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Britain’s economy shrank for a second month in a row in October in the run-up to the government’s first budget, the first back-to-back falls in output since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a setback for new finance minister Rachel Reeves. Gross domestic product contracted by 0.1% month-on-month in October, as it did in September, the Office for National Statistics said. It was the first consecutive drop in monthly GDP – which is volatile and prone to revision – since March and April 2020, when Britain enforced its first coronavirus lockdown. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a monthly expansion of 0.1%. The ONS said there was “mixed” anecdotal evidence from companies that turnover had been affected by companies waiting for the budget statement, which imposed large tax rises on businesses. Others brought forward activity. The services sector flatlined, while output in the manufacturing and construction industries declined in October’s data, which measured the economy in the weeks before Reeves’ budget statement on Oct. 30. Reeves and Prime Minister Keir Starmer – who made stronger economic growth the centrepiece of the Labour Party’s election campaign this year – had warned that the budget would include painful tax increases. Friday’s data adds to a run of worse-than-expected figures for Britain’s economy, with business surveys and retail sales readings also falling flat. “While the figures this month are disappointing, we have put in place policies to deliver long-term economic growth,” Reeves said in a statement. The opposition Conservatives said the growth outlook was under serious pressure because of Labour’s first moves in power. “It is no wonder businesses are sounding the alarm,” the Conservatives’ spokesman on the economy, Mel Stride, said. “This fall in growth shows the stark impact of the Chancellor’s decisions and continually talking down the economy.” The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a leading think tank, said it expected the economy would stagnate in the fourth quarter of 2024. Most forecasters think the budget’s boost to public investment and spending will yield faster economic growth in 2025, although business groups say employers will struggle with higher social security contributions. Confidence among consumers rose modestly in December, in a survey published on Friday, offering Reeves a crumb of comfort after a torrent of glum business surveys. Sterling fell by more than a third of a cent against the U.S. dollar after the GDP data before recovering partially. Investors continued to price in around three quarter-point cuts in Bank of England interest rates by the end of next year. Paul Dales, chief UK economist at consultancy Capital Economics, said the BoE was unlikely to be sufficiently worried about the GDP data to cut rates at its meeting on Thursday. “That said, we’re not as confident about that as we were before this data release,” he added. Last month, the BoE trimmed its annual growth forecast for 2024 to 1% from 1.25% but predicted a stronger 2025 with 1.5% growth, reflecting a short-term boost to the economy from Reeves’ budget. Britain’s economic output has grown slowly since the pandemic. Only Germany, which was also hit hard by surging energy costs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has done noticeably worse among the largest advanced economies. Separate ONS trade data showed imports and exports of goods fell in October. Exports to the European Union were higher than exports to the rest of the world for the first time in nearly a year. Source: Reuters (Reporting by Andy Bruce and Suban Abdulla; editing by Sarah Young and Kate Holton, Kirsten Donovan)CLONDALKIN, Ireland (AP) — Dozens of massive data centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here. Now, a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centers to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence. Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland's grid operator to halt new data centers near Dublin until 2028. These huge buildings and their powerful computers last year consumed 21% of the nation’s electricity, according to official records. No other country has reported a higher burden to the International Energy Agency. Not only that, but Ireland is still heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, despite a growing number of wind farms sprouting across the countryside. Further data center expansion threatens Ireland's goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions. Ireland is a “microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI,” said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork. Twenty-six-year-old activist Darragh Adelaide lives in a working-class Dublin suburb just across a busy motorway from Grange Castle Business Park, one of Ireland’s biggest data center clusters. It could get even bigger were Adelaide not a thorn in the side of Google’s expansion plans. “It’s kind of an outrageous number of data centers,” Adelaide said. “People have started to make the connection between the amount of electricity they’re using and electricity prices going up.” Ireland has attracted global tech companies since the “Celtic Tiger” boom at the turn of the 21st century. Tax incentives, a highly skilled, English-speaking workforce and the country’s membership in the European Union have all contributed to making the tech sector a central part of the Irish economy. The island is also a node for undersea cables that extend to the U.S., Britain, Iceland and mainland Europe. Nearly all of the data centers sit on the edge of Dublin, where their proximity to the capital city facilitates online financial transactions and other activities that require fast connections. Data center computers run hot, but compared to other parts of the world, Ireland's cool temperatures make it easier to keep them from overheating without drawing in as much water. Still, buildings that for years went mostly unnoticed have attracted unwanted attention as their power demands surged while Irish householders pay some of Europe’s highest electricity bills. Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency has also flagged concerns about nitrogen oxide pollution from data centers’ on-site generators — typically gas or diesel turbines — affecting areas near Dublin. A crackdown began in 2021, spurred by projections that data centers are on pace to take up one third of Ireland's electricity in this decade. Regulators declared that Dublin had hit its limits and could no longer plug more data centers into its grid. The government urged tech companies to look outside the capital and find ways to supply their own power. “What’s happening in Ireland is the politics of basically what happens when you build too many of these things,” said University College Dublin researcher Patrick Brodie. “Even though people have recognized for a while that data centers are energy hogs, there hasn’t really been so many of these moments where, effectively, Ireland issued a red alert.” Adelaide was a child when Microsoft opened Grange Castle's first data center in 2009, but enormous complexes built by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other companies have since expanded around the ruined castle that anchors the business park. They have their own modern fortifications of high fences, surveillance cameras and guard houses, and don’t display their corporate logos. In June, Adelaide’s campaign against data centers helped get him elected to a seat on the South Dublin County Council for the leftist People Not Profits Party. The council soon after rejected Google’s plan to build another data center. Google appealed the decision in September. “It was only going to employ around 50 people,” Adelaide said. “It would have been a massive cost to the local area and to Ireland in general with very little benefit, which is kind of how the tax haven system works.” The backlash from Dublin-area local planning authorities — combined with stricter, if sometimes contradictory, guidance from the national government — has frustrated data center developers. One fully-built data center from Texas-based Digital Realty is sitting idle at Grange Castle while it awaits permission to connect to the electricity grid. The company sells space within its data centers for clients such as banks, email providers and social media platforms. It says it lacks a grid connection despite contracting for enough renewable energy to power all of its Irish data centers. “When we look at artificial intelligence, when we look at new technologies coming along the line, the basic requirement for all of those is power infrastructure,” said Dermot Lahey, who directs Digital Realty's data center implementation in Ireland, speaking inside a cavernous empty data hall. Ireland has all the elements to make it a “great home for AI expansion,” he said. “What’s preventing us from being able to leverage that is the fact that the power constraints that we have, or the power moratorium that we have, is greatly impacting our ability to provide space for customers,” Lahey said. Once colder weather sets in, the smoky fragrance of fireplaces burning briquettes of peat lingers over County Offaly, just over an hour’s drive west of Dublin in a region known as the Midlands. It’s places like this where some data center developers, thwarted by Dublin’s constraints, now see opportunity. A report commissioned by County Offaly’s government pitches the bog-dotted region as a place to “create thousands of green jobs” and rival “Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris in being an anchor for data centres powered by renewable energy.” Farmer and conservationist Brian Sheridan, 83, is doubtful. He's seen this region transformed once before, from a vast wetland known as the Bog of Allen to barren pockets of brownfields as people cut away trenches of dense peat soil, or turf – first with spades and later with tractors at an industrial scale to create homegrown fuel. “The bog started disappearing and it wasn't being replaced,” said Sheridan, walking along a boardwalk over carpets of moss and sedges in the now-protected Clara Bog Nature Reserve. Decades of rapid extraction fostered Ireland's energy independence and employed scores of workers in turf-cutting, briquette factories and power plants. But it also polluted the air and devastated a delicate environment. Bogs that naturally trapped large amounts of carbon dioxide were stripped down to the bedrock, contributing to global warming. When burned, peat is dirtier than coal. Ireland has largely banned the sale of peat and shuttered the last remaining peat-fired power plants. But the state-supported company at the helm of peat extraction, Bord na Móna, still controls vast tracts of former bogland. It has refashioned itself as a renewable energy provider, laying down wind turbines and solar farms and partnering with Amazon to build a data center near the village of Rhode. Bord na Móna declined multiple interview requests about its plans, and some residents feel left in the dark. “Bord na Móna, as far as I’m concerned, are a law unto themselves,” Sheridan said. “Now that the turf-cutting is all finished, they should be gone. But it’s still the same Bord Na Móna and they won’t answer questions.” Amazon declined to talk about specific projects and has repeatedly signaled it may shift its new data