NEW YORK (AP) — When slugger Joe Carter hit the last World Series pitch thrown in Canada over the left-field wall to win the Toronto Blue Jays’ second consecutive title, it was 8 1/2 months before Shohei Ohtani was born.
The Blue Jays are back in baseball’s championship round for the first time since 1993 and will host Ohtani and the Dodgers in Friday night’s opener as Los Angeles tries to become the first repeat winner in a quarter century.
The previous time the World Series was played north of the border, the Steroids Era was just starting, advanced analytics were science fiction and complete games were thrown about twice a month.
While the Dodgers may be the favorite, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the Blue Jays have an entire country behind them after rallying to win the American League Championship Series with a 4-3 victory over Seattle in Game 7 on Monday night.
Until now, Toronto’s only World Series appearances resulted in back-to-back titles in 1992 and ’93.
“You always feel the weight of the world in decisions you make but when you’re kind of feeling a country, it kind of gets a little dicey at times,” manager John Schneider said early in the postseason. “Sixth inning with the bases loaded and nobody out and Aaron Judge hitting, you feel like people in Nova Scotia want to come murder you.”
George Springer and the AL East champion Blue Jays have home-field advantage in the best-of-seven Series because they finished the regular season with 94 wins, one more than the NL West champion Dodgers.
“They just got all their guys rolling. They’re scoring seven, eight runs, 10 runs a game, so that’s tough to slow down,” Los Angeles shortstop Mookie Betts said. “They’re doing all three facets of the game.”
The Greatest Sho on Earth returns to the World Series
Seeking the franchise’s ninth title and eighth since bolting Brooklyn for Los Angeles after the 1957 season, the Dodgers have overrun opponents during the postseason. Ohtani is starring at the plate and on the mound, a performance that would be deemed CGI if not witnessed by thousands in person.
“Sometimes you’ve got to check yourself and touch him to make sure he’s not just made of steel,” teammate Freddie Freeman said.
Before his three-homer at the plate and 10-strikeouts, six-scoreless innings mound show last Friday night, Ohtani’s bat had been slumping.
He’s hitting .220 with five homers and nine RBIs in the postseason and is 2-0 with a 2.25 ERA in a pair of pitching starts, striking out 19 and walking four in 12 innings.
LA tries for a rare repeat
Los Angeles is back in the World Series for the fifth time since 2017 and is seeking its third championship in six years. The Dodgers are the first defending champion to reach the Fall Classic since the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies, who lost to the New York Yankees in six games.
No team has won consecutive titles since the Yankees took three in a row from 1998-2000. The gap is the longest in baseball history, topping the previous high between the 1977-78 Yankees and the 1992-93 Blue Jays.
In other U.S. major leagues, the longest Super Bowl title gap was between the 2004-05 New England Patriots and the 2023-24 Kansas City Chiefs, the longest in the NBA was between the 1968-69 Boston Celtics and the 1987-88 Los Angeles Lakers, and the lengthiest in the NHL was between the 1997-98 Detroit Red Wings and the 2016-17 Pittsburgh Penguins.
“Realizing how hard it is to do last year, realizing how hard it was in ’20, it’s special,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “Trying to get back-to-back is even more special.”
Historical ties between the Dodgers and Canada
Toronto pitcher Max Scherzer was on the 2021 Dodgers team that fell short, losing to Atlanta in the National League Championship Series. Hall of Famers Rickey Henderson and Fred McGriff also played for both franchises, along with two-time All-Star Justin Turner.
Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman has dual American-Canadian citizenship — his parents were born in Canada.
Blue Jays bench coach Don Mattingly, in the World Series for the first time after a long and successful career in baseball, managed the Dodgers from 2011-15.
The Triple-A Montreal Royals were the Dodgers’ top farm team from 1939-60 — Jackie Robinson started his Dodgers career there in 1946, a year before he broke the major league color barrier.
The Dodgers roster has been money well spent
Los Angeles entered the postseason with a big league-high $341.5 million payroll, according to Major League Baseball’s latest tabulation, and is projected to pay nearly $168 million in luxury tax, easily a record. Counting the $6.5 million signing bonus in rookie Roki Sasaki’s minor league contract, the Dodgers’ player cost this year totals $516 million — with final numbers to be calculated during the offseason.
Including Sasaki’s signing bonus, the 13 pitchers on the Dodgers’ NLCS roster alone cost $124.5 million.
Toronto has the fifth-highest payroll at $252.7 million and is on track to spend $266 million including just over $13 million in luxury tax. No small-market team has won the title since the 2015 Kansas City Royals.
