Top headlines from Vancouver and beyond for October 14 2011:

Brookfield Asset Management, the Canadian owners of Zucotti Park, where thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters are camped, has postponed its clean-up operation that many feared would lead to violent clashes between protesters and police.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Canada movement is picking up steam, with planned protests nation-wide set to start-up Saturday, October 15. Tomorrow’s Facebook event in Vancouver has nearly 4,000 attendees.

The B.C. missing women inquiry heard yesterday that archaic laws, coupled with police enforcement tactics has forced sex workers into unsafe conditions. SFU Professor John Lowman has long been a proponent of legal reform, claiming the quasi-legal status of prostitution, coupled with its push from residential neighbourhoods into the commercial areas of the Downtown Eastside provides predators like Robert Pickton with the ideal conditions to operate with impunity.

The Globe laments our electricity shortfall and populistic shortsightedness. BC Hydro, which has seen little in the way of infrastructure investments since the era of W.A.C. Bennett, announced that it requires $6-billion to upgrade it’s aging infrastructure, but there is little political will to raise Hydro rates.

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