center investments away from Ireland. But an executive said the company is still working closely with the Irish government and characterized Ireland’s challenges as mostly about transmission — building the infrastructure to get new clean energy where it needs to go. “Ireland has tremendous opportunity for additional renewable energy,” said Kevin Miller, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of global data centers. "However, they also need quite a bit more capacity on the grid to tap into that generation.” A tech-driven race is on to harness the region's wind. Backed by a power purchase agreement with Microsoft, the Norwegian wind energy company Statkraft is building nine towering wind turbines in remote former boglands along County Offaly’s eastern edge. Statkraft’s managing director for Ireland, Kevin O’Donovan, said data centers are actually helping to accelerate Ireland’s clean energy transition. “For a lot of the mainland European countries, demand is going down and that’s actually leading to a challenge to roll out renewables,” O’Donovan said. “Whereas in Ireland we have demand that’s increasing because the country is growing economically and obviously a part of that is the data center growth.” On the other side of Offaly, a group of residents who live along the Lemanaghan Bog near the site of a 7th-century monastery are skeptical of such claims. They are opposed to what a proposed Bord Na Móna wind farm will do to its cultural heritage and ecology. KK Kenny took his concerns to Dublin this fall in a meeting with the country’s taoiseach, or prime minister, Simon Harris. Kenny wants to see the bog preserved for biodiversity. He'd be happy to see data center developers follow through with their pledge to look to other European countries. “They say, oh, they’re going to pull out," Kenny said. "That would be a great thing. We can’t sustain them.” Some neighbors of Amazon's proposed data center in Rhode are more open to the idea. One village resident already commutes all the way to Dublin to work at a data center. Another is hoping it will employ people who’d want to buy new homes. “We’re all for change,” said Gerard Whelan. “I’ll get work because I build houses. It’s a domino effect.” At a village pub, the Rhode Inn, Whelan points to a photograph of the old peat-burning power plant where his father worked the control room. Its cooling towers loomed over the village before their demolition two decades ago. Another nearby plant only stopped burning peat a year ago. What happens next for Ireland's data centers could depend in part on the new national government coming into power early next year. Data centers were not a top issue for Irish voters who showed up to the polls on Nov. 29. But analysts expect the two center-right parties forming a new coalition government to face industry pressure to ease limits on data center expansion. Ossian Smyth, an outgoing minister of state for the Irish government whose Green Party lost nearly all its parliamentary seats, said it would be a mistake to slow down Ireland's climate commitments. But he also sees the limits on data center growth set by his outgoing government as having resolved most people's concerns. What other countries can learn from Ireland's experience, he added, is to carefully manage the effect of data centers on the stability of the electricity system — and make sure their benefits are much more than income or foreign investment. “Don’t see them as a necessary evil or something that you just have to put up with because it makes money and it gets taxes,” Smyth said. —— The Associated Press receives financial assistance from the Omidyar Network to support coverage of artificial intelligence and its impact on society. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .The Albanese government dropped six separate documents explaining what is happening on climate change and clean energy on Thursday in an annual event some call "climate Christmas". Here is some of what we learned. Emissions are falling – but not fast enough The latest Australian emissions data tells a slightly complicated story, mainly due to the Covid-19 shutdown years. Have emissions increased under Labor, as the Coalition and Greens claim? Or is that just in comparison with those during lockdowns? Emissions fell slightly last financial year – about 3m tonnes, or a 0.7% drop – and are now estimated to be 28.2% below 2005 levels. This followed a small post-pandemic rise the year before. A progress report by the Climate Change Authority gives the backdrop to this: pollution declined rapidly when Covid hit, largely because we stopped driving and flying as much, and has plateaued over the three years since. Its conclusion is that emissions are falling but not fast enough. Labor has passed its proposed social media ban for under-16s. Here's what we know – and what we don't Read more Climate pollution needs to be reduced on average by 15m tonnes a year between now and 2030 to reach the government's legislated target (a 43% cut below 2005 levels). Projections suggest this is possible under existing policies – if everything goes according to plan. The biggest driver of this should be the capacity investment scheme, a program to underwrite 32GW in new large-scale renewable energy and batteries before the end of the decade. That is roughly equivalent to building half the current capacity of the grid again. But it is worth remembering what scientists say: that Australia should be making a deeper cut by 2030 and setting a much more ambitious target for 2035 in the months ahead, to live up to... Adam Morton , Petra Stock

