Alexandra Posadzki

When Shirley was handed a three-month prescription for Ativan, her doctor insisted the popular sedative was just an “innocent little thing” to help her sleep.

But after her doctor yanked her off the drug cold turkey, rather than slowly tapering off the dosage as experts typically recommend, Shirley plunged into a deep withdrawal. Over the next year and a half she was cycled through more than a dozen benzodiazepines and antidepressants, locked up in a psych ward and diagnosed with a slew of mental disorders.

Unable to sleep and gripped by a relentless, gnawing fear, Shirley contemplated the most painless way to end her life.

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Published by the Canadian Press.

The following story began as a project for an investigative journalism class at Ryerson University and was later published in the Toronto Star. The final product is the result of a collaborative effort between myself, my classmate Alex Nino Gheciu and Toronto Star reporter/Ryerson instructor Robert Cribb. Here is an excerpt:

Two weeks after Toronto inspectors documented serious “health hazards” at New York New York Accessories & Body Piercing, Carleigh Milton walked in to get her tongue pierced.

She knew nothing of the potentially bacteria-spreading concerns detailed in Toronto Public Health inspection reports — violations including no functioning sink and missing sterilization tests — when she stepped inside the Queen St. W. shop in June 2011.

Like most Torontonians who frequent any of the city’s 3,000 “personal service settings” — from tattoo parlours and body piercing shops to beauty salons — the 21-year-old assumed she was in safe hands.

Not so, she would learn.

A Toronto Star/Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found that a lack of mandatory training for tattoo and piercing practitioners, along with sometimes lax enforcement against repeat offenders in Toronto, poses serious health risks.

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Published by the Toronto Star

A passenger alleges that Air Canada agents laughed at him and refused to help after a delay caused him to miss a connecting flight.

Another customer claims he was notified via email that his flight with Spanish airline Iberia had been cancelled — four days after the scheduled trip.

And thirteen people say they missed their flights after Air Canada changed its check-in time for domestic travel from 30 to 45 minutes.

These are some of the allegations contained within nearly 400 air travel complaints obtained by the Canadian Press through an Access to Information request.

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Published by the Canadian Press.

Gaps in the cyber security efforts of Canadian corporations could be leaving them open to sophisticated attacks by hackers, records show.

"The current situation is that there are an increasing number of new software vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain access to companies' networks," reads a July 2012 memo obtained from Public Safety Canada under the Access to Information Act.

"The scale of the problem is significant. The cost of maintaining a highly secure network is high for each company, and they may not be willing to make that investment."

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Published by the Canadian Press.

When Brian Rosenbaum started pitching cyber insurance to companies in 2006, he was met with blank stares from risk managers and resistance from information technology experts, who insisted their networks were impenetrable.

All of that has changed in the past year and a half said Mr. Rosenbaum, who heads the cyber insurance division of Aon Corp.’s Canadian brokerage arm.

“We’ve reached a threshold where people are now coming to us instead of us going to them,” said the vice president.

Insurance brokers say the frequency of high-profile data breaches is causing a surge in demand for insurance products that protect against losses stemming from cyber attacks.

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Published by the Canadian Press

The first time Ryan Johnson bought Bitcoins — an emerging digital currency that isn’t controlled by any authority such as a central bank — it was with a pocket full of cash from a stranger he had met online.

“It was almost like a sketchy drug deal,” recalls the 31-year-old Vancouver resident.

Since that first transaction in January, Johnson has been exchanging his Canadian cash for digital currency at Bitcoiniacs, a shop in Vancouver that acts like a Bitcoin broker.

“It’s just much more comfortable to go sit down in an office at a brick-and-mortar building with a professional that knows a lot about Bitcoins, do a professional transaction and get a receipt for it,” says Johnson. “It’s reassuring.”

Johnson and other Canadian enthusiasts will soon be able to exchange cash for the digital currency through a kiosk similar to an ATM. Bitcoiniacs has ordered five Bitcoin kiosks from a Las Vegas-based company called RoboCoin and intends to roll them out across Canada in the coming months. The first is expected to land in Vancouver in October.

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Published by the Canadian Press.

In the summer of 2012 I spent four days living in the back of a Toyota Corolla while covering a fatal mall collapse in the northern Ontario town of Elliot Lake. Filing audio, video and text simultaneously on a fast-moving story made for a challenging assignment. Here's an excerpt from one of many stories I filed:

A risky rescue operation at a northern Ontario mall that collapsed, leaving at least two people buried in the rubble, has encountered yet another setback.

A massive robotic arm was unable to reach an unstable escalator through the hole in the roof in order to push it aside and allow rescue crews to enter the Algo Centre mall in Elliot Lake, officials said Tuesday night.

The machine is now methodically plucking pieces of the mall’s facade and some of the debris inside in order to clear a path.

"It's kind of like when you're reaching your arm in the cupboard and you have to move all the cups away to get to the one in the back," said Dan Heskey, the province's community safety commissioner. "It's a very surgical removal of certain pieces so that we can get in and move (the escalator), as was the plan."

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Published by the Canadian Press

When Dzeja Klibingaitis heard two gunshots and a woman’s screams, she had no idea that her daughter was being shot dead during an encounter with police outside their home in the city’s north end.

“I ran to the room to tell Sylvia that something bad is happening,” said the 83-year-old woman. “I go in her room where she sleeps and she’s not there. I don’t know what’s happening.”

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Published by the Toronto Star.

Nearly four years after an explosion in an underground hydro vault tore through an east-end Toronto high rise and forced 1,000 residents out of their homes, potentially hundreds of apartment buildings throughout the city don’t have essential safety equipment that could prevent such a blast.

“It was like a bomb went off,” Romelda Morson said of the explosion that left her homeless for two months. “The whole building shook.”

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Published by the Globe and Mail.

Complaints filed by students about some of Ontario’s private career colleges allege that harassment from teachers, inadequate instruction and lack of proper equipment are hurting the quality of education at these increasingly popular institutions.

“The teacher is very degrading and belittling of her students on a daily basis,” reads a complaint from a student at Everest College’s Mississauga campus.

“She is constantly using rude and offensive language.”

Among the complaints are numerous allegations that instructors behaved unprofessionally or lacked knowledge.

There are also claims that some schools didn’t have the equipment needed for certain training programs and that instructors at several institutions didn’t provide the amount of instruction time promised.

The documents, obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom of information request, outline 47 formal complaints made by students to Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities in 2010 and 2011.

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Published by the Canadian Press.

The pint-sized units inside the glass condo towers popping up all over urban centres aren’t the only things getting smaller.

“Every major furniture retailer now has a line that is apartment or condo sized,” says Elaine Cecconi, co-owner of interior design consultant firm Cecconi Simone.

“There’s so much product out there for small-space inhabitants that it’s become more of the mainstream, I would say, than a trend in the furniture industry.”

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Published by the Canadian Press

More big-box retail is headed for Toronto’s Leaside neighbourhood, whether or not the local residents like it.

That’s the message from Councillor John Parker, who’s facing heat from property owners in the northeast neighbourhood who say he should have put up a tougher fight against a proposed SmartCentre on Wicksteed Avenue, near Laird Avenue.

The plot of land in question has been vacant since Canada Wire moved out about two decades ago. Sitting on the fringes of an industrial block but with frontage on a major street, Laird Drive, it’s exactly the kind of space that the City of Toronto has targeted, in its official plan, for redevelopment for large-scale retail.

For local residents, who say they are already plagued by heavily congested streets and surrounded by big-box retail centres, the proposed 147,000 square-foot shopping centre – complete with almost 500 parking spots – is just too big.

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Published by the Globe and Mail