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Coal-fired power plants, long an increasingly money-losing proposition in the US, are becoming more valuable now that the suddenly strong demand for electricity to run Big Tech's cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications has set off a full-on sprint to find new energy sources. President Donald Trump who has pushed for US energy dominance in the global market and suggested that coal can help meet surging power demand is wielding his emergency authority to entice utilities to keep older coal-fired plants online and producing electricity. While some utilities were already delaying the retirement of coal-fired plants, the scores of coal-fired plants that have been shut down the past couple years or will be shut down in the next couple years are the object of growing interest from tech companies, venture capitalists, states and others competing for electricity. That's because they have a very attractive quality: high-voltage lines connecting to the electricity grid tha
Wall Street's sell-off is spiralling Tuesday following President Donald Trump's latest escalation in his trade war, briefly pulling the US stock market 10% below its record set just a few weeks ago. The S&P 500 was down 1.4% in afternoon trading after Trump said he would raise tariffs on steel and aluminum coming from Canada, doubling their planned increase to 50%. The president said it was a response to moves a Canadian province made after Trump began threatening tariffs on one of the United States' most important trading partners. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 678 points, or 1.6%, as of 1:40 pm Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1% lower. The S&P 500 was sitting at the edge of what Wall Street calls a correction," where it falls 10%, and was sitting within 0.1 percentage points of the mark. Such head-spinning moves are becoming routine following a scary ride for investors where the S&P 500 has swung by at least 1%, up or down, seven times in the last .