“Before this season started, they said the Dodgers are ruining baseball,” manager Dave Roberts shouted to the crowd after Friday night’s National League pennant clincher. “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”
Los Angeles pitchers are 9-1 with a 2.45 ERA in 10 postseason games, including 7-1 with 1.40 ERA for starting pitchers totaling 64 1/3 of 82 innings. Led by Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Dodgers starters were 3-0 with a 0.63 ERA in the NLCS and their staff held the Milwaukee Brewers to a .118 batting average during the four-game sweep, lowest in a postseason series of at least three games.
Healthy and rested for a deep October run
LA’s four postseason starters totaled 73 starts and 372 1/3 innings during the regular season. Their closer threw 36 1/3 innings.
That’s because Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Sasaki all hurt their pitching shoulders and Ohtani didn’t return to the mound until June 16 after recovering from elbow surgery in 2023.
If the Blue Jays win
Toronto, which started play in 1977, could become the 15th of the 30 teams to win three or more titles. That would be more than Cleveland and Philadelphia, franchises that have existed for longer than a century.

AP Sports Writer Beth Harris in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Internet disruptions tied to Amazon’s cloud computing service affected people around the world Monday trying to connect to online services used for work, social media and video games.
About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. But the company later said it was continuing to respond to “significant” errors and connectivity issues across multiple services.
What is Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world’s most-used online services and provides behind-the-scenes infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.
Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, constituting over 41% of the market, according to research group Gartner. Google and Microsoft are the next biggest competitors.
Seattle-based Amazon said the problems were centered in its Virginia-based US-East-1 data center region, one of its oldest and most important cloud hubs around the world. The region is a backbone “for so many services that when things go screwy, domino effects around the internet-as-we-know-it are enormous,” wrote John Scott-Railton, a cybersecurity researcher at Citizen Lab, in a social media post.
What happened?
AWS traced the source of the problem to something called the “DynamoDB endpoint in the US-East-1 Region,” in a pair of jargon-laden updates.
“DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know, but it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day,” said cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple.
DynamoDB is a centralized database service that many internet-based services use to track user information, store key data and manage their operations, Chapple said by email.
It’s “one of the record-keepers of the modern internet,” said Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s reliable. But today it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the internet.”
Amazon’s updates suggest the problem isn’t with the database itself, but rather that something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data, he said.
“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia,” Chapple said.
Amazon has attributed the outage to a domain name system issue. DNS is the service that translates internet addresses into machine-readable IP addresses that connects browsers and apps with websites and underlying web services. DNS errors disrupt the translation process, interrupting the connection.
Because so many sites and services use AWS, a DNS error can have widespread results.
Who was affected?
Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption because Amazon’s problem took down dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.
On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.
Starbucks experienced “a very limited impact for a very short amount of time” to its app, but all stores were serving customers normally, Starbucks Global Communications Director Jaci Anderson said in an email to The Associated Press.
“Our mobile order ahead and pay app is working normally to serve our customers this morning,” Anderson said midmorning.
DoorDash said its systems were not directly affected but some of its partners “experienced brief disruptions” affecting deliveries.
Lyft said an outage was “intermittently impacting” the ride-hailing service, while language-learning app Duolingo thanked users for their patience.
The risks of centralized cloud services
Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
“The world now runs on the cloud,” and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.
And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.
“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve)” and there’s no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident like a cyberattack, Burgess said.
Has this happened in the past?
This is not the first time a problem with Amazon’s key services has caused widespread disruptions.
Many popular internet services and publishers were down after a brief outage in 2023. AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies — everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services — were affected for more than five hours. Other major outages happened in 2020 and 2017.
Unrelated to Amazon, a faulty software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike affecting devices running Microsoft’s Windows also rippled across the world to cause massive disruptions in 2024.

The Great Jack-O’-Lantern Sail at Belmont Lake State Park
The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation is pleased to announce the 12th
Annual Great Jack-o’-Lantern Sail will take place Saturday, October 25, 2025, at Belmont Lake State Park.
Festivities begin at 3:00PM and will conclude at 6:30PM; the Jack-o’-Lanterns will set sail at approximately
6:15PM.
Everyone is welcome to join in this spooky celebration! In addition to the Jack-o’-Lantern Sail on the lake at
dusk, there will be a kid friendly spooky house, balloon twisting, a magic show, a petting zoo, character meet &
greets, children’s games and more! Halloween costumes are optional but encouraged. Don’t forget a trick-ortreat bag! All activities are free! Food and refreshments will be available for purchase.
