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The Saskatchewan government is hosting sharing circles with survivors around the province. The last one is to be held in Regina on Nov. 25.
"It's very heartfelt, it's very emotional and it's very hard for them to tell their story but it's also part of their healing process as from what they've told me," said Merriman, who recently attended a circle in North Battleford, Sask.
The province said a report based on testimony at the circles will be filed and is intended to inform the apology.
Opposition NDP Leader Ryan Meili said the government is only allowing a week after the meetings end to file a report and said the short timeline has been a source of stress for those involved.
Rod Belanger, a Sixties Scoop survivor who's involved in the sharing circles, told CBC Radio's Blue Sky there has been a lot of anger, frustration and confusion at sharing circles when survivors are asked what they are hoping comes from the government.
"I don't really understand yet what sorts of actions we're going to expect from the apology," Belanger said.
He said many survivors don't know if a broad apology from one person will make a difference.
"It's in the back of people's minds, and they deal with it as they think about it every day, and I don't know if they will ever come to a place where they feel the apology is real," Belanger said.
Sale of India's specialty tea varieties from exclusive estates in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh are on the rise in the domestic market, and sought after in overseas markets too.
Mokalbari Tea Estate, situated on the south bank of the Brahmaputra river, upper Assam, offers an orthodox variety of tea that today fetches Rs 8,100 per kilo. Photograph: Courtesy Mokalbari Tea Pvt Ltd/Facebook.
The marginal increase in the prices of crush tear curl tea, produced by a process in which black tea leaves are run through a series of cylindrical rollers, has prompted tea growers to increasingly shift towards production of specialty tea, which fetches steep prices both in the domestic as well as international markets.
India produces 22 percent of the world's tea, the largest producer after China. But nearly 70 per cent of output is consumed by Indians, with more and more exotic teas also being introduced into the domestic market. Photograph: Courtesy Twitter.
Auction centres are also easing their norms to promote such sales.
Tea is the cured leaf of the Camellia sinensis. The rarely-seen flower of a tea plant is called a camellia. Generally tea bushes are pruned so the flowers never come up. Photograph: Courtesy @teaboardofindia/Twitter.
Recently, a 1.1 kg of Golden Needle, from Arunachal Pradesh’s Donyi Polo Tea Estate, fetched an exorbitant price of Rs 40,000 a kg, while Gold tea from Manohari Tea Estate in Assam was sold at Rs 39,000 a kg at the Guwahati tea auction.
Assam and Arunachal Pradesh teas are currently fetching some of the highest prices of tea in the world. Britain's Prince William and his wife Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, visited an Assam tea plantation when they came to India in 2016. Photograph: Biju Boro/Reuters.
Earlier, orthodox tea varieties (hand-processed tea) from Mokalbari Tea Estate, in Assam's Brahmaputra valley and Dikom Tea Estate, situated on the Sessa river, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, were sold at Rs 8,100 and Rs 12,000 per kg, respectively.
Tea workers in Assam wearing traditional jappi hats that protect them while plucking. More tea is consumed than any other beverage in the world. Tea consumption is roughly equal to consumption of chocolate, coffee, soft drinks, and alcohol combined. Photograph: Ahmad Masood/Reuters.
Specialty tea varieties fetch lucrative prices every year in international markets like Iran, Germany and Japan.
In August 2018 Golden Needle, from Arunachal Pradesh’s Donyi Polo tea estate, sold for Rs 40,000 for 1.1 kilo. Photograph: Courtesy Absolute Tea/Facebook.
Most of Darjeeling specialty tea varieties are sold to foreign buyers privately, and not via auction.
The first English tea garden began in 1837 in Chabua, upper Assam. Photograph: Courtesy @teaboardofindia/Twitter.
The Golden Needle and Manohari Gold varieties are sold to Indian buyers like Assam Tea Traders and Saurabh Tea Traders of Guwahati for supply in Delhi and Ahmedabad, respectively.
Tea was initially consumed in southwest China as a medicinal drink. Photograph: Ahmad Masood/Reuters.
