Indonesia’s Mount Merapi erupts multiple times, 250 evacuate

Suspension on the horizon for Hellebuyck as pre-season set to start

In this high stakes game of chicken, Kevin Cheveldayoff, Connor Hellebuyck or any of the potential suitors for the Winnipeg Jets franchise netminder appear ready to blink.

Winnipeg, police and downtown crime

A safer downtown is not much use if people are still afraid to walk there.

That is the uncomfortable message from Winnipeg’s latest police citizen survey, and one city council should take seriously.

Downtown crime has fallen this year, according to the most recent police statistics. Violent crime is down even more. But for most Winnipeggers, the downtown still feels like a place to avoid, particularly after dark.

Only 44 per cent of survey respondents said they feel very or reasonably safe walking alone downtown during the day. At night, that number plunges to just eight per cent. Among women, it is an appalling three per cent, compared with 14 per cent of men.

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.

Wind and batteries the best bet

For years, Manitoba Hydro has claimed that we can’t rely on wind turbines during multi-day or even multi-week cold snaps. Although turbines can be equipped with cold-weather packages to operate down to –30 C, as at the St. Leon and St. Joseph wind farms, Hydro routinely warns of the possibility of a lengthy winter wind drought at the same time as electricity use peaks due to high heating demand.

This concern is largely why Hydro is pushing to build a 750 MW fossil gas-fired power plant in Brandon, rather than building more wind farms.

But new analysis by Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, a former energy modeller for Manitoba Hydro, shows that wind-generation reliability well exceeds assumptions and that, if combined with battery energy storage, it could meet even the most bullish load growth forecasts. (These findings were presented to the Public Utilities Board on Aug. 31, and the full report can be found on Climate Action Team Manitoba’s website.)

Hydro’s low estimate of wind generation stems from its erroneous assumption that all new wind farms will be built in the same locations as Manitoba’s two existing wind farms (St. Leon and St. Joseph). Because these two wind farms are only 100 kilometres apart, they have highly correlated wind speeds; when wind conditions are low at one site, they likely are at the other as well. This is not how new wind farms will be built in Manitoba. Instead, they will be located in different areas and use much taller turbines with higher generation potential than the existing wind farms.

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.