TownReporter 0.6.26 — legal removal and investigative settings

This completes the approved remote implementation queue with owner-only legal removal and saved investigative settings, building on the Dark Desk corrections in 0.6.24 and configurable sections/manual page watching in 0.6.25.

Legal removal is separate from ordinary Trash. It previews linked and historical copies, records a case, and supports an access-controlled copy for 12 calendar months or explicit destruction that never inserts removed text into retained storage. Known captured copies require operator resolution; foreign-room references refuse unsafe cascades. Normalized URLs, late writes and restores are guarded. Backup records are operator attestations, not independently verified erasure.

Dark Desk saves inclusive UTC search dates and a 1–24 signal verification limit. One per-round snapshot governs discovery, synthesis, verification and failover. The editor sees attempted, verified, failed and deferred work against the full eligible count. Search dates remain hints, not guaranteed factual-date filtering.

README, manuals, setup, landing, canonical TODO, current handoff and version fields are reconciled. Historical design decisions are marked as such, and deployment receipts retain their attribution. Fable Direction A remains the design foundation. Migrations 0047–0048; no dependency changes.

Source: 00367ea27db07f445f40c97a06f023e5d41d9485 (PRs #10–11). Exact-main CI34107538179 passed all 14 jobs, including real Postgres and browser workflows. Source tests: 1,321 passed, 36 skipped, 0 failed. Script tests: 329 passed, 4 skipped, 0 failed. Typecheck and build passed; lint has zero errors and 12 inherited warnings.

Validation includes independently reproduced legal-removal defects and correction probes, settings snapshot/date controls, compiled local editor journeys with PGLite and blocked external transports, normal/encoded removed-URL readbacks, and a real-Postgres foreign-FK race test. Retention is owner access control, not encryption. Captured-copy cleanup, historical records and external backups have explicit limits.

Merged to main, CI green, ready for the Halo-local operator to stage and promote when the owner directs it. This GitHub source release is not a production deployment. Five real investigations (three additional owner topics still needed), real-data acceptance, historical-record review and actual backup cleanup remain external. No Halo production scripts, database or backups were accessed from this travel machine.