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Rogers, Telus deny blame for June twister alert barrage

Telecom companies say they aren’t to blame for the barrage of tornado alerts Manitobans received during severe thunderstorms in early June.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced in August it would investigate the unusually high number of alerts, and called on the Pelmorex Corp., which operates the national Alert Ready system, along with telecom companies Bell, Rogers and Telus to respond to a number of questions.

They were given until last Friday to describe their possible roles in the creation, receipt, processing or distribution of alerts issued from Environment and Climate Change Canada in the midst of the June 9 storm.

Telus said in its response that it received 133 alert requests targeted to Manitoba created by Environment Canada and forwarded by Pelmorex between 2:35 p.m. June 9 and 3:29 a.m. the following day. While the majority of those messages contained identical information and were automatically suppressed, 17 were ultimately sent out as alerts in Winnipeg.

New in Paper

A Thousand Farewells

By Nahlah Ayed (Penguin, $18)

THE former Winnipegger's memoir takes us from her childhood in a Palestinian refugee camp to her experiences as a CBC foreign correspondent.

City denies teen received ‘life-altering injuries’ from police dog bite in lawsuit defence

City officials have denied a 17-year-old girl’s claim she received life-altering injuries when a Winnipeg police dog bit her, arguing her lawsuit over last year’s incident should be rejected.

The teen, whom the Free Press is not naming because she is a minor involved with a police matter, seeks unspecified damages from the City of Winnipeg, in a statement of claim filed in the Court of King’s Bench in March.

The teen, described as “a small, slightly built girl,” claims she was “attacked, arrested and detained” by several Winnipeg Police Service officers around 1 a.m. on June 4, 2025.

The girl’s court papers say that in order to detain the teen, officers first deployed “a large, vicious and dangerous, non-human, canine animal,” which the lawsuit calls the “beast” in subsequent references.

Seven years sought for serial harasser

Alexander Beaton finished serving a two-year jail sentence for criminally harassing six women and didn’t last two days in the community before he was back at it, sending unwanted obscene messages and videos to a dozen women.

Now prosecutors are seeking a seven-year prison sentence for the 30-year-old Winnipeg man, whose latest string of victims includes a police officer who investigated his earlier crimes.

“He essentially continued (offending) unabated,” Crown attorney Brett Rach told provincial court Judge Malcolm McDonald at a sentencing hearing Friday. “It caused more than a nuisance to these victims — it caused them to fear for their safety.”

Beaton pleaded guilty to 14 charges of criminal harassment, sending indecent communications and breaching court orders for a campaign of harassment waged between 2015 and 2025.