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Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers a speech during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on January 20, 2026. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here. Canada’s prime minister delivered a blistering and remarkable speech at the World Economic Forum this week, essentially declaring the end of the world as you and I have known it.  Since World War II, Mark Carney told the crowd in Davos, Switzerland, global politics have largely adhered to a system of norms that prioritized shared prosperity and cooperation. But as President Donald Trump lays waste to those norms, long-time US allies — Canada included — are taking steps to counter America’s influence, even after Trump’s current term. It’s hard to overstate just how new and strange that is: America’s nearest neighbor, and closest ally, calling for the development of a new world order that sidelines the US. “When historians look back at this era, this speech by Mark Carney will be seen as an inflection point,” wrote Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a New York Times journalist. The address is worth reading or watching in full, which is something I have said of… maybe three speeches in my career. But because that would be a lot to put in your inbox, I’ve instead asked four of my colleagues from Vox’s policy and politics team to explain the big highlights here. In today’s edition, they answer the question: What does Canada — and the rest of the world — want from the new world order? Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canada’s prime minister declared that the system of international rules and norms that’ve been in place since World War II aren’t working anymore — and that “middle powers” like Canada should stop pretending that they are. Tension between the US and its European and Canadian allies has been ratcheting up for months. What’s special about this? What’s different?  Benjy Sarlin (senior editor): One thing that Trump’s second term has changed, and that Carney’s speech reflects, is that the West’s tensions with America are no longer just about Trump’s personal behavior. You could look at this current Greenland standoff, for example, as a personal obsession of Trump’s that has no real connection to any faction of either party, that polls about as terribly in the US as it does in Europe, and that will go away as soon as he goes away or faces enough pressure from US voters or the stock market. But that’s not how it’s being treated by Carney: Canada now has to consider the possibility that the US — whether in the next election, or 20 years, or 40 years — is capable of empowering another Trump-like figure who tears up existing agreements and fundamentally does not believe in the post-World War II project of shared security and democratic values. Carney starts out by critiquing the “rules-based international order,” which is an interesting choice. He says, in particular, that “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.” Is he saying that the old world order was a lie? Or that American dominance was universally bad?  Seth Maxon (senior editor): There has been quite a bit of left-wing commentary about the line “we knew that international law applied with varying rigor,” with some people expressing shock to hear that articulated by a major Western leader. I think this is key to why this speech resonated so much — Carney’s tendency to say a quiet part out loud. Zack Beauchamp (senior correspondent): But Carney is not, as some on the radical left have suggested, admitting that the international order was “always” a total lie. He is saying that there were gaps and hypocrisies in it, but that these were outweighed (at least from the Canadian perspective) by the…

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and attorney Abbe Lowell leave the Supreme Court on January 21, 2026. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images The Supreme Court’s Republican majority ordinarily believe that President Donald Trump is allowed to fire virtually anyone who works for a federal agency. Last July, for example, they permitted the Trump administration to fire nearly half of the Department of Education’s employees. In May, however, the Court also signaled that the Federal Reserve is special. In Trump v. Wilcox (2025), the Court indicated that Trump may not fire the Fed’s leaders because that agency is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” It is not at all clear what this cryptic sentence means, but at Wednesday morning’s oral argument in Trump v. Cook, most of the justices signaled that they will adhere to the view that they laid out in Wilcox. Six justices — the three Democrats plus Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — appeared very likely to reject Trump’s attempt to seize control of the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, even Justice Samuel Alito, who is ordinarily a kneejerk Republican partisan, asked some skeptical questions of Trump’s lawyer. The Federal Reserve is supposed to make technocratic decisions about where to set interest rates. If they set those rates too high, it will be too expensive for businesses to borrow money and investment and hiring will stagnate. At the same time, if they set rates too low, the economy will take off in the short term, but will experience much more damaging inflation in the long term. The Fed, in other words, has the power to inject cocaine into the economy — giving it a temporary high at the price of much greater economic pain down the road. For this reason, Congress shields the Fed’s governors from presidential control, only permitting the president to fire them “for cause.” This is to prevent the president from pressuring them to lower interest rates in an election year, when the president’s party would benefit from a temporary economic high. The Cook case, meanwhile, appears to involve Trump’s attempt to bypass this law by making up a fake reason to fire a Fed governor. And, if Trump prevails in Cook, his administration has already signaled that it will bring similarly dubious allegations against Fed chair Jerome Powell. Trump’s attempt to neutralize the Fed’s independence, explained Last August, Trump attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the Fed’s Board of Governors, claiming that she falsely claimed on a mortgage application that “both a property in Michigan and a property in Georgia would simultaneously serve as her principal residence.” But Trump has yet to provide any meaningful evidence that supports this allegation, and he never gave Cook a hearing where she could explain this alleged falsehood. According to a Reuters report from last September, moreover, these allegations appear to be fabricated. While Cook does appear to have signed a document indicating that she would use the Atlanta property as a primary residence, that document states that the bank may agree in writing that the property may be used for something else. And, in a separate document, Cook told the lender that the property would be used as a “vacation home.” Cook’s lawyer, Paul Clement, told the justices on Wednesday that, “at most,” any discrepancies in Cook’s mortgage documents are inadvertent. Right out of the gate, several key justices appeared skeptical that a minor discrepancy on mortgage documents could justify Trump’s decision to fire Cook. As anyone who has ever obtained a mortgage can testify, the process requires the borrower to sign a huge pile of documents, many of which are drafted by the government, with little time to review them or to ask for them to be changed — even if such a change can be made. Thus Chief Justice John Roberts told…

