COLUMBUS, Mont. - A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below. David Stamey, the county's chief of emergency services, said there was no immediate danger for the crews working at the site, and the hazardous material was being diluted by the swollen river. The area is in a sparsely populated section of the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by ranch and farmland. The river there flows away from Yellowstone National Park, which is about 110 miles southwest. ADVERTISEMENT. The Yellowstone saw record flooding in 2022 that caused extensive damage to Yellowstone National Park and adjacent towns in Montana.

While Russia scrambled to defend itself from its own paramilitary forces on Saturday, Ukrainian leaders said their own forces managed to make advancements in Russian-occupied territory. The Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization led by Yevgeny Prigozhin - a former ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin - marched across Russia on Saturday, coming within hours of Moscow. The BBC reported that Ukraine has made advances since launching its counter-offensive on June 4, including in the days and hours before the Wagner Group's apparently brief insurrection. While Ukraine continued its efforts to retake territory, Russia was forced to defend itself from itself. Before the Wagner Group fighters turned back, Russian security officials were gearing up to defend Moscow.

June 24 - Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to crush what he called an armed mutiny after rebellious mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday he had taken control of a southern city as part of an attempt to oust the military leadership. Prigozhin had demanded that Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, whom he has pledged to oust over what he says is their disastrous leadership of the war against Ukraine, come to see him in Rostov, a city near the Ukrainian border that he said he had seized control of. A Russian security source told Reuters that Wagner fighters had also taken control of military facilities in the city of Voronezh, about 500 km south of Moscow. Footage on channels based in Rostov-on-Don showed armed men in military uniform skirting the regional police headquarters in the city on foot, as well as tanks positioned outside the headquarters of the Southern Military District. Russian local officials said a military convoy was indeed on the main motorway linking the southern part of European Russia with Moscow, and warned residents to avoid it.

Vladimir Putin made an extraordinary address to the nation on Saturday morning admitting that he was facing an armed insurrection led by former confidante Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries. After months of feuding between the mercenary boss and Russia's Defense Ministry, things came to a head Friday when Prigozhin accused the Russian military of ordering a rocket strike on a camp full of his men, and vowed merciless revenge. Within hours, the Prosecutor General's Office announced charges against Prigozhin for attempting to incite an armed rebellion, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years behind bars. Prigozhin showed no sign of backing down, instead releasing a series of audio messages via his press service late Friday in which he accused the Defense Ministry of deploying fighter jets to shoot at Wagner vehicles in the Rostov region and of firing at civilians on Russian territory. While the drama between Moscow and Prigozhin played out, Ukrainian officials announced Friday their forces had retaken eight villages from Russian control as part of their first counteroffensive.

The increasingly public feud between Russian military leaders and the head of a Russian paramilitary group escalated dramatically on Friday, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the paramilitary Wagner Group, accused Russian armed forces of attacking his soldiers and vowed retaliation. Prigozhin, whose Wagner forces helped take the city of Bakhmut, has been increasingly vocal in his attacks against the Russian military's leaders, posting more and more scathing criticism of the top brass over the war effort and accusing generals of denying Wagner the ammunition and support needed to fight effectively. Prigozhin has claimed to be the founder of the Wagner Group, but the reality is likely much more complicated. In one video Prigozhin posted in May, he stands in a field, apparently surrounded by corpses of dead Wagner fighters. Even before Prigozhin escalated his rivalry with the Russian military this week, experts I've spoken to really doubted Prigozhin was actually a Putin rival and could build his own power center in the Russian state.

As a long-running standoff between Prigozhin and the military top brass appeared to come to a head, Russia's FSB security service opened a criminal case against him, TASS news agency said, and it called on fighters from his Wagner private military company to ignore his orders and arrest him. 'OBEY PRESIDENT,' GENERAL SAYS The deputy commander of Russia's Ukraine campaign, General Sergei Surovikin, told Wagner fighters to obey Putin, accept Moscow's commanders and return to their bases. The standoff, many of the details of which remained unclear, looked like the biggest domestic crisis Russian President Vladimir Putin has faced since he sent thousands of troops into Ukraine in February last year. UKRAINE SAYS MAJOR THRUST AHEAD On the ground in Ukraine, at least three people were killed in Russian attacks on Friday, including two who died after a trolleybus company came under fire in the city of Kherson, regional officials said. Although the advances Ukraine has reported this month are its first substantial gains on the battlefield for seven months, Ukrainian forces have yet to push to the main defensive lines that Russia has had months to prepare.

