WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Thursday he is renaming Lake Ontario to be known as “Lake America” in the United States as he escalates his trade war with Canada.

The Republican president signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. Trump cannot force Canada to follow along, however.

Trump has been floating the idea of the name change in recent days as the U.S. announced it was imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods over the weekend after talks between the countries broke down. Trump has been needling America’s northern neighbor since he returned to the White House last year, suggesting the ally with whom the U.S. once had warm relations should instead be absorbed as the 51st state.

Canada responded to Trump’s import taxes this week by imposing retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion worth of American goods, including steel, dairy products, appliances and farm equipment.

Trump, who signed the order as he was sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, had a large sign behind him propped on a stand with a map of the Great Lakes. Over Lake Ontario, in big red letters, the map read “Lake America.”

On the other side of the president was another map with the words, “MAKING THE GREAT LAKES EVEN GREATER.”

Trump said as he was signing the order that he’d “notified all of the various people that we have to notify. So, we’ve done everything that you have to do.”

“And this is official, effective immediately,” he added.

But the executive order Trump signed shows that the changes are supposed to be made within 30 days.

Canadian officials dismissed Trump’s move.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the move, invoking the lake’s Indigenous roots and noting that the name predates both Canadian Confederation and the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

“Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always,” he wrote.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has traded insults with Trump, said on X: “It’s Lake Ontario to Canadians and the rest of the world. Now and forever.”

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said, “We’re into some real foolishness now. It’s Lake Ontario, buddy.”

The lake is one of multiple Great Lakes that the U.S. and Canada share borders along. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat whose state shares a border on the lake, wrote on X in response to the White House’s announcement that, “New York won’t be calling it that.”

There is no single international body that determines names of international bodies of water and Trump has wide latitude over how the U.S. government recognizes geographic places and landmarks.

The name Lake Ontario comes from the Huron Indigenous people’s word “oniatarí:io,” which means “lake of shining waters.” The province of Ontario, founded in 1867, took its name from the lake.

Trump said that while his action was not meant to send any particular geopolitical message, “Canada’s been ripping us off for a long time” on trade and military issues.

“They wanted to be treated like a state and they’re not a state,” the president said. “We just can’t do that anymore.”

“We love the people of Canada,” Trump added. “I don’t think their representatives do, an appropriate job. Maybe they’ll change. I really don’t know. It doesn’t make much difference.”

The move is reminiscent of his move last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Trump scribbled his name with a Sharpie pen on the executive order, then held it up for the cameras, offering, “And we filed all the necessary papers, documents, everything else.”

He also suggested his push to rename bodies of water may not be finished.

“So, if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean,” Trump said. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them.”

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Meta agreed Wednesday to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of a landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by nearly every state.

The settlement resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to hook young people’s attention.

The agreement “institutes real change, real transparency, real protections for children and teens across the country,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

If approved by the court, the deal will stop an avalanche of litigation by states against Meta, although the company still faces lawsuits from individuals and school districts throughout the U.S. For the states, the settlement delivers money for mental-health programs for kids, including after-school or summer activities and digital literacy counselors.

Advocates cheered the new protections, including default time limits and the disabling of features such as “like” counts.

But “we cannot truly protect all children and teens until these protections are required on every platform and are permanent — that’s something only Congress can do,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project.

The settlement will be paid out over 10 years. California will get the largest sum of at least $1.5 billion, but several other states will still collect hundreds of millions of dollars each over the decade.

The settlement “will put an end to these dangerous practices and deliver meaningful relief that will protect children from online harm,” Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said.

Meta urges rivals to adopt similar safety measures

Meta said in a blog post that it was “building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.”

“Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the company said. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.”

The company urged competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar safety measures.

The $18 billion settlement is a fraction of Meta’s 2025 revenue of $201 billion. Meta shares closed up about 1% Wednesday, although they rose as much as 4% during the day.

The agreement cuts short an ongoing court case involving California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which were among 29 states that sued Meta in 2023. The federal trial kicked off last week in Oakland, California, where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been among the witnesses expected to take the stand.

The lawsuit accused Meta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding them from the public. The case also argued that Meta violated federal laws by routinely collecting data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent.

