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On 23 Jan 2026, an international group of WhatsApp users filed for class-action status in San Francisco, claiming Meta secretly stores and can read supposedly end-to-end-encrypted chats.
On 22 Jan 2026 South Korea began enforcing its 2024 AI Basic Act, the first fully-implemented national law that obliges companies to watermark deepfakes, notify users of generative AI and place human monitors over “high-impact” systems.
On 24 Jan 2026 a week-long heatwave surging into south-eastern Australia pushed temperatures into the mid-40 °C range, triggering the season’s first “catastrophic” fire ratings in South Australia and western Victoria and causing the Carlisle River blaze in the Otways to jump its lines, forcing shelter-in-place orders.
On 23 Jan 2026 Meta announced it will disable teenagers’ access to all role-play AI ‘characters’ worldwide until a redesigned, parent-controlled version is released.
A flurry of same-day moves—from Alibaba’s $35 m JV and Equinix’s Singapore SMR study to the US, Philippine and Vietnamese siting pushes—signals that both tech giants and states are accelerating concrete investments and policy steps to bring new fission capacity online within the next decade.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin broke cover on 22 Jan 2026 with plans to launch a multi-orbit, 5,408-satellite network named TeraWave—aimed at 100,000 government, data-centre and corporate customers—starting Q4 2027.
Uranium-series tests on calcite over a claw-shaped hand stencil in Sulawesi’s Liang Metanduno cave show humans making imagery at least 67,800 years ago—about 15,000 years earlier than any previously verified cave painting.
NOAA upgraded its geomagnetic storm watch to “severe” (G4) on 19 Jan 2026 after an X1.9-class flare a day earlier hurled a full-halo coronal mass ejection toward Earth, putting auroras within reach of Alabama and Northern California for the first time in decades.
On 20 Jan 2026 the European Commission released draft Cybersecurity Act revisions that turn voluntary curbs on "high-risk" vendors into a legal mandate, compelling all EU states to strip Chinese-made gear—chiefly from Huawei and ZTE—from mobile networks and 17 other critical sectors within set deadlines.
On 19–20 Jan 2026, the first X-class flare of the year drove a coupled S4 radiation + G4 geomagnetic storm—the strongest since 2003—forcing emergency mitigations and lighting skies far beyond the poles.
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