OceanGate Expeditions listed a job posting for a submersible pilot on its web site while a frantic search and rescue mission was underway for five missing tourists in the doomed Titan bound for the Titanic wreckage site. Social media was abuzz on Friday after screenshots of the ad, which was posted before the Coast Guard announced on Thursday that all five people aboard the Titan had perished, were widely circulated. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was among the five people who died in the Titan submersible. The passengers included 61-year-old OceanGate boss, Rush, as well as Titanic specialist Paul-Henri Nargeolet, UK billionaire explorer Hamish Harding and Pakistani billionaire and mogul Shanzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman. Filed under missing titanic sub , social media , TikTok , twitter , 6/23/23.

Warnings over the safety of OceanGate's Titan submersible were repeatedly dismissed by the CEO of the company, email exchanges with a leading deep sea exploration specialist show. In messages seen by the BBC, Rob McCallum told OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush that he was potentially putting his clients at risk and urged him to stop using the sub until it had been classified by an independent body. Mr McCallum told the BBC that he repeatedly urged the company to seek certification for the Titan before using it for commercial tours. Mr Rush founded OceanGate in 2009 and the company offered customers a chance to experience deep sea travel, including to the wreck of the Titanic, on board Titan for a price of $250,000. Experts have questioned the safety of Titan and how private sector deep-sea expeditions are regulated.

Seven years after the Brexit referendum, the proportion of Britons who want to rejoin the EU has climbed to its highest levels since 2016, according to a new survey. Data from YouGov's latest Brexit tracker survey found that, excluding those who said they would not vote or did not know, 58.2% of people in Britain would now vote to rejoin. The percentage is only fractionally down on the 60% recorded in February this year - the highest figure since comparable data began in February 2012 - and has risen more or less consistently since a post-referendum low of 47% in early 2021. A record proportion of respondents in Britain also think other countries are now unlikely to follow its example and leave the EU in the next decade - 42% said it was unlikely, up from 26% three years ago, while 40% said it was likely, down from 58%. EU member states showed a similar trend, with 45% of respondents in France saying they thought another EU-exit was likely, compared to 55% in February 2020. In Germany the figures were 36% and in Denmark 29%. While sentiment towards EU membership has shifted significantly in Britain since the referendum, a slim majority of respondents say they still think it is unlikely Britain will rejoin the EU at some future point in the future.

The US Navy first detected the sound of the Titan's likely implosion soon after the vessel lost contact with its mothership on Sunday while on an exploratory dive to the Titanic shipwreck more than two miles beneath the surface, The Journal reported Thursday. A top secret acoustic detection system that is used by the Navy to identify enemy submarines first registered the sound of an implosion near the since-discovered debris site on Sunday, US defense officials told the outlet. Navy officials began searching for sounds from the missing Titan almost immediately after it lost contact, according to the newspaper. Officials told the Journal that the Navy couldn't definitively conclude that the sound detected on its system came from the Titan, but the signal helped narrow the scope of the search. The device, capable of diving 20,000 feet underwater, discovered the debris believed to be part of the missing Titan on Thursday morning.

NEWFOUNDLAND, Canada - The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that an underwater vessel has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough in the around-the-clock effort. The search for the missing submersible on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic passed the critical 96-hour mark Thursday when breathable air could have run out, a grim moment in the intense effort to save the five people aboard. The Titan submersible was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic - but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. MORE: Why rescue mission for Titanic submersible is so difficult. At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate's submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, that oversees matters involving the Titanic shipwreck.

Greek authorities have so far recovered the bodies of at least 81 people, and more than 100 passengers have been rescued, including Pakistanis, Egyptians, Syrians, Afghans and Palestinians. Survivors and the United Nations have said hundreds were aboard the boat and many are still missing and feared dead. If a death toll in the hundreds was confirmed, it would be among the worst shipwrecks recorded in the Mediterranean. Greek authorities have further been criticized for not acting to rescue the migrants, even though a coast guard vessel escorted the trawler for hours. International maritime law dictates that authorities are obligated to conduct immediate rescue operations - with or without an explicit plea for help. Artist Oliver Jeffers shared his feelings with a cartoon on Tuesday, which marked World Refugee Day.