The cases in other states had been expected to go to trial later, but are now resolved. The settlement covers 48 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and some U.S. territories. The only two states to be excluded are New Mexico, which went to trial in its case against Meta and won earlier this year, and Florida, where the attorney general said the settlement was not tough enough on Meta.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote on X that the “payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids.”

New features to include time limits and curbs on push notifications

Under the proposed settlement, Meta agreed to adopt a series of safety features, including two-hour daily time limits that can only be disabled with a parent’s permission and pauses for children using Instagram and Facebook.

The company will eliminate push notifications during weekday school hours and bring in “robust” age-assurance measures and “age-appropriate” content controls to prevent bullying and harmful material about eating disorders and self-harm.

There will be stronger and more user-friendly parental controls and limits on social comparison features such as “like” counts.

An independent auditor will assess how Meta is implementing the safety features and how effective they are.

The company said 30% of the settlement amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

Neither YouTube owner Google nor TikTok responded to requests for comments.

Meta officials declined to comment on whether they had conversations with their competitors about those conditions, but said they intentionally designed the agreement with the states to incentivize the rest of the industry to follow suit.

Some of the safety measures Meta will implement, like disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters, made sense regardless of whether competing platforms do the same, Meta said. Other features, like the overnight block, will function better if they are established across the board, the company said.

If industry peers sign on to the agreement, Meta will implement stronger defaults for teens’ daily time limit and the length of time for “night mode.”

Investigation was led by bipartisan coalition

The federal lawsuit was the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont. It followed newspaper reports, first by The Wall Street Journal in 2021, that found the company knew about the harm Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.

Meta has since added a host of safety features to Instagram, including separate accounts for teenagers with stronger protections around messaging and privacy, along with content restrictions.

But child-safety advocates and experts, along with some former Meta employees, have long contended that the features are little more than window dressing.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director who testified last week in the Oakland trial, called the settlement a “significant milestone” but warned that it should not be interpreted as an “all clear” sign that Instagram is now safe for children.

“The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said in an interview. He urged the court to address that “because it’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.”

Parents and advocates celebrated the settlement as a moment of accountability for Meta. Victoria Hinks, mother of Alexandra “Owl” Hinks, who died by suicide at age 16, said she was satisfied with the terms “as long as they enforce it properly.”

“It felt like today finally something was done,” she said outside the Oakland courthouse. “I feel like justice is possible.”

MURDOCK, Neb. (AP) — In rural eastern Nebraska, a technology revolution could rise from fields of corn and soybean in the form of new data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom.

But just like around many parts of the country, opposition has been building in ways that defy typical partisan boundaries. Conservative farmers and the state Sierra Club chapter recently found common cause against labor leaders as they filled the firehouse in Murdock — population around 275 — to share concerns about data center development moving too quickly.

The scene exemplified an unlikely coalition that worries about dwindling farmland, declining water supplies and rising electricity bills — not to mention how massive corporations could reshape small town America into nodes in a national network of computing warehouses.

The debate around data center projects is one of the rare modern issues to cut across party lines, demographics and geography — from Republican-dominated Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming to swing-state Pennsylvania to Democratic-leaning New Mexico.

Supporters of data centers, including Republican President Donald Trump and some union leaders who usually back Democrats, praise a potential jobs and economic bonanza, while helping the U.S. thwart China in the geopolitical race for technological supremacy.

But hostility toward developments coming at breakneck speed has surged ahead of November’s midterm elections, and forced national, state and local elected officials to adapt to a shifting political landscape.

Judy Stroy, a fifth-generation Nebraska farmer whose late husband grew corn and soybeans and whose son still does, worried that with “the amount of ground that’s getting gobbled up every year, our food source is in trouble.”

“That should scare everyone,” she said.

Some areas have paused data center expansion

Stroy’s fields are just outside Murdock, a village named for a railroad official at the company that first laid tracks here in the 1890s. There’s a school, a post office, a bar and a Corn Grower’s State Bank branch, plus the Midwest Farmer’s Coop where growers sell their produce and buy supplies like feed and fertilizer.

