Latest news with #Balzac
Cision Canada
a day ago
- Business
- Cision Canada
Balzac's Coffee Launches Canada's Cup Iced Maple Latte: A Patriotic Pour with Purpose
Limited-time offering celebrates Canada and the bounty of our resource-rich provinces TORONTO, June 9, 2025 /CNW/ - Just in time for summer, Balzac's Coffee, a proudly 100% Canadian specialty coffee company, is launching a bold, limited-edition drink: the Canada's Cup Iced Maple Latte. This 16oz iced latte is made with Balzac's signature Fair Trade, organic espresso (roasted in Ontario), blended with water from the superior side of Lake Superior. It's topped with Canadian whipped cream, drizzled with Ontario maple syrup, and finished with a sprinkle of Vancouver Island sea salt — a refreshing tribute to Canadian flavours from coast to coast. The drink is served in a custom-engraved, Ontario-made recycled aluminum keepsake cup, complete with a Canadian-made softwood stir stick. Designed to keep its cool and built to last, it's a defiantly delicious drink made to be enjoyed with your elbows up. Balzac's Coffee is owned by District Ventures Capital, the venture capital fund of renowned Canadian investor and TV personality Arlene Dickinson. "Balzac's captures the best of Canada — connection, creativity, sustainability, and exceptional taste," says Dickinson. "Inspired by our love for all things maple and the growing need to buy homegrown goods, the Canada's Cup Iced Maple Latte captures the essence of our home and native land in every sip. It's our way of celebrating the Canadian summer — with sustainability and style in hand." Available starting June 9 in Balzac's cafés across Ontario, Canadians are invited to raise a cup to homegrown flavour with a drink that's as Canadian as coffee gets. About Balzac's Coffee Roasters Founded in 1993, Balzac's has built a strong legacy roasting specialty coffee for Canadians to enjoy across the country. Inspired by Honoré de Balzac's quote, "The café is the people's parliament," the 100% Canadian-owned and operated company is committed to sustainably sourced coffee and is available online, in retail stores nationwide, or at any of its 16 cafés across Ontario. To learn more, please visit
New York Times
a day ago
- New York Times
In Paris, 3 Troves of Art and Curios Even the Parisians Don't Know About
Paris is a city of museums, nearly 150 by my unofficial count. Beyond the state-owned grandes dames — the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and Versailles (if you define a palace as a museum) — there are free city museums (the Petit Palais and the Carnavalet, among them), and museums dedicated to one artist (Rodin, Picasso), one writer (Balzac, George Sand), one subject (perfume, playing cards), even one activity (counterfeiting, smoking). But some of the most intriguing collections may be ones you've never heard of, sequestered in hidden spaces. Here are three museum spaces that even many Parisians have never heard of. Consultation Room for Prints and Drawings at the Louvre Tucked away at the far end of the sprawling Louvre is an intimate, little-visited wing: the Graphic Arts Department's Consultation Room, whose entrance, guarded by two stone lions, faces the Carrousel Garden abutting the Tuileries Garden. There you can see works by some of the world's most famous artists up close, out of their frames, for as long as you want. The Louvre does not advertise how to visit the Consultation Room. The department houses almost a quarter of a million drawings, pastels, miniatures, prints, engraved plates, rare books, autographs, woodcuts, lithographic stones and manuscripts, most of which never see daylight. It takes perseverance to visit. Through the Louvre's website, you must submit a request in French for an appointment with the name and number of up to 10 portfolios from the museum's online catalog. Then you wait for a written acceptance, typically sent within a few days. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Europe's growing wealth divide: back to the world of Balzac
In a recent study picked up in the French press, the academic Mélanie Plouviez cites one of her country's best-loved novelists to make a damning point. The power of inherited and unearned wealth in the France of 2025, she argues, replicates the social injustices found in Honoré de Balzac's 19th-century chronicles of ambition and despair. As in the 1820s, she writes, 'Who now could buy a place in Paris relying only on their wage and without family help? With the resurgence of inherited wealth, a gulf between what work allows and inheritance allows has also returned.' The problem is a sadly familiar one across Europe, and the same observation could be made of Britain, Germany or Italy. The economist Thomas Piketty has laid bare the extent to which booming stock markets and property prices have turbocharged asset wealth in western liberal democracies, at the expense of those reliant solely on a wage. Since the 1980s, regressive tax changes have empowered the wealthy to keep more of their money and pass more of it on to their sons and daughters. In advanced economies, the amount of inherited wealth has more or less doubled as a proportion of GDP, compared with the middle of the last century. The collapse of trust in politics can, in part, be attributed to this emergence of a two-tier society that offers only limited opportunities to the assetless young and undermines the basis of the social contract. France is at the sharp end of this loss of faith. On Wednesday evening, during a marathon primetime television interrogation, Emmanuel Macron was accused of having become a 'president for the rentier class'. Mr Macron, who made the reduction of taxes on wealth a priority of his first term, batted away the question with airy talk of promoting equal opportunities. Yet as the French president refuses to contemplate a more redistributive approach, his unpopular prime