MONTREAL - A childhood friend of the Quebec man killed in a Florida boat explosion Monday said one of the victim’s sisters was among the other six passengers injured in the blast. Thi Cam Nhung Lê said 41-year-old Sebastien Gauthier was celebrating the holidays with his family when the explosion occurred in Fort Lauderdale. Lê said Gauthier’s older sister was also on the boat when it erupted into flames, and she was taken to a hospital. “It’s unimaginable, incomprehensible,” Lê said Saturday, adding that Gauthier’s family and mutual friends informed her about his death. Lê, 40, said she first met Gauthier in her early adolescence and they grew up together in Quebec City. She remembers him as a globetrotter who always had a smile on his face. “He’s still my best friend. It’s always him I call if I need something, but he’s no longer with us,” she said. The last time the two friends saw each other face-to-face was about two years ago, Lê said, but she last messaged Gauthier on social media in the days before Monday’s explosion. And on Jan. 1, her birthday, she would have expected a call from him, just like every year. “I’m shocked, surprised, and feeling a little bit of regret,” she said. “You regret not having seen him more. I spent yesterday crying. You can’t believe your friend disappears from one day to the next.” Earlier this week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission confirmed that Gauthier died of his injuries in Broward County. The FWC said its preliminary investigation in Fort Lauderdale showed a 37-foot vessel exploded after its engines were started, injuring all seven passengers on board. Video posted on social media Monday showed the vessel engulfed in flames, with a thick column of black smoke billowing into the sky. However, Florida authorities have not provided The Canadian Press with more information about the investigation. Searching for an explanation has also left Lê angry. As she mourns the loss of her longtime friend, she said she’s still waiting for answers about what led to his unexpected death. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 28, 2024.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A fight broke out at midfield after Michigan stunned No. 2 Ohio State 13-10 on Saturday as Wolverines players attempted to plant their flag and were met by Buckeyes who confronted them. Police had to use pepper spray to break up the players, who threw punches and shoves in the melee that overshadowed the rivalry game. Ohio State police said in a statement “multiple officers representing Ohio and Michigan deployed pepper spray.” Ohio State police will investigate the fight, according to the statement. After the Ohio State players confronted their bitter rivals at midfield, defensive end Jack Sawyer grabbed the top of the Wolverines’ flag and ripped it off the pole as the brawl moved toward the Michigan bench. Eventually, police officers rushed into the ugly scene. Ohio State coach Ryan Day said he understood the actions of his players. “There are some prideful guys on our team who weren’t going to sit back and let that happen,” Day said. The two Ohio State players made available after the game brushed off questions about it. Michigan running back Kalel Mullings, who rushed for 116 yards and a touchdown, didn’t like how the Buckeyes players involved themselves in the Wolverines’ postgame celebration. He called it “classless.” “For such a great game, you hate to see stuff like that after the game,” he said in an on-field interview with Fox Sports. “It’s just bad for the sport, bad for college football. But at the end of the day, you know some people got to — they got to learn how to lose, man. ... We had 60 minutes, we had four quarters, to do all that fighting.” Michigan coach Sherrone Moore said everybody needs to do better. “So much emotions on both sides,” he said. “Rivalry games get heated, especially this one. It’s the biggest one in the country, so we got to handle that better.” ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up . AP college football: andAll you have to do to become a South Dakota resident is spend one night. Stay in a campground or hotel and then stop by one of the businesses that specialize in helping people become South Dakotans, and they’ll help you do the paperwork to gain residency in a state with no income tax and relatively cheap vehicle registration. The system brings in extra government revenue through vehicle fees and offers refuge to full-time travelers who wouldn’t otherwise have a permanent address or a place to vote. And that’s the problem. State leaders are at a stalemate between those who say people who don’t really live in South Dakota shouldn’t be allowed to vote in local elections and those who say efforts to impose a longer residency requirement for voting violate the principle that everyone gets to vote. And at least one state has gotten wind that its residents might be avoiding high income taxes with easy South Dakota residency and is investigating. Catering to the nomadic lifestyle Easy South Dakota residency for nomads has become an enterprising opportunity for businesses such as RV parks and mail forwarders. “That’s the primary concept here, is the people that have given up their sticks and bricks and now are on wheel estate, we call it, and they’re full-time traveling,” said Dane Goetz, owner of the Spearfish-based South Dakota Residency Center, which caters to full-time travelers. “They need a place to call home, and we provide that address for them to do that, and they are just perpetually on the move.” Goetz estimated more than 30,000 people are full-time traveler residents of South Dakota, but the actual number is unclear. The state Department of Public Safety , which handles driver licensing, says it doesn't track the number of full-time traveler applications. Officials of the South