Bonnie Robinson is adamant about getting a mammogram every year.

With a history of breast cancer in her family, the 73-year-old from Kemptville, Ont. understands the importance of getting her regular screens so any abnormalities are caught early, before becoming untreatable.

“I have been religious about going for my physicals,” Robinson said in a telephone interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.

However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, medical screenings including mammograms, PAP smears, MRIs endoscopies, among others, were put on hold to deal with the outbreak of virus cases that overwhelmed hospitals across the country.

Robinson is among several Canadians who reached out to CTVNews.ca saying their diagnoses of cancers, autoimmune disorders and incurable conditions could have been caught sooner, and possibly prevented from advancing to late stages, had the COVID-19 pandemic not delayed their annual screenings and checkups…read more.

Going the way of hand sanitizer, toilet paper and gasoline, Christmas trees have become harder to find and a more expensive product during the COVID pandemic.

But the reason it’s now difficult to find an affordable family tree is more complicated than a simple rush of demand.

The price of a Christmas tree is up as much as 30%, but so are the costs for sellers to ship their trees. For some suppliers, it used to cost $800 to get trees delivered from Canada; now, it costs $2,500.

But the main cause pre-dates COVID. The Great Recession in the years after 2007 left tree growers with fewer resources. “When times were tough in ‘08 and ‘12, ‘15, nobody planted,” Phil Londrico, of Londrico’s Christmas Trees, says. “Now you don’t have trees.”

The supply shortage has only been realized in recent years because of the time it takes the trees to grow…read more.

It is encouraging to see that the Conservative party has announced its shadow cabinet, as the party is in dire need of revitalization. Its election campaign was feeble and void of the slightest daring. It presented no core contrast with the Liberals and did not provide much of a counterpoint to the disastrous government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Now, with the campaign over, aside from a series of flares signalling distress over Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s continued leadership, the Tories seem to have deserted the public stage altogether. It was a very odd time for the official Opposition to go dark.

Despite their tepid campaign, however, the Tories did elect 119 members. This is not a small force. Why, with such numbers, the party and its leader haven’t been out every day since the vote — challenging the Liberals on various policies, highlighting the slow return of Parliament and making the case for alternative perspectives on the host off issues facing the public — is more than a puzzle.

They have avoided any real debate on the troublesome COVID mandates and a host of other very pertinent issues. The country, for example, is getting its first substantial taste of inflation — the first signal that the prime minister’s gargantuan and furious spending over the last year and a half is not the painless panacea his team insisted it was…read more.

German security services believe that a man found dead in a street outside the Russian Embassy in Berlin last month was an undercover agent of Russia’s FSB intelligence service, Der Spiegel reported on Friday.

The body of the 35-year-old man was found early on Oct. 19 by Berlin police officers guarding the building, the magazine said. Quoting security sources, it said the man had fallen from an upper floor at the embassy.

The officers called an ambulance, but medics were unable to resuscitate him, it added.

The embassy confirmed in a statement to Interfax news agency that a Russian diplomat had died but said it was “not commenting on this tragic event for ethical reasons”.

Berlin police declined to comment and directed all questions to public prosecutors, who said they could neither confirm nor deny the Der Spiegel report. The discovery of a body outside the Russian diplomatic mission had not previously been reported…read more.

Two Ontario sisters have been awarded $100,000 in a defamation suit against an activist who started a social media campaign against them, alleging a Snapchat video they made mocked the murder of George Floyd.

The sisters, Shania and Justine Lavallee, were both fired from their respective jobs at Boston Pizza and Canada Border Services Agency in the spring of 2020, shortly after the social media campaign began.

The Ontario Superior Court decision by Justice Marc Smith said that ​​Solit Isak initiated a “brutal and unempathetic campaign to destroy the lives of two young women.”

According to the ruling, Isak made dozens of posts about the sisters after viewing a screenshot of a Snapchat video made by Shania Lavallee, which were quickly amplified by social media and the news media. The screenshot showed Justine being pinned down by her boyfriend, who had his knee on her back and was holding her arms back. Isak viewed the image shortly after Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer—setting off a summer of protests about racial injustice—and believed the Snapchat post mocked his death…read more.