Dinesh Bihani, secretary at the Guwahati Tea Auction Committee, said such varieties would be sold in the domestic market only as tea connoisseurs, willing to pay a hefty price for quality, were on the rise in India.
Buyers sampling tea at Donyi Polo Estate, Arunachal Pradesh. Photograph: Courtesy @NuxalbariTea/Twitter.
Azam Monem, chairman at the Indian Tea Association said, "It is good for the industry if high quality tea gifting picks up in India. Such purchase have always been prevalent in Japan, China. Now, if this trend picks up in India, it will not only good for this niche market, but also prove India's prowess to produce such high-end tea."
When tea drinking became fashionable in the 17th century, the British introduced its cultivation in India so they would not have to depend on China for tea. Photograph: Courtesy @teaboardofindia/Twitter.
Bihani added, "The small tea growers from Assam are increasingly shifting towards production of such exquisite tea varieties and the Guwahati Tea Auction Committee has eased norms so that these tea producers can find a better market in the country itself through the auction route."
One thousand workers maintain Donyi Polo Estate in Pasighat, East Siang, Arunachal Pradesh. But 87 of the estate's workers have been trained in specialty tea production that has made the estate famous. Courtesy @NuxalbariTea/Twitter.
Against the earlier requirement of putting up a minimum 500 kg of tea for listing in the auction catalogue, the auction committee has now eased it to only one kg for the small tea gardens listing such specialty varieties in the auction catalogue.
Besides, the bigger producers need to pay ~21,000 as the registration fee.
A poster made for the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board, 1947. Photograph: Courtesy Indian Tea Market Expansion Board.
The small tea gardens are required to pay Rs 1,000.
Tea coolies being paid by a British planter in Assam. Photograph: Courtesy Bourne and Shepherd.
"Such moves have encouraged more and more small tea gardens to list on the auction centres," he said.
On the other hand, the tea board has also eased its upper cap of sale prices for premium orthodox tea from Rs 20,000 a kg to Rs 40,000 a kg.
A part of the Mokalbari tea estate. The company owns three estates. Some 800 hectares area of these estates are under cultivation for tea. The estates together produce 2 million kg annually with a 1,600 strong work force. Photograph: Courtesy Mokalbari Tea Pvt Ltd/Facebook.
Bijoy Gopal Chakraborty, president at Confederation of Indian Small Tea Growers Association said the trend towards the production of organic, high quality and boutique teas started three years ago, after some small tea gardens realised that they cannot rely on production of usual CTCs which isn't remunerative.
The introduction of tea into India, by stealth, is credited to a British grower named Robert Fortune who had 20,000 plants smuggled in from China and even some labourers too. Till then the Chinese regarded tea as the property of the emperor. Photograph: Courtesy @teaboardofindia/Twitter.
"Besides, like Darjeeling, tea from Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Manipur have an inherent aroma, all these are hilly areas and if they can cultivate the right variant at the right altitude, provided weather conditions are optimal, these can fetch excellent prices," he said.
A look at the Golden Needles tea from Donyi Polo, Arunachal Pradesh that sold at Rs. 40,000 per kg at Guwahati Tea Auction Centre on August 23, 2018. Photograph: Courtesy @teaboardofindia/Twitter.
Bihani said the problem with the small tea gardens were exposure to the market, which various auction centres and the tea board were addressing. Various schemes such as orthodox incentive, a special North-East package and others have been rolled out and buyers across India can participate in the auctions.
Leaves from Dikom Tea Estate, situated in Assam on the Sessa river, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, sold for Rs 12,000 per kg. Photograph: Courtesy: Shyamalima Rajkhowa/Facebook.com.
Industry sources suggested that while in Assam, there are around 850 tea estates and another 0.1 million small tea gardens, only 150 gardens and around 200 small tea gardens cultivate quality orthodox varieties, including the specialty ones.
The Tea Board of India controls India's tea trade looking after production, certification, exportation and other aspects. Photograph: Courtesy @teaboardofindia/Twitter.