minister, François Bayrou, is seeking backing for an austerity budget that would impose €40bn in spending cuts. This, Mr Bayrou has blithely stated, 'will demand efforts from everybody, and given its scale, it cannot succeed unless the French people support it'. Across the Rhine in Germany, the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is pushing a similar message of collective sacrifice. Germans, Mr Merz said this week, must 'work more, and above all more efficiently' to get a stagnating economy back on track. Prof Plouviez's work is the latest to highlight why such exhortations to solidarity and hard work ring so hollow for so many. As populist parties surf on social discontent, governments are shamelessly echoing their rhetoric and approach towards immigration. But confronting the manner in which a self-reproducing wealth divide is corroding social bonds and undermining a politics of the common good remains taboo. Presidential elections in Romania and Poland this weekend are likely to showcase voters' deepening disillusionment with the political mainstream, and the continuing rise of the far right. As Balzac was writing the final volumes of his La Comédie Humaine in the 1840s, the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, his fictional indictment of the great wealth divide in Victorian England. Two centuries on, facing a darkening political horizon, Europe's current crop of leaders could usefully dust down a copy and learn from its insights before it is too late.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Column: The inescapable answer to America's problems? Fix Congress
Pretty much on a daily basis now, I find myself muttering or shouting, 'If only Congress wasn't broken,' or something to that effect. I'm happy to acknowledge that our problems have many causes. Still, here's my answer to the question 'What is one thing you would do to solve — or just improve — American politics and America's mounting list of crises?': Fix Congress. Sort of like Balzac's famous line, 'Show me a great fortune, and I'll show you a great crime,' if you show me a big problem, I can make the case that Congress' dysfunction either created the problem or made it worse. Read more: Column: Hate Trump? Love him? Either way, you'll be annoyed by this column This is not a partisan point because the problem has been worsening for decades. But we might as deal with the problem right now. And right now Congress is controlled by Republicans and they are controlled by the president. Whatever you think of Donald Trump's various executive orders — I think it's been a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly — the simple fact is that presidents aren't supposed to govern or legislate by diktat. Love Trump's Bernie-Sanders-style executive order to lower the price of drugs? Fine, you should know that it probably won't pass muster in the courts. But even if it does, what is done by executive order can be undone by executive order. If you want price controls or any of his executive fatwas to become the law of the land, they need to be made laws. And only Congress can do that. Except Congress can't, or won't. Which is mostly fine with Trump because he'd often rather have the fight over the issue, and the appearance of royal authority, than do the hard work of getting legislation in and out of Congress. Read more: Column: President Trump's economic philosophy that only a leftist could love You may have noticed that the president likes to generate controversy and have people believe him when he says stuff like, 'I run the country and the world.' Issuing legally dubious, evanescent, executive orders serves both purposes. Reporters run around covering the orders like Trump has actually done the thing he's said he's done, giving him the headline he craves and fomenting panic among his foes. If and when judges block him, he gets a fresh issue: 'Rogue' judges are standing in his way. For his fans, the issue becomes judges exceeding their authority, not judges preventing Trump from exceeding his. And for fans and foes alike, judges are cast as partisan actors, eroding trust in the judiciary. Broadly speaking, judges aren't supposed to be a check on the executive on most issues. That, too, is Congress' job via the power of the purse. It's also the only branch that can fire a president. But it's proved incapable of that too. Which simply invites presidents to test or ignore the limits on their authority and gripe about 'unelected judges' when stymied. Read more: Column: Is Kilmar Abrego Garcia a criminal? Great question The proliferation of nationwide judicial injunctions against the executive is a problem. It's been getting worse for decades. But why? Because presidents increasingly try to legislate via executive order — because Congress lets them. Pick almost any issue. Trade? The Constitution gives Congress sole authority to regulate trade. But over the last century, Congress has more or less transferred that authority to the executive branch. Immigration? Making hay with the complexities of the issue helps both parties politically and solving it through reform of the immigration laws is hard and painful. Better to do nothing. The national debt? Congress has successfully followed its own budget process only four times in the last half a century, the last instance was in 1997. And only once — in 1977 — did it manage that on time. Congress instead relies on a slew of ugly stopgaps, continuing resolutions and omnibus bills that put spending on autopilot. Read more: Column: Markets to GOP: We won't save you from Trump's folly This isn't just a wonky point about sausage-making. Congress is where politics is supposed to happen. When it fails to absorb political and partisan passions, those passions spill out into institutions not designed to absorb them. The House and the Senate were designed to force consensus across a vast nation with diverse interests. When