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Dakota Co. park ranger recovering after driver slams into squad
Sheriff Joe Leko says the accused driver was going more than 100 mph on Highway 52 near Inver Grove Heights.
INVER GROVE HEIGHTS, Minn. — A Dakota County squad car is totaled and a park ranger is recovering after the sheriff says a speeding driver hit the vehicle from behind Sunday morning near Inver Grove Heights.
Sheriff Joe Leko says the park ranger behind the wheel is lucky to be alive after the crash sent him careening into the ditch and into a guardrail.
Leko says the incident stared Sunday around 1:30 a.m. The suspect and another driver are first caught on traffic cameras on Highway 52 as the two leave West St. Paul. The cameras show them speeding for nearly three miles until the collision happens near Interstate 494.
There was also another park ranger following the squad in a truck.
“The first vehicle tried to get between them and ended up hitting one of our park rangers that was in the left lane, sending him into the median, striking a guardrail and then a cable barrier,” said Leko.
He says the suspects were traveling in excess of 100 miles per hour.
After the crash, Leko says the suspects took off. The rangers were shaken, but not deterred and determined to track them down.
“The awareness of one of our park rangers to get a license plate of one of the vehicles led us on this investigation and brought us to where we’re at today, which is having the two drivers identified,” said Leko.
Data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows speeding increased particularly during the pandemic and it hasn’t really stopped since.
“We need to get in front of that and identify who’s doing that, and bring it to an end before somebody gets hurt,” said Leko.
The ranger who was hurt had minor injuries. The sheriff says the suspects are 20 and 23 years old. The investigation helped track the two down and the sheriff expects them to be charged on Friday.
“Speed matters and it can have consequences if you’re not obeying them,” said Leko. “It doesn’t take much to push somebody in the ditch and lose control.”
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“This is not a decision I’ve come to lightly, but there is simply too much at stake to risk a second Donald Trump presidency,” Craig said in part in a statement.
MINNEAPOLIS — As the 2024 presidential election gets closer, more Republicans and Democrats are speaking out about their choice for president. On Saturday morning a local representative became the 5th Democrat to call for President Joe Biden to step aside.
U.S. Rep. Angie Craig issued a statement and said in part:
“I have great respect for President Biden’s decades of service to our nation and his steadfast commitment to making our country a better place… However, given what I saw and heard from the President during last week’s debate in Atlanta, coupled with the lack of a forceful response from the President himself following that debate, I do not believe that the President can effectively campaign and win against Donald Trump.”
In the statement, Craig continued, underlining that she hadn’t come to the decision lightly, but felt there was “too much at stake to risk a second Donald Trump presidency.”
As an elected leader, I feel a responsibility to be honest about what I believe, even when it’s hard to hear.
President Biden is a good man & I appreciate his lifetime of service.
But I believe he should step aside for the next generation of leadership.
The stakes are too… pic.twitter.com/rtZLz6riDp
— Angie Craig (@AngieCraigMN) July 6, 2024
This outcry follows a “disastrous” debate between President Biden and former president Donald Trump.
Other Democrats, including Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, called on Biden to leave the race this week. On Wednesday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told the New York Times the president needs to “shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.” Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton said on the following day in an interview with WBUR that President Biden should bow out of the upcoming election. Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) said in an interview on MSNBC “Mr. President, your legacy is set. We owe you the greatest debt of gratitude.”
RELATED: Rep. Lloyd Doggett is first Democrat to publicly call for Biden to step down as party’s nominee
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The lawsuit stems from disagreements involving Tyka Nelson, Prince’s sister, and five half-siblings.
DOVER, Del. — A Delaware judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by former business advisers to the late pop music icon Prince against two of his siblings and other heirs in a dispute over his estate.
The judge on Friday also agreed with plaintiffs L. Londell McMillan and Charles Spicer Jr. that an agreement purporting to replace them as managers of a limited liability company established by three siblings was invalid.
Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016. He had no will, and his six siblings inherited equal interests in the estate.
Three of them assigned their combined 50% interest to Prince Legacy LLC. They also granted McMillan and Spicer each a 10% interest in Prince Legacy, along with broad and exclusive management authority.
One sister, Sharon Nelson, later regretted the decision and led an effort to remove McMillan and Spicer as managing members by amending the LLC agreement.
Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick ruled that the terms of the initial LLC agreement are unambiguous and that they prohibit the defendants’ attempts to amend it. She said the agreement remains in effect and McMillan and Spicer remain as managing members.
“As a matter of contract law, this is the only reasonable interpretation,” the judge wrote.
McCormick also ruled that the plaintiffs can pursue a claim that the defendants breached the LLC agreement by acting without authorization to amend it and remove McMillan and Spicer.
The lawsuit stems from disagreements involving Tyka Nelson, Prince’s sister, and five half-siblings: Sharon Nelson, Norrine Nelson, John R. Nelson, Omarr Baker and Alfred Jackson.
