades to the DocumentCloud Beta, we’re expanding support from 22 languages to 103, so whether you’re analyzing a document in Afrikaans or Yiddish, or anything in between, we’ve got you covered.

Building on COVID Public Info, we’re excited to announce that we’re combining efforts with Documenting COVID-19. The project, based out of Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation, is similarly working to use public records to build a shared repository to benefit newsrooms around the country.

In this week’s roundup, we highlight the latest finds from federal FOIA releases and the Postal Service, plus a new FOI law and frustration with denials in New York

No user-facing feature updates this week, but we updated the API instructions and have a new sample script that helps export request data any way you need it.

We released the first in our MIT Press series, “Writers Under Surveillance,” two years ago today.

Decades of the President’s Intelligence Checklist and Presidential Daily Briefings are publicly available. Help us read through them.

In this week’s roundup, we highlight the latest from MuckRock, federal FOIA lawsuits, and the plight of Illinois’s child wards.

Science writer Kris Newby shares her personal journey that took her from the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard into the depths of the U.S. government’s Cold War biological weapons program.

In late August, we pushed out a major upgrade bringing MuckRock from Django 1.11 to Django 2.1 and from Python 2 to 3. While these updates didn’t offer much new functionality, they were important to help us continue keeping MuckRock secure and giving us an updated, modern platform to build on.

How did massive amounts of government money end up in the pockets of corporations and rich Americans during Trump’s presidency? We go inside the system to find out in ‘The Heist,’ a new Center for Public Integrity podcast. To celebrate, we’re partnering on a contest to help bring even more transparency to one of the biggest tax breaks for the wealthy in history.

Iowa State Patrol has recorded 245 drone flights in the last seven months, including 54 at the scenes of fatal collisions and 15 following crimes, according to its response this week to a records request.

In this week’s FOIA roundup, we highlight how COVID-19 is still delaying transparency in cities across America, even as its needed more than ever. Plus helpful resources for fighting for transparency from our friends at the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press and the FOIA Project.

Some of the nation’s largest cities are stilling using COVID-19 as an excuse to delay records requests.

Police statements, but no records, have followed the shooting of Jacob Blake, a barrier to public access made stronger by a weak Open Records law.

WordPress is the most popular content management system on the web. With a significant number of newsrooms using WordPress under the hood, our existing DocumentCloud WordPress plugin has been a crucial bridge to bring primary source documents to the masses. Now, the plugin has been updated to fully support DocumentCloud and the new DocumentCloud Beta.