Amarillo, Potter County | featured news

Dressed entirely in black, with tape covering their mouths, a line of Amarilloans will walk single-file down Georgia Street, silently, for the cause of an estimated 27 million people across the globe who are trapped in forced manual and sexual labor.
Hundreds could form the Amarillo walk that day, on Oct. 15, Audrey Jones said. She is part of a group from The Loft Church who are planning the second-annual Amarillo A21 Campaign Walk for Freedom, which is just one of nearly 250 international planned walking locations.

When future-nurse Erin Fraser moved from West Virginia to the Panhandle as an incoming high school freshman, she was introduced to the community of the Panhandle Area Health Education Center. She said it helped her transition to the new area, but it also steered her into her future as a health professional.
“I always enjoyed medicine, I didn’t know what direction to choose though,” said Fraser.

A vehicle stopped for a traffic violation on eastbound Interstate 40 has led to the seizure of more than 25 pounds of cocaine, Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Cindy Barkely reported.
At 9:03 p.m. Friday, a DPS trooper stopped a 2013 BMW traveling east on I-40. The trooper discovered several plastic-wrapped packages of cocaine located inside false compartments that were accessed through the wheel wells. DPS has estimated the cocaine is worth approximately $1.5 million.

Basil Trainer was just 9 years old when he decided it was time for an adventure.
Life with his parents and nine older brothers and sisters — all packed into a half dugout home on a dusty Oklahoma farm — was getting cramped, and he was getting overlooked.
So Basil did what some of the more adventurous restless souls did in the early 1900s. He saddled up a horse and headed west, with little more than the clothes on his back.
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PLAINVIEW — Glenn Schur’s sorghum is gluten-free.
But then again, so is all sorghum.
The trick for the Plainview-area farmer to be able to use his crop in food products labeled gluten-free is to give it some distance.
“We can’t have it exposed to wheat, barely or oats,” he said. “It can’t be in the same elevator.”

TUESDAY
Amarillo City Council: 5 p.m. Council Chambers, City Hall, 509 S.E. Seventh Ave. The agenda calls for consideration of a program to register and regulate tire haulers, an Amarillo Economic Development Corp. project briefing, a public hearing on the proposed tax rate, a public hearing on fiscal year 2016-17, and appointments to boards and commissions.

THURSDAY

■ On Sept. 4, 1951, President Harry S. Truman addressed the nation from the Japanese peace treaty conference in San Francisco in the first live, coast-to-coast television broadcast.
■ In 1781, Los Angeles was founded by Spanish settlers under the leadership of Gov. Felipe de Neve.
■ In 1886, a group of Apache Indians led by Geronimo surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon in Arizona.
■ In 1888, George Eastman received a patent for his roll-film box camera, and registered his trademark: “Kodak.”

In today’s climate, it would be understandable, even expected, that Verslia Newkirk would be bitter, sullen, maybe even angry.
If there were a woman in Amarillo who would be in agreement with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s sit-down protest of the national anthem, it would seem to be her.
Newkirk, 48, is African-American. It was 22 years ago that her brother, Versie Brown Jr., was shot and killed by Pampa police.
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Confident that marijuana was a safer alternative to pharmaceutical drugs prescribed during and after her pregnancies, Colorado mother Jeanna Hoch used marijuana medicinally while carrying both of her children and while breastfeeding them.
In 2015, Colorado Child Protective Services began investigating Hoch after receiving information that she was using marijuana while breastfeeding her daughter, the self-proclaimed “cannamama” said.

Bill Wright, 54, is an independent medical marijuana advocate who suffers from roughly 28 ailments, many of which are genetic.
His heart has only two working valves and is kept beating by a defibrillator. He also suffers from Crohn’s disease, an incurable bowel condition.
“I do have reason to be doing this,” he said. For the Amarillo resident, cannabis is “the only effective manner that I’ve found to control Crohn’s disease. It makes your brain think ‘Everything’s cool, everything’s normal.’”