A school administrator at Marinette High School in northeast Wisconsin called police at around 4 p.m. today, reporting that a student carrying a loaded handgun had gone into a classroom and taken twenty-three students and a teacher hostage. The school is now surrounded by police trying to talk the armed student into surrendering. [Reuters via LAT]

Updated: Emergency Management Director Eric Burmeister's office said all twenty-three students and a female teacher were released unharmed at about 8 p.m. The teacher apparently acted as a mediator between the male hostage-taker and authorities.

Updated: The Times confirms that all of the hostages were released unharmed, but reports that the fifteen year-old gunman shot himself after police entered the classroom. He was taken to a hospital, and his condition is unknown. A local policeman said the armed student had made no demands during the standoff and provided no sense of why he had taken hostages. [NYT]

The documents are "like the Enron emails," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tells Forbes. "I mean, it could take down a bank or two." Exciting! Exhausting! Terrifying! But ugh: They won't be released until "early next year." In the meantime, here's an idea: Anyone who thinks it might be their big bank should just go ahead and release all of the embarrassing/damaging documents themselves, right now, and spare us the suspense. Wouldn't you rather we heard it from you than a weird paranoid Draco-Malfoy looking Swede? Anyone? Vikram? (Intel[AT]nymag.com]

An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange [Forbes]

According to a man who has written "sample" application essays for several would-be business-school students who subsequently "may have passed them off as their own": "My clients are not lazy or trying to be unethical," Blake Reynolds of New York–based Perfect Words, who may or may not have had his buns taped together by members of the football team in high school, explains. They're just really busy. "They work in industries where the hours are really long and writing skills are not emphasized … I think I'm helping people. People who go to these lengths will get the most out of business school." Yes, they probably will.

B-School Admission Essays, For a Fee [BusinessWeek]

When "expert network" analyst John Kinnucan appeared on CNBC last week to talk about how the Feds had approached him to wear a wire to gather information for an insider-trading investigation, he didn't feel the need to explain his decision to tell the suits to back off, since he was talking to people who understood the code of the Street: If you can't be trusted, you get dusted. But when Kinnucan's story started to go mainstream, people had questions. Namely: Why did he refuse the Feds' offer and then bungle their case by sending a warning missive to clients they named as targets in the probe, giving them ample opportunity to fire up their paper shredders and torch their hard drives before subpoenas arrived? If he and the people he worked with weren't doing anything illegal as he claimed, he shouldn't have had to do either of those things. Kinnucan's answer, as explained by him on the Times's DealBook blog today: The Feds didn't ask nicely enough.