Dakota Secretary of State's Office did not respond to emailed questions or a phone message seeking the state's tally of full-time travelers registered to vote. The office is not responsible for enforcing residency requirements, Division of Elections Director Rachel Soulek said. Victor Robledo, his wife and their five kids hit the road a decade ago in a 28-foot (8.5-meter) motorhome to seek adventure and ease their high cost of living in Southern California. They found South Dakota to be an opportunity to save money, receive mail and “take a residency in a state that really nurtures us,” he said. They filed for residency in 2020. “It was as simple as coming into the state, staying one night in one of the campgrounds, and once we do that, we bring in a receipt to the office, fill out some paperwork, change our licenses. I mean, really, you can blow through there — gosh, 48 hours,” Robledo said. Residency rules spark election concerns Residency becomes thorny around voting. Some opponents don’t want people who don’t physically live in South Dakota to vote in its elections. “I don’t want to deny somebody their right to vote, but to think that they can vote in a school board election or a legislative election or a county election when they’re not part of the community, I’m troubled by that,” said Democratic Rep. Linda Duba, who cited 10,000 people or roughly 40% of her Sioux Falls constituents being essentially mailbox residents. She likes to knock on doors and meet people but said she is unable to do “relationship politics” with travelers. The law the Republican-controlled Legislature passed in 2023 added requirements for voter registration, including 30 days of residency — which don't have to be consecutive — and having “an actual fixed permanent dwelling, establishment, or any other abode to which the person returns after a period of absence.” The bill's prime sponsor, Republican Sen. Randy Deibert, told a Senate panel that citizens expressed concerns about “people coming to the state, being a resident overnight and voting (by) absentee ballot or another way the next day and then leaving the state.” Those registered to vote before the new law took effect remain registered, but some who tried to register since its passage had trouble. Dozens of people recently denied voter registration contacted the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, according to the chapter’s advocacy manager, Samantha Chapman. Durational residency requirements for voting are, in general, unconstitutional because such restrictions interfere with the interstate right to travel, said David Schultz, a Hamline University professor of political science and a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas. “It’s kind of this parochialism, this idea of saying that only people who are really in our neighborhood, who really live in our city have a sufficient stake in it, and the courts have generally been unsympathetic to those types of arguments because, more often than not, they’re used for discriminatory purposes,” he said. State lawmakers at odds over residency law Earlier this year, the Legislature considered a bill to roll back the 2023 law. It passed the Senate but stalled in the House. During a House hearing on that bill, Republican Rep. Jon Hansen asked one full-time traveler when he was last in South Dakota and when he intends to return. The man said he was in the state a year earlier but planned to return in coming months. Another man who moved from Iowa to work overseas said he had not lived “for any period of time, physically” in South Dakota. “I don’t think we should allow people who have never lived in this state to vote in our state,” Hansen said. Republican Sen. David Wheeler, an attorney in Huron, said he expects litigation would be what forces a change. It's unlikely a change to the 30-day requirement would pass the Legislature now, he said. “It is a complicated topic that involves federal and state law and federal and state voting rights, and it is difficult to bring everybody together on how to appropriately address that,” Wheeler said. Out-of-state residents may see tax benefits More than 1,600 miles (2,500 kilometers) east, Connecticut State Comptroller Sean Scanlon has asked prosecutors to look into whether some state employees who live in Connecticut may have skirted their tax obligations by claiming to be residents of South Dakota. Connecticut has a graduated income tax rate of 3.0% to 6.99%. Connecticut cities and towns also impose a property tax on vehicles. South Dakota has none. Scanlon and his office, which administers state employee retiree benefits, learned from a Hartford Courant columnist in September that some state retirees might be using South Dakota’s mail-forwarding services for nefarious reasons. Asked if there are concerns about other Connecticut taxpayers who are not state retirees possibly misusing South Dakota’s lenient residency laws, the Department of Revenue Services would only say the agency is “aware of the situation and we’re working with our partners to resolve it.” A South Dakota legislative panel broached the residency issue as recently as August, a meeting in which one lawmaker called the topic “the Gordian knot of politics.” “It seems like it’s almost impossible to come to some clear and definitive statement as to what constitutes a residency with such a mobile population with people with multiple homes and addresses and political boundaries that are easy to see on a map but there’s so much cross-transportation across them,” Republican Sen. Jim Bolin said. ___ Dura reported from Bismarck, North Dakota. Associated Press Writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

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