Bibi Club est de retour avec une pièce qui se retrouvera sur Amaro. La pièce de rock électronique commence avec une phrase assez marquante : « where do we go… L’article Washing Machine est apparu en premier sur Le Canal Auditif.

Sara Godinez-Espinosa, a research technician with the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP), sets an adult colony of branching coral called Acropora kenti into a bin at the National Sea Simulator near Townsville, Australia. | Harriet Spark for Vox CAIRNS, Australia — “I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.”  It was shortly after 10 pm on a cloudy December night, and Harrison, a coral researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University, was about 25 miles off the coast of northern Queensland. He was with a group of scientists, tourism operators, and Indigenous Australians who had spent the last few nights above the Great Barrier Reef — the largest living structure on the planet — looking for coral spawn.   And apparently, it has a smell.  Over a few nights in the Australian summer, shortly after the full moon, millions of corals across the Great Barrier Reef start bubbling out pearly bundles of sperm and eggs, known as spawn. It’s as if the reef is snowing upside down. Those bundles float to the surface and break apart. If all goes to plan, the eggs of one coral will encounter the sperm of another and grow into free-swimming coral larvae. Those larvae make their way to the reef, where they find a spot to “settle,” like a seed taking root, and then morph into what we know of as coral.  Key takeaways The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living structure, will likely collapse by the end of the century without immediate and steep cuts to carbon emissions. An enormous group of scientists, backed with nearly $300 million, is working tirelessly to delay that decline through an initiative called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. At the core of their approach is assisted reproduction — i.e., helping coral have more babies — which they do at sea and in one of the world’s largest research aquariums. The broader reef conservation industry in Australia has not fully reckoned with the climate reality it faces, and that undermines efforts to slash emissions, the only long-term solution to save reefs. Spawning on the Great Barrier Reef has been called the largest reproductive event on Earth, and, in more colorful terms, “the world’s largest orgasm.” Coral spawn can be so abundant in some areas above the reef that it forms large, veiny slicks — as if there had been a chemical spill. This was what the team was looking for out on the reef, and sniffing is one of the only ways to find it, said Harrison, who was among a small group of scientists who first documented the phenomenon of mass coral spawning in the 1980s. Some people say coral spawn smells like watermelon or fresh cow’s milk. To me it was just vaguely fishy.  “Here we go,” said Mark Gibbs, another scientist onboard and an engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), a government agency. All of a sudden the water around us was full of little orbs, as if hundreds of Beanie Babies had been ripped open. “Nets in the water!” Gibbs said to the crew. A few people onboard began skimming the water’s surface with modified pool nets for spawn and then dumping the contents into a large plastic bin. That night, the team collected hundreds of thousands of coral eggs as part of a Herculean effort to try to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. Rising global temperatures, together with a raft of other challenges, threaten to destroy this iconic ecosystem — the gem of Australia, a World Heritage site, and one of the main engines of the country’s massive tourism industry. In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is…