Local

Flags fluttered and blue and white balloons bobbed in front of the Columbia Federal Building at 608 E. Cherry St. on Saturday morning. A crowd gathered outside to celebrate the award of the historic building to the Health Adventure Center, which will convert the building into an interactive health science museum for youth.

“This is a great day for our city,” said Ann Cohen, president of the Health Adventure Center Board of Directors.

Five black educators will be honored today by the Minority Men’s Network for outstanding efforts in education.

The educators include the late Muriel Battle, former associate superintendent of Columbia Public Schools; Wanda Brown, principal of Hickman High School; Beulah Ralph, director of Home School Communicators, Columbia Public Schools; Keener Tippin, retired MU administrator; and Rosie Tippin, principal of West Boulevard Elementary School.

MU students can now voice their complaints online through the Megaphone, a Web site created by the Missouri Students Association. The site became available last week.

“Megaphone’s purpose is to give all students an easy way to complain or suggest something to a department on campus and to make sure it gets to the right people right away,” said Nichole Radman, web developer for the association and designer of Megaphone.

Huang Ping and Farika Rusli spent their wedding night apart. The groom watched TV and spent time with his friends. The bride attended a concert in MU’s Jesse Auditorium and then went home to study.

Huang and Rusli walked down the aisle on Friday in a mock American wedding organized by the International Student Friendship and Chi Alpha Campus Ministries under a program called “Discover America.”

Raising red cardboard signs with the words “just practicing” printed in white, more than a dozen Tribune Publishing Company employees marched outside the building Friday afternoon protesting the terms of a work contract unresolved for more than 21/2 years.

The town of Kailua on the windward side of Oahu is guarded by a lush, majestic face of volcanic rock. Across town is a gently sloping beach that travel critics have named one of the nation’s 10 best.

With a boyish smile that rarely leaves his face, Dick Millspaugh recalled the years he spent between these landmarks as pastor of a United Methodist church.

While triumph might be on the minds of some gay men and lesbians in Canada, some religious conservatives fear that a new bill extending protection in hate crime laws to include sexual orientation may threaten fundamental freedoms of speech and religion.

The bill, awaiting approval in the Canadian Senate, was proposed by the first openly gay member of Parliament, Svend Robinson, member of the New Democratic Party. The law would ban “the incitement of genocide or hatred against an identifiable group defined by color, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”

Texas-based developers JPI want to sell their Columbia luxury apartment complex, Jefferson Commons, to a Texas nonprofit corporation that specializes in low-income housing.

A cigarette with your dinner could become a thing of the past.

John Clark is excited that Columbia has begun a reconstruction project to improve the dilapidated streets near downtown.

What started out as a bad day for Peter Freidin snowballed into a yearlong struggle for accessibility to the downtown post office.

Minutes after hordes of police officers and firefighters scoured Rock Quarry Park in a lunchtime search for a lost 2-year-old boy, he was found safe nearly a mile away at his day care. He had walked there alone.

The search lasted for about 40 minutes in the park, near the intersection of Rock Quarry Road and Grindstone Parkway. The boy was found at 3805 Churchill Drive, a home where the boy attends day care.

While chronic wasting disease has yet to appear in Missouri’s white-tailed deer herd, state wildlife researchers remain persistent in their testing for the fatal illness.

This deer season, Boone will be one of 30 counties in Missouri randomly selected as a testing site for chronic wasting disease, the neurological disease that has crippled deer and elk herds in several Midwestern and northern states.

Stephens College is planning for the future. Its Board of Trustees has passed a resolution to begin a major strategic planning initiative.

Even though it will be years before the Improve I-70 project comes to fruition, the Missouri Department of Transportation plans to make costly safety changes to sections of the corridor in mid-Missouri during the next year.

The transportation agency has two projects in the works in the central Missouri district. The first one, already under way, will replace 41,000 feet of damaged and outdated guardrails along a 70-mile stretch across Callaway, Boone and Cooper counties. A separate project, tentatively set for next summer, aims to prevent vehicles from crossing the center median by installing 37 miles of guard cables from eastern Columbia to Montgomery County.

The Columbia Police Officers Association, local businesses and Columbia Police Chief Randy Boehm have established a nonprofit organization that seeks to raise money to support additional programs and purchase equipment for the Columbia Police Department.

The nine-member Board of Trustees, which works with the police to identify areas of need, includes Boehm, former Boone County presiding judge Frank Conley, local attorney Dan Atwill, and Randy Wright, vice president and general manager of KMIZ/Channel 17. The co-chairs of the board are Jim and Billie Silvey, longtime supporters of the police department, who Officer Steve Rios, the foundation’s administrator, said were a unanimous choice.

A Mediacom proposal for public-access television that calls for users to pay hourly fees for studio and airtime is “ridiculous,” a leader of the Columbia Media Resource Alliance said.

The cable television company on Sept. 15 submitted a proposal to the Columbia City Council that provides a public-access channel and studio through an agreement with KMIZ/KQFX. It requires users, however, to pay $80 per hour for studio production time, $35 an hour for program editing and $30 an hour for broadcast time.

It’s 9 a.m. and time for school.

But for 7-year-old Ian McEuen, there is no bus ride involved. McEuen, who has cerebral palsy, is being educated in his family’s living room. His curriculum consists of coordination exercises, as well as speech and physical therapy.

The School of Medicine is not leaving MU, Chancellor Richard Wallace said Tuesday.

Addressing preliminary discussions about proposals to close MU’s School of Medicine and shift its operations to Kansas City, Wallace said the school is critically important to MU’s plans and to retaining membership in the American Association of Universities.

From the outside, the 3M plant appeared to be doing business as usual on Monday. But inside, as workers learned whether they were one of the 124 let go by the company, things were anything but normal. Some emerged from the meeting with tears, others with sighs of relief.

They all wondered why.