At least 200 people died in eastern Congo after a landslide collapsed several mines at a major coltan mining site on Wednesday, January 29, 2026, according to rebel authorities. The Rubaya mines, controlled by the M23 rebels, experienced the collapse due to heavy rains, Lumumba Kambere Muyisa, the spokesperson of the rebel-appointed governor of North-Kivu province, told The Associated Press on Saturday, January 31, 2026.
The landslide occurred at a coltan mining quarry in Rubaya, a region in eastern Congo. Recovery efforts were underway, but some bodies remained trapped in the mud, according to Muyisa. Coltan is a mineral used in electronics.
In other news, Nvidia Corp. planned to participate in OpenAI's latest funding round, with CEO Jensen Huang describing it as potentially the largest investment the company had ever made. "We will invest a great deal of money," Huang told reporters in Taipei on Saturday. "I believe in OpenAI. The work that they do is incredible. They’re one of the most consequential companies of our time." While Huang did not specify the exact amount, he characterized the investment as "huge." He indicated that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in the process of closing the round. "Let Sam announce how much he’s going to raise – it’s for him to decide," Huang said. "But we will definitely participate in the next round of financing because it’s such a good investment."
Meanwhile, the cybersecurity community was grappling with a new Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet called Kimwolf. According to Krebs on Security, Kimwolf had spread to more than 2 million devices, forcing infected systems to participate in massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to relay other malicious and abusive Internet traffic. The botnet's ability to scan local networks for other IoT devices to infect made it a significant threat to organizations, with research revealing its prevalence in government and corporate networks. Kimwolf reportedly grew rapidly in late 2025 by tricking residential proxy services into relaying malicious commands to devices on local networks.
Also, Wiki Education reported on its experiences with generative AI and Wikipedia editing throughout 2025. LiAnna Davis, writing on January 29, 2026, noted that the organization had been grappling with the impacts, opportunities, and threats of generative AI for several years. Wiki Education runs large-scale programs to bring new editors to Wikipedia and has been evaluating how its cohort of content contributors uses generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to draft contributions to Wikipedia.
In the tech startup world, CollectWise, a Y Combinator-backed company, was hiring an AI Agent Engineer to automate consumer debt collection. The company claimed its AI agents were already outperforming human collectors by 2X at a fraction of the cost. CollectWise, with a team of three, reported scaling to a $1 million annualized run rate in just a few months and aimed to reach $10 million within the next year.
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