What is Amber Alert issued for 11-year-old girl in Canada?

A girl had gone missing near Stanford, Ontario, on Tuesday, prompting the authority to issue of an Amber Alert.

At around 5:30 PM (local time), the police issued an amber alert, after which, at around 6:15 PM, Stanford police confirmed through phone that the 11-year-old girl had been found safe in Toronto.

What is Amber Alert?

The Amber Alert originated in the U.S. and is also known as a child abduction emergency alert. The public is urged to find kidnapped children using the child abduction alert system. AMBER means America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response. The name originated when Amber Rene Hagerman was abducted and found murdered in 1996.

The NOAA weather radio and emergency warning system broadcasts amber alerts via public and commercial cable TV, text messaging, television stations, satellite radio, Internet radio and radio stations. Electronic traffic-condition signs and e-mails are also used to distribute the alerts.

Facebook, Google, Bing
Facebook, Google, and Bing are all partners with AMBER Alert to reach an ever-growing demographic. The alerts will display automatically when users use the maps on Bing or Google.

The AMBER alert began in Canada in 2002. Alberta was the first to launch a province-wide system. Alberta initially anticipated that the alert would be issued only once a year. They hoped never to use it, but if a child was abducted, then the AMBER Alert would help in locating the abducted child and bringing them back. Hence, these are now being used if any such case happens.