A case in Cape Girardeau County, where the coroner is charged with stealing from the dead and lying on death certificates, is spurring action to strengthen qualifications for public officials who handle deaths.

In Texas, a self-described Christian sex trafficking abolitionist sought to create a “Mayo Clinic” for juvenile survivors and raised tens of millions to create a new nationwide model. But the Refuge Ranch, and other programs like it, fell far short, a MuckRock and Texas Observer investigation has found, leaving those it treated with more traumatic experiences than they came in with.

Orhan Gündüz’s assassination becomes national news as FBI informants warn of a plot to kill another Turkish diplomat — along with thousands of innocent bystanders. After Loosciano’s VW Rabbit resurfaces, the Bureau zeroes in on a suspect.

In 1978, the director of the CIA warned that excessive, impulsive secrecy was a danger — not only to the public’s right to know, but to the agency’s ability to keep the important secrets. 40 years later, that lesson still needs repeating.

A MuckRock user found an interesting memorandum from the late ‘70s in our recent assignment From the Archives: Memos mentioning Senator Joe Biden, in which the Central Intelligence Agency bemoaned the “burdens” placed on it by the recently strengthened Freedom of Information Act.

Partially due to Joe Biden’s time on the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, a search of the Central Intelligence Agency’s CREST database returns thousands of records - news articles, memos, letters, and more - referencing the Senator.

A memo uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives shows that during his time at the CIA’s Office of Legislative Council, current Attorney General William P. Barr drafted letters calling for the end of the moratorium on destroying records imposed on the Agency ahead of the Church Committee hearings.

On the 48th anniversary of the break-in at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Media, Pennsylvania field office, reporter Betty Medsger reflects on the role of whistleblowers in the pursuit of truth and government transparency.

On Valentine’s Day eve 1976, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a column by Bob Lancaster, in which the veteran humorist bemoans having the flu. In a self-described malaise, Lancaster ponders what a Valentine’s Day card would look like written in a such a sour state, and then - capturing the post-Church Committee zeitgeist - pens one for our “secret admirers” at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lancaster would no doubt be delighted to know that his sweethearts at the CIA were so smitten by his sentiment that they kept a copy, and it remained classified for just shy of 30 years.

While a not-insignificant percentage of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities under Director J. Edgar Hoover were driven by personal vendettas, few were as well-known – or as publicly vicious – as Hoover’s feud with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. That clash quite literally came to a head on December 1, 1964, when, at the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, Hoover invited King to FBI headquarters for their first - and only - face to face meeting, captured in a ten-page memo in King’s file.