On an average, quality orthodox varieties fetch anywhere between Rs 250 and Rs 500 a kg when under the hammer, while standard CTC fetches 130-140 a kg.
A sample of exotic tea available at Manohari tea estate. This estate's tea also fetched prices making it the second most expensive tea sold at the Guwahati auction in 2018. Photograph: Courtesy Manohari Tea Estate/Facebook.
The tea companies for long have been complaining about stagnant or low increase in tea prices, which may render production not viable. On the other hand, brokers and buyers point out that the prices would "always depend on quality".
Tea gardens in Assam apparently do not follow Indian Standard Time. From the British era they have been observing Bagan Time, which is one hour ahead, to make use of the early sunrise in the east of our country. Photograph: Ahmad Masood/Reuters.
Against a total sale of an estimated 200 kg of such boutique varieties from January to August last year, via the auction route, 300 kg of the same varieties have been sold in the same period this year.
Your favourite cup of tea could be in trouble!
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Former Paramore drummer Zac Farro has joined his guitarist brother Josh‘s new band Novel American.
Josh revealed initial details of the new band earlier this month. Tyler Ward was originally in the set-up on drums, but he has now been replaced by Zac.
Ward posted a statement on the band’s official blog, Novelamerican.tumblr.com, announcing the line-up change.
Josh Farro has said he hopes to record an EP shortly with the band.
I have a confession to make--and I know I`m not alone: I hate beaches. They are hot, boring and generally covered with sand. The sun tends to beat down on them all day long. Not my idea of a good time. In fact, beaches give me the creeps.
Still, as winter in my home sweet home, Chicago, wears on, and on, I begin to long for the tropics. That`s when I start thinking of the West Indies --specifically, the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis.
If, after a long winter, you`ve had a similar longing, remember that travel to the Caribbean in the off season, just getting under way, is attractive, too. There`s often more to do, and bargains abound.
The high season at most hotels and restaurants ends on April 15, after which prices drop 50 percent or more. In winter, a double room at the Royal St. Kitts on the island of St. Kitts costs $135 a night; after mid-April, the rate drops to $59, a saving of 56 percent.
Airlines also lower their fares: All Caribbean packages using American Airlines are automatically $100 less than in the high season, and Air Jamaica shaves $40 off its U.S.-Montego Bay flights, to give but two examples.
While prices are dropping, Caribbean temperatures are rising, but prevailing ocean breezes usually keep it from being uncomfortably hot. On many islands, the social pace picks up during the warmer weather. For those who loathe beaches, that, too, may be good news.
Neither St. Kitts nor Nevis is devoid of beaches, but they are by no means the main attractions, and true beach freaks need not apply. For those of us with better sense, it`s easy to have a perfectly wonderful time on either island--as I did on my last trip there--without so much as sticking a toe in the Caribbean.
True, St. Kitts lacks the lushly forested mountains of St. Lucia, say; or the fabulous cookie-cutter lagoons of St. Barth`s or Antigua. Many of the West Indies are more spectacular in one way or another.
Basseterre (its name a reminder of when the British and French shared the island), the typical gingerbread capital strung in sun-bleached pastels along the shore, the green land behind it converging upward to the darker green focus of the steaming volcanic crater, hung with brooding clouds and draped in necklaces of sugarcane fields.
St. Kitts` 65 square miles are shaped on maps like a whale leaping northwest through the blue Caribbean--though British writers often compare it to a coal scuttle (a shovel by any other name).
The tail, or handle, is the drier end, more hilly than mountainous, all but uninhabited except for the herons on the Great Salt Pond and the monkeys descended from pets brought to the island by French sailors. On a bay at the tip are a couple of decidedly get-away-from-it-all hotels, the Cockleshell and Banana Bay, both reachable only by boat. There, the day`s hottest action can be sitting with a drink watching as the sinking sun turns supernova red and slides shimmering down behind Nevis not far off, covering the water with the colors of its extravagantly dying light.