If you would like to have your Jack-o’-Lantern in the sail, register at www.bookwhen.com/jackolantern.com
Registration is limited to the first 50 carved pumpkins. Pumpkins must be between the size of a soccer ball and
a basketball and dropped off at Belmont Lake State Park Boat Dock the day of the event between 10:00am
and 4:00pm. For additional information, please call Recreation Department at (631) 321-3510.
This event is sponsored by the Natural Heritage Trust, Connoisseur Media Long Island (WALK 97.5, KJOY
98.3, 103.1 The Wolf, WHLI 104.7 & 94.3 The Shark), Hick’s Nurseries, New York Life, Renewal by Andersen,
and Beachside Valet. Corporate contributors include North Atlantic Canoe and Kayak, Inc.
For more information, please call Belmont Lake State Park at (631) 667-5055 or the Long Island State Park
Region Recreation Department at (631) 321-3510 weekdays from 9:00am to 5:00pm or visit our website at
parks.ny.gov.
Belmont Lake State Park is located off the Southern State Parkway (Exit 38) in North Babylon, NY.

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday he had commuted the sentence of former U.S. Rep. George Santos, who was slated to serve more than seven years in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud and identity theft charges.
Joseph Murray, one of Santos’ lawyers, told The Associated Press late Friday that the former lawmaker was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, New Jersey, around 11 p.m., and was greeted outside the facility by his family.
The New York Republican was sentenced in April after admitting last year to deceiving donors and stealing the identities of 11 people — including his own family members — to make donations to his campaign.
He reported to FCI Fairton on July 25 and was housed in a minimum security prison camp with fewer than 50 other inmates.
“George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” Trump posted on his social media platform. He said he had “just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY.”
“Good luck George, have a great life!” Trump said.
Santos’ account on X, which has been active throughout his roughly 84 days in prison, reposted a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post Friday.
During his time behind bars, Santos has been writing regular dispatches in a local newspaper on Long Island, in which he mainly complained about the prison conditions.
In his latest letter, though, he pleaded to Trump directly, citing his fealty to the president’s agenda and to the Republican Party.
“Sir, I appeal to your sense of justice and humanity — the same qualities that have inspired millions of Americans to believe in you,” he wrote in The South Shore Press on Oct. 13. “I humbly ask that you consider the unusual pain and hardship of this environment and allow me the opportunity to return to my family, my friends, and my community.”
Santos’ commutation is Trump’s latest high-profile act of clemency for former Republican politicians since retaking the White House in January.
In late May, he pardoned former U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm, a New York Republican who in 2014 pleaded guilty to underreporting wages and revenue at a restaurant he ran in Manhattan. He also pardoned former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, whose promising political career was upended by a corruption scandal and two federal prison stints.
But in granting clemency to Santos, Trump was rewarding a figure who has drawn scorn from within his own party.
After becoming the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress in 2022, Santos served less than a year after it was revealed that he had fabricated much of his life story.
On the campaign trail, Santos had claimed he was a successful business consultant with Wall Street cred and a sizable real estate portfolio. But when his resume came under scrutiny, Santos eventually admitted he had never graduated from Baruch College — or been a standout player on the Manhattan college’s volleyball team, as he had claimed. He had never worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
He wasn’t even Jewish. Santos insisted he meant he was “Jew-ish” because his mother’s family had a Jewish background, even though he was raised Catholic.
In truth, the then-34-year-old was struggling financially and even faced eviction.
Santos was charged in 2023 with stealing from donors and his campaign, fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits and lying to Congress about his wealth.
Within months, he was expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives — with 105 Republicans joining with Democrats to make Santos just the sixth member in the chamber’s history to be ousted by colleagues..
Santos pleaded guilty as he was set to stand trial.
Still, a prominent former House colleague, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, urged the White House to commute Santos’ sentence, saying in a letter sent just days into his prison bid that the punishment was “a grave injustice” and a product of judicial overreach.
Greene was among those who cheered the announcement Friday. But U.S. Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican who represents part of Long Island and has been highly critical of Santos, said in a post on social media that Santos “didn’t merely lie” and his crimes “warrant more than a three-month sentence.”
“He should devote the rest of his life to demonstrating remorse and making restitution to those he wronged,” LaLota said.
Santos’ clemency appears to clear not just his prison term, but also any “further fines, restitution, probation, supervised release, or other conditions,” according to a copy of Trump’s order posted on X by Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney.
As part of his guilty plea, Santos had agreed to pay restitution of $373,750 and forfeiture of $205,003.
In explaining his reason for granting Santos clemency, Trump said the lies Santos told about himself were no worse than misleading statements U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal — a Democrat and frequent critic of the administration — had made about his military record.
