Missing Women Inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal (CBC Photo)It's an inquiry into an inquiry.

The high-profile B.C. Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, spawned by the time it took to catch serial killer Robert "Willie" Pickton, has been knocked off balance by anonymous charges of sexual harassment among its staff.

Commissioner Wally Oppal, a former British Columbia attorney general and appeal court judge, appointed an independent lawyer to investigate the National Post claims that female commission employees worked in a "highly sexualized" environment where men allegedly made offensive remarks about women and their bodies.

Five former commission staff members told the Post they experienced harassment, intimidation and conflict. One said a senior staff member referred to a local sex-trade worker as "the fat hooker," while another made degrading remarks about a female staffer's body.

The allegations came as a surprise to Oppal and senior commission counsel Art Vertlieb. Both said no one on staff reported inappropriate behaviour to them.

"I'm

A Toronto artist was arrested, charged with assault and forced to pay $3,000 in legal bills because someone pointed to her photo on Facebook and told police she was the person who assaulted her.

Because of privacy settings, the photo couldn't have been bigger than a thumbnail.

It all started for Lizz Ashton, who tells the Toronto Star she has never been in a fight before, in January when she received an email from Toronto police asking her about an incident at the Piston bar on Bloor St. The incident reportedly took place in November.

Ashton called police who told her a woman was assaulted at the bar and identified her as the assailant after seeing a picture on Facebook. Ashton then went to the police station and showed the police text messages proving she wasn't at the bar when it occurred and said she was with her boyfriend later in the evening.

"[The officer] said, 'It doesn't matter, I'm going to have to arrest you anyways,'" she told NOW Toronto. "I got handcuffed and searched.

Six years ago Graham McMynn was abducted in a brazen attack by armed men as he was leaving his family home in a wealthy part of south Vancouver.

Several men boxed in McMynn's car near his home and dragged him out at gunpoint and into their vehicle. His stunned girlfriend saw the whole thing as they didn't touch her but did take her cell phone.

The CBC's the fifth estate speaks with the father, the negotiator, cops and journalists in a live interactive edition of the show, which will air Friday. The fifth estate recreates the kidnapping and will let viewers decide what to do to catch the predators. CBC has also set up an interactive site that allows people to be the girlfriend identifying the plates and then be the cops searching for the kidnappers.

You are placed at an officer's desk and follow clues including tracing phone calls, tracing license plates and tailing suspects until you make the call for a series of raids on different house and eventually find McMynn. It seems hard not to

Joe Glass sits in the kitchen of his Helena, Montana home, on Thursday October 26, 2006.A Canadian member of the legendary Devil's Brigade has died within hours of an American comrade in Helena, Mont., where they both lived.

Ottawa-born Joe Glass, 92 and Mark Radcliffe, 94, originally from Farmington, New Mexico, lived not far from the Montana military base where the Canadian-American commando unit trained in the Second World War.

According to the Tribune of Great Falls, Mont., Glass's death was announced by the Washington office of Sen. Max Baucus.

"Montana and our nation have lost a true hero," Baucus said in a statement Monday. "In a group of hard and brave war heroes, Joe was among the toughest. He endured significant injuries in World War II for our freedom and my thoughts and prayers are with the Glass family at this time."

Baucus is behind an effort to bestow the Congressional Gold Medal on the unit, known officially as the First Special Service Force.

About 3,300 Canadian and American soldiers served in the unit between 1942 and December 1944, when it was

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor.A federal court judge has rejected the appeal of Liberian refugee claimant Sampson Jalloh, who's facing deportation after the Immigration and Refugee Board refused to believe he was an unwilling soldier in Charles Taylor's brutal rebel army in the 1990s.

The National Post reports Sampson, a 41-year-old Toronto resident, fears persecution if he's forced back to the West African country he fled in 1996.

But the refugee board, now backed by the court, doubted Jalloh's claim that he was forced to lure fellow members of his minority Mandingo ethnic group to their deaths at the hands of Taylor's rebels during Liberia's first civil war.

Jalloh said he was conscripted into the rebel force at age 22 after they tortured and murdered his father. During his four years with Taylor's rebels, Jalloh said he witnessed gruesome atrocities by child soldiers but was never armed and did not take part himself.

After a peace agreement ended the war, Jalloh said he fled to neighbouring Guinea, then to the

A Japanese fishing boat lost in the Pacific Ocean after the March 2011 earthquake was sighted March 20 drifting 150 nautical miles of the southern coast of Haida Gwaii.As the drifting mass of debris from last year's Japanese tsunami, including an intact fishing boat begins to reach the west coast of North America, it's revived discussion of theories that Chinese vessels made it here same way a thousand years before Columbus.

The Tyee, a Vancouver-based news site, has a fascinating two-part series that looks at tantalizing evidence ancient Asian mariners came to the West Coast, willingly or unwillingly.

For decades, B.C. fishermen have found Japanese green-glass fishing floats caught up in their nets, brought by the Japanese Current.

In 1834, the Japanese fishing boat Hyojun Maru, disabled in a typhoon, drifted for 14 months before washing up on Cape Flattery on the Washington side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca with three men aboard. A hundred such incidents of drifting boats have been recorded over the years, Daniel Wood wrote, the last in 1987 when an empty boat came ashore on the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii).

In 1979, fisherman Mike

A new study finds that while suicide rates among young Canadians has declined on average over almost three decades, albeit slowly, girls and young women are killing themselves at an increasing rate.

An article in the April 2 edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal noted suicide is the second leading cause of death for Canadians aged 10 to 19 years.

"Our results show that suicide rates in Canada are increasing among female children and adolescents and decreasing among male children and adolescents," authors Robin Skinner and Steven McFaull reported.

"Limiting access to lethal means has some potential to mitigate risk. However, suffocation, which has become the predominant method for committing suicide for these age groups, is not amenable to this type of primary prevention."

Suicide rates among girls aged 10 to 14 soared by 50 per cent from 1980 to 2008 but are still less than one per 100,000, according to the study, Postmedia News reported.

The rate nearly doubled for

It wasn't quite as exciting as the fisticuffs between Justin Trudeau and Patrick Brazeau, but it may have longer-term consequences.

Tout l'Ottawa is wondering what's happened to political pundit Don Martin since his widely reported set-to with Dimitri Soudas, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former press secretary at Hy's Steakhouse on budget night.

Martin hosts CTV's Power Play political affairs program but didn't appear on the show Friday, the day after a verbal altercation with Soudas at the restaurant.

According to the Ottawa Citizen, Martin encountered Soudas at the restaurant squiring his girlfriend, Conservative MP Eve Adams.

"What are you doing with this guy?" Martin lightheartedly asked Adams, according to a witness.

But Soudas, not known for his sense of humour while acting as Harper's media pitbull, apparently didn't find Martin's quip amusing and the two began trading increasingly sharp barbs.

Soudas reportedly said he'd report the exchange to George Cope, chief executive of