The most noticeable tourist action on the island is concentrated along a narrow stretch called Frigate Bay, which connects the tail to the fat main body of St. Kitts. The strip offers beaches, condos, a few restaurants and the new Royal St. Kitts Hotel and Golf Course, a modernist complex featuring, along with its tennis courts, the island`s only casino and one of its two discos--the only game in town for late-night partying.
The government has designated this area a ''tourist zone'' and is concentrating all tourist development here so as to leave the rest of the island the way it has been for as long as anyone can remember, which is to say charming and gorgeous.
''consumer boat'' (cruise ship) trade.
The police station in Basseterre where I got my local driver`s license looked just the same, and the policeman who wrote out my license looked just as bored.
I picked up my rental car at the Shell station on the edge of town. As I drove north toward Rawlins Plantation, where I was staying, on the lone main road that circles the fat part of the island (a 32-mile circuit from Basseterre to Basseterre), I found myself repeatedly recognizing long-forgotten details--a certain tiny pink frame house sitting on cinder blocks, its sparse interior spiffy clean and neat; a palm-shaded stone bridge over one of the streams that run through the villages scattered every few miles; an ancient gum tree towering over the narrow road; rounding a bend and coming upon the crumbling ruins of a 200-year-old sugar plantation set among the golden-green giant crabgrass of the cane fields, which still occupy much of the island.
I was seeing these things in desperate flashes. You see, I`ve spent a lifetime not driving on the left. Furthermore, my car had a right-hand-drive 5-speed gearshift, with the steering wheel on the shotgun side and the gearshift on the wrong side of it. It`s a definite test of the I.Q. because it requires reversing practically every driving response in the book, and one that kept me too busy at first for sightseeing, working instead on not slamming into anything alive, at least, while I was getting the hang of it.
This was more of a challenge than it might seem. For one thing, there are barely any sidewalks bordering the road, not even in the villages, which are scattered at intervals along the road like small pastel planets, sharing the same crooked orbit around mountains dripping with rainforest and dominated by Mt. Misery--the best-named volcano I know of.
Usually close on one side is the sea, canefields on the other; so St. Kittseans out here in the boonies use the road as their all-purpose hiking trail, bicycle path, Sunday promenade and general social center. Cars and gas are so expensive that most people get around other ways. Jitney buses poot by every so often, starting and stopping like fitful bugs.
But the people understand the theory and practice of traffic, something that can`t be said of the island`s goat population. Blase as they are abundant, most of them seem to consider the road their private domain, and all but the most sheepish regard cars as brazen intruders better ignored than dealt with.
Driving on St. Kitts is definitely an adventure all by itself.
Such as getting to the Rawlins Plantation. The sign points straight into a canefield, directing you over a rutted dirt track that for a long time seems to lead nowhere. Drowning in sugarcane, I bounced and careered over the track, sending reddish-winged ground doves the size of sparrows skittering ahead of me. I crossed the narrow-gauged tracks of the sugarcane railroad that also circles the fat part of the island, still deep in cane, and kept going, increasingly certain that some joker had moved the sign for my dumb-tourist benefit.
But no. Still climbing the convex shield of the mountain, the track bursts out of the cane onto the gorgeously landscaped grounds of the Rawlins Plantation. These days it`s a small elegant hotel resort with eight rooms or cottages. But it was formerly a working sugar plantation dating from colonial days, as my room, a 200-year-old stone mill tower converted to a secluded, bilevel suite, clearly proved.
Rawlins Plantation is one of the pick hits in the whole Caribbean. It`s a non-beach freak`s heaven, one of the best spots in the world to do nothing. The grounds are spectacular, a year-round botanical extravaganza, with gloomy doomy Mt. Misery in the back yard and a spiffy view of Saba and `Stacia to the north (plus St. Martin`s on especially clear days).
For those who can`t help exercising, there`s a tennis court and a freshwater pool. But for my money, sitting on the breezy greathouse porch with a rum punch just sort of gaping at the peaceful beauty everywhere can`t be beat.
