The news media finally did something somewhat right.

There was a bomb and anthrax threat at UMR today. It spread across the newswire pretty quick and brought in news crews from the larger cities around here. Department of Homeland Security showed up and the FBI, people were being "decontaminated" and such.

But soon after it was found out to be no threat seems everyone dropped the story, which is much better than in the recent past where things have gone nuts with threats.

It was reported that it was an "international student" that caused this, so there was potential for a runaway media with this. UMR's international student base is really high, especially for graduate students, with a majority of them being Indian. The building is also 1 block away from a nuclear reactor.

Unfortunately I don't think this is so much the media doing something right, and probably all that this is a smaller city and the authorities handled this without blowing up anything themselves.

Anyone interested in the story it can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/27/missouri.standoff.ap/index.html as well as many other places online.

Poertner_1274, myself, and Goalie are alumni of that school. I currently work there as a research engineer.

Ft. Leonard Wood is about 30 minutes down interstate from here, they brought in a WMD team. They just had a press conference here 30 minutes ago, they didn't release much information.

International Student, Graduate Student, Civil Engineering, 22 years old is all the information about the 'suspect'.

Latest word is he had a knife and was waving around a bag saying he had a bomb, he'd also written a 3? page note and it had white powder on it. Police tazered him, and now the 23 students that were in the room are still isolated and in decontamination bubbles incase it was anthrax. Apparently it isn't because they have no symptoms as of yet, labs are working on the powder now and should know by 2pm what it is.

Sensationalization Time

Dow Jones Industrial Average Plummets 500 Points on News of UMR Terror Threat

That was me linking those 2 events together, as a joke. They didn't actually do that.

It was on Foxnews and CNN a few times throughout the day. I think the authorities here handled it pretty well and already had a good idea it was all a hoax by the time the news crews got word anything was going on.

I think he had a court date the other day and showed up unrepresented. I think it is safe to say his 'free' life is over.