Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Amarillo News Drop. I'm Keli, with Hast.

HAST Four people indicted this week on solicitation charges after a June undercover operation in Randall County. Travis Jordan Brooks, thirty-five; Braiden Sellers, thirty-four; Kody Dick, thirty-eight; and William Bradley, forty-eight — all indicted Wednesday by the county grand jury. Two others, David Ritchie and Jorge Lopez-Najera, were indicted earlier in August. Two more from that same June sting have been arrested but not yet indicted.

KELI That's the mechanism underneath: the Randall County Sheriff ran an undercover prostitution operation in June. Eight people came up in it. The grand jury is moving them through the system in batches — first wave hit in mid-August, this second wave Wednesday. Two more are sitting in the queue. No word yet on timing for charges against the final two, but the county's working through the stack.

HAST On water in the Panhandle — Guymon held a public meeting this week to walk the community through the Mesa Water Project and the long-term supply strategy. The city's been under Stage 3 restrictions for months now. Drought conditions are holding. The project is how they're planning to dig out of it, but the meeting's a signal the timeline matters and the conversation with residents matters too.

KELI Different scale — crews are working on Western Street in Amarillo between Erik Avenue and Western Plaza Drive on a force main improvement at Lawrence Lake. One lane each way, Western Plaza closed to through traffic, detours in place. That's through the project window, which the city hasn't pinned down publicly yet.

HAST In Austin — Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a billion-dollar settlement with Meta this week over child safety violations. Paxton's office said Meta failed to protect minors on its platforms. The settlement is one of the largest the state has secured against a tech company on that front.

KELI One date marker — August twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-nine: the Russian space station Mir closed after nearly ten years of continuous human occupation. The end of an era in low-Earth orbit.

HAST That's the Amarillo News Drop. Full script and sources at inkwell.wiki/news/amarillo.

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. This drop comes from the same workshop as Gil's Intelligent Version — the Bible, re-ordered into the sequence events actually happened, and retranslated from the original languages.

HAST Its rule is simple: no author, only method. The full archive is at inkwell dot wiki, slash giv.