Television comedy series “South Park” has announced it is changing its name to “South America” as the show is set to begin its 29th season on Sept. 16.

The show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said, “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

Parker and Stone’s statement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America amid a trade spat with Canada. Canadian officials said they will not recognize the new name.

Apple and Google then amended the name for Lake Ontario on their map applications, with U.S. users seeing “Lake America,” while Canadian users saw “Lake Ontario.”

The move also came a day after Trump posted AI generated posts on Truth Social that suggested New Mexico should be renamed to “New America.”

Last year, the president used an executive order to change the name for the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, drawing international opposition.

“South Park” won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the “Sermon on the Mount” episode which premiered last year and parodies Trump’s presidency.

The “Skydance Capitulation” line comes after the $8 billion merger between parent company Paramount and Skydance, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year after Paramount settled a lawsuit brought by Trump for $16 million.

Trump had alleged an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2024 with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was deceptively edited.

Paramount subsidiary CBS News in July 2025 said it was canceling comedian Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” citing financial reasons, just days after Colbert accused Paramount of paying Trump a “big fat bribe.” The final episode of the show aired in May.

Paramount and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he does not regret initiating the Iran war, adding, “If I had it to do again, I would do exactly what I did.”

During a Thursday interview in the United States with Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham, Trump said he would have attacked Iran even knowing it could affect the midterm elections.

Ingraham told Trump, “If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now.” Trump replied, “supposing we were cruising, and all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon. They would use it.”

He also warned that if Iran possessed a nuclear weapon, the Islamic Republic would “wipe out” Israel and the Middle East and begin striking U.S. cities.

The comments came as markets prepared for a longer Iran war, following a Wall Street Journal report that senior White House advisers had discussed with Trump the possibility that the conflict could continue beyond his current term.

Trump has said the war will end immediately after the midterm elections and that oil and gas prices will also decline, reinforcing months of claims that the conflict will soon conclude.

In a separate Thursday interview with NewsNation, Trump denied reports of any damage to U.S. assets after Iran said it had hit multiple U.S. fighter aircraft at a base in Jordan.

When asked whether the reports were true, Trump said, “No damage. No nothing.”

Mounting economic pressure

Washington is continuing its efforts to isolate Iran from its economic network, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaling sanctions against “a large bank” next week.

“We’re going to do it on Monday because we want to honor the memory of our fallen citizens on 9/11. But watch this space on Monday.”

Bessent said the administration had sanctioned Egypt’s second-largest bank and closed its Dubai branches, alleging that the bank had given Iran $1.8 billion. He said the “largest Turkish bank” that had been providing support to the Iranians had also been sanctioned, although he did not identify the banks.

During the NewsNation interview, Trump was also asked how Iran could continue to hold out under the current economic pressure.

“I don’t know that they’re gonna be able to hold out,” Trump said. “But it’ll get settled after the elections. Or maybe sooner. But it’ll get settled right after the election.”

An artificial intelligence researcher quit his job at Anthropic on Tuesday and accused the company, and its chief rival, OpenAI, of acting irresponsibly, igniting a frenzy of concern on social media about the rapid pace of the technology’s development.

Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both companies, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

Coxon’s post, which has been viewed more than 70 million times, reflects a long-standing debate in Silicon Valley about whether AI can be safely developed and controlled. As Anthropic and OpenAI barrel toward potentially historic initial public offerings while releasing increasingly advanced models, many researchers are calling for a coordinated slowdown.

OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post on Sunday and warned that no AI company has “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” In the AI industry, alignment refers to the work by AI developers to ensure that the system behaves in accordance with human values and intentions.

“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established,” Pachocki wrote. “And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.”

Coxon’s post on Tuesday also struck a chord with industry researchers who are worried about recursive self-improvement, or an AI system becoming capable of designing and developing its successor without human intervention. Recursive self-improvement is not yet possible, but companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have warned that it would make it easier for humans to lose control over those systems.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.”

Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, echoed Coxon’s comments in a post on X late Tuesday.

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

While extreme, concerns about the potential for AI to cause human extinction or other catastrophic events are not new in AI research circles. In 2023, for instance, prominent AI researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a statement that said “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Some experts even use a shorthand, p(doom), to estimate the probability of dire outcomes that could stem from AI.

Anthropic’s Hubinger was also one of roughly 1,400 AI researchers who signed an open letter called “Pacing the Frontier” in July. The letter urged the U.S. government to develop the tools necessary to support an effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

Some members of Congress have taken steps to try and address AI’s rapid advancement in the months following, but there’s no clear consensus about how the technology should be regulated.

In July, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., introduced a bill called the FRONTIER Act, which aims to establish a framework for governing the deployment of advanced AI models. And earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced a bill called the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily pause advanced AI development until the federal government establishes safety rules. Both bills have been met with mixed receptions.

“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Trahan wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”

Lawmakers are also trying to navigate growing public backlash against AI data centers, the large facilities that house the hardware for training and running AI models. The pushback has grown so intense that the The National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, said last month that data centers have become a “sleeper issue” for the entire midterm election cycle, as CNBC previously reported.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that AI companies have done a “horrendous job of explaining themselves to the American people.”

“They’re going to have to take some of the blame, and they are going to have to convince the American people that all the benefits will not accrue to a small group,” Bessent said, following the G20 meetings with finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, North Carolina. “That’s what they hear from me.”