Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

Babcock & Wilcox received a limited notice to proceed on engineering and long-lead purchasing for a SolveBright CO2-capture system at an unnamed existing US power plant, sized to capture more than 550,000 tons a year. The full contract, expected by March 2026, is worth an estimated $80 million; the plant is not named, so the pin sits at B&W's Akron headquarters.

OpenAI hired Slack chief executive Denise Dresser, a Salesforce executive for more than 14 years, as chief revenue officer; Slack product chief Rob Seaman stepped in as interim CEO.

Qualcomm bought Ventana Micro Systems, the Cupertino designer of high-performance RISC-V server CPU chiplets, to build RISC-V CPUs alongside its custom Arm-based Oryon cores.

Judge Charles Breyer granted California a preliminary injunction ending the continued federalization of the California National Guard troops still in and around Los Angeles, more than five months after they were sent.

After seven years, Calvin McDonald will leave as CEO on 31 January 2026; CFO Meghan Frank and president André Maestrini become interim co-CEOs and chair Marti Morfitt becomes executive chair while the board searches for a successor.

International revenue jumped 33% while the Americas slipped 2%; Lululemon raised its full-year outlook and added $1.0 billion to its buyback, and the shares rose more than 9% the next day.

Oregon opened its commercial Dungeness crab season on 16 December 2025 from Cape Falcon to the California border, 15 days after its 1 December target, while the north coast waited for Washington crab to fill out.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published November payrolls on 16 December 2025 together with October, which had no separate release: +64,000 in November, -105,000 in October, and unemployment at 4.6%.

Google releases Gemini 3 Flash, frontier intelligence built for speed that outscores 2.5 Pro at three times the speed, priced at $0.50 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens.

Salesforce signed a deal for Qualified, maker of the Piper AI SDR agent that turns company websites into conversations that qualify and book inbound leads, to strengthen Agentforce Sales and Marketing.

Qualcomm closed its takeover of Alphawave IP Group about a quarter ahead of schedule, for $2.3 billion in cash and stock, with Alphawave CEO Tony Pialis taking charge of Qualcomm's data-centre business.

China switched on island-wide independent customs operations across the Hainan Free Trade Port, expanding zero-tariff product coverage from 21% to 74% of tariff lines and duty-free items from about 1,900 to roughly 6,600.

B&W will supply low-pressure wet gas scrubbing, ExxonMobil technology it licenses, to cut sulfur dioxide from a major Canadian petroleum refinery's catalytic cracker and coker units. The $40 million contract adds $30 million to a $10 million first order from September.

A Paris judicial court ruled on 19 December 2025 that Shein would not have to suspend its French website for three months, rejecting the government's bid to enforce a shutdown sought after the platform's childlike-sex-doll listings. The court instead ordered Shein to add genuine age verification for adult products.

The Central Kowloon Route opens to traffic as the Central Kowloon Bypass (Yau Ma Tei Section), a 4.7 km dual three-lane trunk road that is about 3.9 km tunnel, running beneath densely built Kowloon from the Yau Ma Tei Interchange in West Kowloon to the Kai Tak Development Area and Kowloon Bay in the east. It forms the western half of Route 6.