Blumenthal apologized 15 years ago for implying that he served in Vietnam, when he was stateside in the Marine Reserve during the war.
“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump wrote.
The president himself was convicted in a New York court last year in a case involving hush money payments. He derided the case as part of a politically motivated witch hunt.
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Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak in New York and Susan Haigh in Connecticut contributed to this report.

GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — Former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton was charged Thursday with storing top secret records at home and sharing with relatives diary-like notes about his time in government that contained classified information.
The 18-count indictment also suggests classified information was exposed when operatives believed linked to the Iranian regime hacked Bolton’s email account in 2021 and gained access to sensitive material he had shared. A Bolton representative told the FBI that his emails had been hacked, prosecutors say, but did not reveal that he had shared classified information through the account or that the hackers now had possession of government secrets.
The investigation into Bolton, who served for more than a year in President Donald Trump’s administration before being fired in 2019, burst into public view in August when the FBI searched his home in Maryland and his office in Washington for classified records he may have held onto from his years in government.
The indictment sets the stage for a closely watched court case centering on a longtime fixture in Republican foreign policy circles who became known for his hawkish views on American power and later emerged as a prominent and vocal critic of Trump. Though the investigation that produced the indictment was well underway during the Biden administration, the case will play out against the backdrop of broader concerns that Trump is weaponizing his Justice Department to go after perceived enemies of the president while sparing his allies from scrutiny.
“The underlying facts in this case were investigated and resolved years ago. These charges stem from portions of Amb. Bolton’s personal diaries over his 45-year career — records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021,” Bolton lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement. “Like many public officials throughout history, Amb. Bolton kept diaries — that is not a crime. We look forward to proving once again that Amb. Bolton did not unlawfully share or store any information.”
The case follows separate indictments over the last month accusing former FBI Director James Comey of lying to Congress and New York Attorney General Letitia James of committing bank fraud and making a false statement, charges they both deny. Both those cases were filed in federal court in Virginia by a prosecutor Trump hastily installed in the position after growing frustrated that investigations into high-profile enemies had not resulted in prosecution.
The Bolton case, by contrast, was filed in Maryland by a U.S. attorney who before being elevated to the job had been a career prosecutor in the office.
The indictmen is significantly more detailed than the Comey or James cases. It alleges, for instance, that Bolton shared more than 1,000 pages of information about day-to-day activities with two unnamed family members and stored and shared sensitive information about foreign adversaries that in some cases revealed details about sources and methods used by the government to collect intelligence.
One document related to a foreign adversary’s plans for a missile launch, while another detailed U.S. government plans for covert action and included intelligence blaming an adversary for an attack, court papers say.
“There is one tier of justice for all Americans,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable. No one is above the law.”
Questions about Bolton’s handling of classified information date back years. He faced a lawsuit and a Justice Department investigation after leaving office related to information in his 2020 book “The Room Where it Happened,” which portrayed Trump as grossly uninformed about foreign policy.
The Trump administration asserted that Bolton’s manuscript included classified information that could harm national security if exposed. Bolton’s lawyers have said he moved forward with the book after a White House National Security Council official, with whom Bolton had worked for months, said the manuscript no longer contained classified information.
A search warrant affidavit that was previously unsealed said a National Security Council official had reviewed the book manuscript and told Bolton in 2020 that it appeared to contain “significant amounts” of classified information, some at a top-secret level.
Lowell has said that many of the documents seized in August had been approved as part of a pre-publication review for Bolton’s book. He said many were decades old, from Bolton’s long career in the State Department, as an assistant attorney general and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Bolton also served in the Justice Department during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and was the State Department’s point man on arms control during George W. Bush’s presidency. Bolton was nominated by Bush to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but the strong supporter of the Iraq war was unable to win Senate confirmation and resigned after serving 17 months as a Bush recess appointment. That allowed him to hold the job on a temporary basis without Senate confirmation.
In 2018, Bolton was appointed to serve as Trump’s third national security adviser. But his brief tenure was characterized by disputes with the president over North Korea, Iran and Ukraine.
Those rifts ultimately led to Bolton’s departure, with Trump announcing on social media in September 2019 that he had accepted Bolton’s resignation. Bolton subsequently criticized Trump’s approach to foreign policy and government in his 2020 book, including by alleging that Trump directly tied providing military aid to Ukraine to that country’s willingness to conduct investigations into Joe Biden, who was soon to be Trump’s Democratic 2020 election rival, and members of his family.
Trump responded by slamming Bolton as a “washed-up guy” and a “crazy” warmonger who would have led the country into “World War Six.” Trump also said at the time that the book contained “highly classified information” and that Bolton “did not have approval” for publishing it.