What makes it really special, in that beauty, like life, is cheap in the tropics, are the owners and staff. Philip Walwyn and his wife, Frances, have been running Rawlins since 1968, taking over from Philip`s father, Charles, who had been a planter for many years on Nevis (the family name goes back forever on these islands).
Charles lends a certain colonial air to things at dinner when he and his wife, Enid (she`s the green-thumb genius), are staying there. The staff consists mostly of local men and women, with a couple of lively gulls--one Irish, one British--running things in the kitchen. Because there are never more than 16 guests (most British and Canadian), there`s a family ambiance that`s very pleasing and getting rarer by the minute.
Rawlins is too quiet for some--but not for me.
I got in on a Saturday, and after a dinner of excellent West Indian beef stew complemented by some smooth, classy burgundy whose label I never saw, I found myself joining an impulsive nighttime excursion for a little gambling at the Royal St. Kitts, most of the island away. A Canadian guest and his wife were leaving the next day and wanted a final fling at the roulette tables and slot machines.
We packed his rental car at least one and possibly three over the limit and were off over the skinny dark road, our Canadian driver showing off his newfound left-hand driving skills by tearing along as fast as he could, hitting the brakes just before each road dish, as the runoff culverts crossing the road are called, laughing through the night.
The scene at the casino was, well, sweet. Gambling is new to St. Kitts, and the resemblance between this casino and Las Vegas is like that of a junior high school science project and Bell Labs.
Open only at night and off-limits to local people, the casino is reached through a dark lounge littered with couches and dominated by a monster TV set easily 3-by-4 feet, on whose screen Ingrid Bergman was suffering her way in technicolor through China. The couches were mostly occupied by local young people taking a break from the disco or just hanging out.
Even on this Saturday night, business was fairly light inside the casino, which is about half the size of a basketball court. Sunburns everywhere. Some action at a couple of the blackjack tables, one roulette table and one craps table, plus a few optimists feeding change to the slots. There`s a small bar in one corner--drinks free to players--and so while the casino is modest (nicer than some of the low-ceilinged smoky dens on St. Martin, if not so snazzy as a couple on Curacao), it gets the job done.
Everyday life is generally as much of a gamble as I can handle, so I didn`t play, preferring to watch the slow transfer of money from people`s pockets to chips to the bank. My new Canadian friend, however, playing combinations all over the place, left the roulette table after a couple of hours up about $150, so I guess it does go the other way sometimes.
I spent Sunday making a driving tour of the island, helped considerably by Janet Cotner`s ''A Motoring Guide to St. Kitts,'' more detailed and accurate if less personable than a taxi driver/guide, with copies easily available and well worth the $3.50.
I started with the biggie, the ruins covering Brimstone Hill. It`s a citadel fortress built on an 800-foot high volcanic extrusion over a period of more than a century, beginning in 1690. It`s easily one of the seven historical wonders of the Caribbean, even if it was only used twice--first in 1690 when the British dragged several cannons up the hill to bombard the French holding seaside Fort Charles (today a leprosarium) directly below.
reinforcements were on their way from England.
Imagine owning your own brand new, single-family home on a spacious ½ acre homesite with a private backyard!. Being more affordable than a townhome, you will quickly see just why so many have chosen to call The Point at Laytons Lake home.Contact us today to schedule a visit.
At Laytons Lake, each homesite is at least half an acre – some are even larger! With five unique single-family home designs, including one with a first-floor owner’s suite, you will be sure to find one that is perfect for the way you want to live. Plus, with Ryan Homes’ Built Smart Program for energy efficiency and our comprehensive 10-year structural warranty, you can have peace of mind for long term affordability.
Where will additional £24million of council cuts be coming from?
Proposals have been set out as to how Northumberland County Council will save a further £24million over the coming years.
As previously reported, a budget update revealed that the authority will have to slash a further £27million from its budget over the next three years.
The update takes into account changes to various funding pots, additional spending pressures and previous savings which have not or may not be met.

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