Congress is working properly, that's an ugly and difficult process (hence the cliche about sausage-making). It involves fact-finding through adversarial hearings, horse-trading and compromise. But the process and the end product have democratic legitimacy. The result earns buy-in from stakeholders and voters because the political fights are public and lengthy, requiring representatives and senators to explain and defend their positions. The bills they pass — laws! — cannot be overturned by presidents or, for the most part, by the courts. Though we're seeing that rule tested nearly daily. The abdication of Congress' role as the arena where political fights happen has turned the House and the Senate into a stew of de facto pundits and lobbyists of the executive branch, which steadily aggrandizes to itself authority not found in the Constitution. In short, when in doubt, blame Congress. @JonahDispatch If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
The inescapable answer to America's problems? Fix Congress
Pretty much on a daily basis now, I find myself muttering or shouting, 'If only Congress wasn't broken,' or something to that effect. I'm happy to acknowledge that our problems have many causes. Still, here's my answer to the question 'What is one thing you would do to solve — or just improve — American politics and America's mounting list of crises?': Fix Congress. Sort of like Balzac's famous line, 'Show me a great fortune, and I'll show you a great crime,' if you show me a big problem, I can make the case that Congress' dysfunction either created the problem or made it worse. This is not a partisan point because the problem has been worsening for decades. But we might as deal with the problem right now. And right now Congress is controlled by Republicans and they are controlled by the president. Whatever you think of Donald Trump's various executive orders — I think it's been a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly — the simple fact is that presidents aren't supposed to govern or legislate by diktat. Love Trump's Bernie-Sanders-style executive order to lower the price of drugs? Fine, you should know that it probably won't pass muster in the courts. But even if it does, what is done by executive order can be undone by executive order. If you want price controls or any of his executive fatwas to become the law of the land, they need to be made laws. And only Congress can do that. Except Congress can't, or won't. Which is mostly fine with Trump because he'd often rather have the fight over the issue, and the appearance of royal authority, than do the hard work of getting legislation in and out of Congress. You may have noticed that the president likes to generate controversy and have people believe him when he says stuff like, 'I run the country and the world.' Issuing legally dubious, evanescent, executive orders serves both purposes. Reporters run around covering the orders like Trump has actually done the thing he's said he's done, giving him the headline he craves and fomenting panic among his foes. If and when judges block him, he gets a fresh issue: 'Rogue' judges are standing in his way. For his fans, the issue becomes judges exceeding their authority, not judges preventing Trump from exceeding his. And for fans and foes alike, judges are cast as partisan actors, eroding trust in the judiciary. Broadly speaking, judges aren't supposed to be a check on the executive on most issues. That, too, is Congress' job via the power of the purse. It's also the only branch that can fire a president. But it's proved incapable of that too. Which simply invites presidents to test or ignore the limits on their authority and gripe about 'unelected judges' when stymied. The proliferation of nationwide judicial injunctions against the executive is a problem. It's been getting worse for decades. But why? Because presidents increasingly try to legislate via executive order — because Congress lets them. Pick almost any issue. Trade? The Constitution gives Congress sole authority to regulate trade. But over the last century, Congress has more or less transferred that authority to the executive branch. Immigration? Making hay with the complexities of the issue helps both parties politically and solving it through reform of the immigration laws is hard and painful. Better to do nothing. The national debt? Congress has successfully followed its own budget process only four times in the last half a century, the last instance was in 1997. And only once — in 1977 — did it manage that on time. Congress instead relies on a slew of ugly stopgaps, continuing resolutions and omnibus bills that put spending on autopilot. This isn't just a wonky point about sausage-making. Congress is where politics is supposed to happen. When it fails to absorb political and partisan passions, those passions spill out into institutions not designed to absorb them. The House and the Senate were designed to force consensus across a vast nation with diverse interests. When Congress is working properly, that's an ugly and difficult process (hence the cliche about sausage-making). It involves fact-finding through adversarial hearings, horse-trading and compromise. But the process and the end product have democratic legitimacy. The result earns buy-in from stakeholders and voters because the political fights are public and lengthy, requiring representatives and senators to explain and defend their positions. The bills they pass — laws! — cannot be overturned by presidents or, for the most part, by the courts. Though we're seeing that rule tested nearly daily. The abdication of Congress' role as the arena where political fights happen has turned the House and the Senate into a stew of de facto pundits and lobbyists of the executive branch, which steadily aggrandizes to itself authority not found in the Constitution. In short, when in doubt, blame Congress. @JonahDispatch