Tyka, Omarr and Alfred, the three youngest, sold their stake to a music publishing company called Primary Wave Music, LLC, which later assigned its interests to an affiliate, Prince OAT Holdings LLC. Alfred has since died.
The older siblings, Sharon, Norrine and John, assigned 20% of their collective interests to McMillan and Spicer before John died in 2021. His interests passed to a trust overseen by Breanna Nelson, Allen Nelson and Johnny Nicholas Nelson Torres as co-trustees. Breanna and Allen are named as defendants in the lawsuit along with Sharon and Norrine, while Nelson Torres has sided with the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit alleges among other things that Sharon improperly tried to insert herself into management decisions and once demanded that the entire staff of the Paisley Park Museum in Minnesota be replaced. She also accused McMillan and Spicer of fraud and tried to sell her interests in Prince Legacy without the required consent of the other members.
The lawsuit is part of a long and convoluted legal battle involving both the size and the beneficiaries of Prince’s estate. In 2022, nearly six years after his death, the Internal Revenue Service and the administrator of the estate agreed to end a court battle and value the estate at roughly $156 million.
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Verizon crisis response team brings mobile data capacity to first responders in hot zones.
MINNEAPOLIS — Access to data and phone service is critical for first responders in a natural disaster, especially those events that take down existing services.
Verizon is one of the companies that can fill that void, by bringing mobile crisis response experts and equipment to first responders. One of the company’s most important tools is a trailer called Spot that includes a generator, satellite dish, and portable cell service.
“The trailer is the workhorse of the crisis response teams,” Mike Olson, a crisis response manager for Verizon, told KARE 11.
“It’s specifically designed so we can pull up to an emergency operations, or mobile command center, and provide just that little bubble of cell service the first responders need.”
Last year he was dispatched to a search for a missing Wisconsin boy in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He said the temporary data service was essential to helping search commanders rescue the boy.
“All of their search and rescue technology is done through cellular phones, and without enough cell service their maps couldn’t work, so they had reverted to paper maps,” Olson explained.
“When we showed up the dots on their maps started showing up, and they were able to cordon off and mark off the maps where they’d searched already. We actually found that 8-year-old boy who’d been missing for 49 hours.”
Olson also travels with an electric mountain bike equipped with a pico cell network extender and Starlink satellite backhaul. It’s designed for getting into areas that are too remote or rugged for other mobile service vehicles.
He also provides aerial surveillance services to first responders using a drone that transmits live video and is equipped with a thermal imaging camera.
“Live video coverage back to their emergency operations center, so they could direct the people that are on the ground to do what they need them to do,” Olson said.
He noted that the mobile crisis equipment provides cell service to first responders regardless of carrier.
Verizon also has larger equipment that can be driven or towed to areas to provide temporary service or a boost. One of them can be used to replace a cell transmitter that has been knocked offline.
“An example of where we would use something like this is if there was a storm that damaged our antenna structure,” Rick Goldschmidt, Verizon’s regional engineering director, told KARE 11 as he stood next to a trailer with a portable tower on it.
“We could pull this up right next to it, take the fiber that’s in that building already and plug it into this asset and we’d be back up on the air.”
Goldschmidt and Olson spoke to KARE during a recent tour of Verizon’s switching operations center in the Twin Cities, where all cellphone calls, texts, and mobile data connections are processed. It’s a secure building at a location that is not publicized as an extra precaution.
The 70-thousand-square-foot structure serves Verizon customers in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska. Redundancy and resiliency are the watchwords of the operation, part of the overall mission of reliability.
“We like to say it’s like wearing a belt and suspenders with an extra belt in your back pocket,” Goldschmidt remarked.
The facility features rooms full of servers, some of which are designed to work with emergency cloud platforms and others for more traditional digital services. They’re both far removed from the days of long-distance operators at switchboards or mechanical switching machines that helped complete phone calls across a network.
“These are switching facilities, but switching is a dated term if you will. Now it’s all electronic. It’s all IP-based,” Goldschmidt explained.
There’s a lot of advanced technology at work just keeping the electronics cooled. Chilled air is pushed through the machines with fans, sending warm air into collection areas so it can be returned to the air handling system without making the rest of the room warm.
“No matter what the information that you’re doing on your phone, through the cell towers that come back through here, this is where it all gets processed, and it gets sent to a destination.”
Constant power flow through the facility is fortified with two three-megawatt generators in the facility’s parking lot, sitting on a week’s worth of diesel fuel.
“These generators are tested every week, so they run a cycle to make sure that not only do the generators start but it transfers the load, that the building uses, and then we feed our equipment and make sure that everything works without a glitch.”
What if there’s a gap between commercial power failure and the generators kicking in? There’s also a room full of high-capacity batteries that can back up the building until the juice starts to flow from the generator.
“You do not want to have an interruption in service at a facility like this!”
