Also on today’s menu:
Five-Car Accident Shuts Down Everett Turnpike
Cleaning Company Sued Over Destroyed Research
Wagner Group To Disband After ‘Mutiny’
Cindy Young, a resident of Bristol, New Hampshire, was arrested on June 23, charged with entering and remaining inside the U.S. Capitol, a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Earlier in the week, another New Hampshire man, Richard Zachary Ackerman of Salem, had been charged with stealing a U.S. Capitol Police helmet during the riot and throwing a water bottle that struck a law enforcement official.
The affidavit filed in connection with Young’s arrest said she appeared in surveillance footage inside the rotunda, wearing a hat and scarf bearing former president Donald Trump’s name — the same hat and scarf she wore in a photograph taken in Massachusetts the previous day as she joined a group calling itself “Super Happy Fun America” in a convoy of buses headed to Washington, D.C.
Court documents state that Young admitted to the FBI that she entered the building, and confirmed her identity when shown a photo of herself inside of the Capitol.
Five-Car Accident Shuts Down Everett Turnpike
Jennifer Pratka, 29, of Litchfield was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua after she drove her Subaru Impreza north in the southbound lane of the F.E. Everett Turnpike on June 24 at 10:34 p.m., striking a pickup truck in the area of Exit 7W and becoming trapped inside while her car caught on fire. The driver and the passenger of the pickup truck sustained serious injuries. Immediately after the crash, three other vehicles struck the two disabled vehicles, with the occupants sustaining minor injuries.
New Hampshire State Police troopers were able to get Pratka out of the car and she sustained only minor injuries.
The southbound lanes were shut down between exits 7W and 7E for about three and half hours while authorities investigated the crash and crews removed the vehicles and cleaned up the debris from the roadway.
Cleaning Company Sued Over Destroyed Research
Decades of research on photosynthesis at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, that had the potential of being “ground-breaking” in the development of solar panels, was destroyed when a cleaner shut off a freezer containing key samples because of an “annoying” alarm sound, U.S. lawyers have claimed in a lawsuit against the cleaner’s employer.
The alarm started going off a few days earlier, alerting the lab of a 3C temperature rise, but the lead researcher determined that the cell cultures, samples, and research were not being harmed. Due to COVID restrictions at the time, no repairs could begin for a week, so they placed a sign on the freezer’s door, warning not move or unplug it. “You can press the alarm/test mute button for 5-10 seconds if you would like to mute the sound,” it said.
The cleaner, whom the lawsuit said had not been properly trained and did not need to clean that area, turned off the circuit breaker providing electricity to the freezer. The majority of specimens that were meant to be kept at -80C were “compromised, destroyed and rendered unsalvageable, demolishing more than 20 years of research”, according to the legal case.
Wagner Group To Disband After ‘Mutiny’
Russia’s Ministry of Defense says that the Wagner paramilitary group that launched a mutiny last week was preparing to hand over its heavy weapons, and President Vladimir Putin said that Wagner members who wanted to sign contracts with the regular Russian military were welcome to join, while others could go home or follow the group’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to exile in Belarus.
Prigozhin says the move against the Russian military came in response to an attack on Wagner camps on June 23. Some 30 Wagner fighters were killed in missile and helicopter strikes, he said. Up to that point, Wagner had been planning to drive to Russia’s Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov and publicly hand over its heavy weapons on June 30. The Ministry of Defense planned to bring all private military companies under the full control of the regular armed forces by July 1, and between 1 and 2 percent of Wagner’s men had agreed to sign the contract, even through, in Prigozhin’s words, they were aware of the incompetence of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Integrating Wagner into the regular Russian military would “lead to the complete loss of combat capacity,” Prigozhin said. “Experienced fighters and commanders will be spread around and turned into cannon fodder, unable to use their combat potential and their combat experience.”
The Wagner group had moved rapidly toward Moscow but, under a deal brokered by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin agreed to halt what he had described as a “march of justice” and agreed to go to Belarus. For their part, the Russian Federal Security Service closed a criminal case against Wagner’s mutineers. Speaking in Minsk this morning, Lukashenko said he had offered to mediate the situation because “My position is: If Russia collapses, we will all be under its wreckage, and we will all die.”
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