UT student from Pearland who found powdery substance in roll of coins test negative for ricin

Houston Chronicle:

A University of Texas at Austin student from Pearland was taken to Memorial Hermann Hospital Friday night and "tested negative for any toxin" after she discovered a white powder that tested positive for the deadly toxin ricin.

...

Kelly Heinbaugh, a freshman walk-on to the UT track team from Pearland, was taken for the additional tests as "an extra precaution," said FBI agent Shauna Dunlap, a spokeswoman for the Houston office of the federal agency.

Heinbaugh returned to Pearland to visit her parents Friday night, after she found "a chunky white powder" while doing laundry Thursday afternoon. The powder was in the last roll of quarters that her mother had given her to do laundry.

...

Mike Elliott, senior district commander for Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services, special operations, said late Saturday that he does not think the white powder was ricin.

"In my opinion, I believe it is not," Elliott said. "As of early this morning, there were four tests run. The first three were exactly the same tests. The first of the three came back mildly positive for ricin. Then, seeing that positive hit, they ran a second one, to confirm their findings. It came back inconclusive. So they ran a third one, to determine which was correct, and it came back inconclusive as well."

"The fourth test, which was a completely different test, came back negative," he said.

Elliott speculated that the powder could be "a granular material that is used to clean and dry coins prior to rolling. It is certainly possible that is what this material is."

Final tests results are likely to be made public either late today or early Monday, he said.

...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more