Murdock is in Cass County, where officials recently approved a 12-month moratorium on allowing data center development.

That might freeze energy company Tenaska’s plans to potentially option 1,300-plus acres of land along Highway 75, south of the nearby villages of Murray and Beaver Lake, in a project that activists fear would pave the way for a data center and its own natural gas power plant.

Tenaska spokesperson Leighton Elise Eusebio said the company has been exploring “the feasibility of developing power generation to serve large loads, whether that is a data center or other form of economic development.”

“We believe there are opportunities to work with public power, communities and other stakeholders to develop power generation that will benefit Nebraskans,” Eusebio said in a statement.

Meanwhile, data center operator CyrusOne has nearly 400 acres under its control outside another Cass County community, Plattsmouth, also along Highway 75, but no development has occurred nor has a project been announced, according to a CyrusOne spokesperson.

The area may be seen as particularly favorable because the highway has been widened, offering easy access to Omaha to the northeast, and to the college town of Lincoln to the southwest. The Missouri River provides a reasonably close, major water source.

Some landowners accepted large checks to sell. Local land typically can go for $10,000 an acre, residents say, and developers sometimes offer four times that, or even more.

Such paydays can be extra enticing as farming has gotten more expensive amid rising diesel prices and soybean exports that have declined in the midst of Trump’s tariff fight with a major market for the crop, China.

“What if somebody offered me $40,000 an acre for my ground? It would be hard to turn down,” Stroy conceded.

Nebraska Sierra Club attorney Ken Winston noted that tech giants have made donations to municipal programs in Lincoln to help mitigate the impact of data centers.

“We need to be aware of the fact that they’re going to happen somewhere,” Winston said. “But communities need to be able to protect themselves and if they don’t want them, they should be able to say no.”

Major project sparks New Mexico divisions

There is no development moratorium in New Mexico that could stop Project Jupiter, a $165 billion data center complex planned near the Mexican border, but concerns over dwindling water supplies are mounting.

“It is not about blue vs. red, or whether we’re a purple state or county,” said Samantha Barncastle Salopek, a longtime water attorney, who is running as a Republican for a seat on the Doña Ana County Commission partly because of the project.

“This is about the local community coming together and saying, ‘Hold on, hold on.’ We didn’t get enough information, and now we’re very concerned because also we have to cut back our water use anyway,” she said.

Barncastle Salopek, whose family grows pecans, said she frequently fields worried calls from farmers, ranchers and local business owners across the political spectrum and in other states.

“When we have to fight over the last piece of the pie, those big companies are going to win,” she said of pressure on remaining water supplies. That’s because New Mexico has been hammered by persistent drought, and large swaths of the Rio Grande have dried up in the central part of the state.

The largest reservoir stands at 1.3% capacity, lows unseen since the early 1970s, even though New Mexico is on the hook to deliver more water to Texas under a recent settlement approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. Activists worry that New Mexico’s pecan, chile and other farms could disappear, taking schools, hospitals and supporting businesses and incomes with them.

Oracle, which announced Project Jupiter, has offered funding for youth programs and pledged to invest $50 million in water and wastewater systems in Doña Ana County.

It also plans to partner with an agriculture technology company to install sensors providing real-time data to farmers to help them use water more efficiently — estimating an eventual savings of 21 million gallons annually.

An Oracle spokesperson called the project a generational New Mexico investment, saying it would generate $4.7 billion in taxes and create more than 7,000 construction jobs and 1,500 long-term jobs while being designed to use little water over 15 years, given its closed-loop cooling and fuel-cell systems.

Still, the Center for Biological Diversity last week filed an emergency petition with the New Mexico Supreme Court, challenging the state’s approval of well drilling to supply millions of gallons of water for Project Jupiter’s construction.

The court on Sunday granted that request, halting authorization to use water from a new well until the legal fight is concluded.

During a recent protest in the state capital of Santa Fe, the demonstrators included Jesus Rodriguez, who traveled four-plus hours from his micro-farm in southern New Mexico.

“The fact is that now the money has taken over,” said Rodriguez, who described himself as disillusioned with American politics. “Now it shows that the Democrats, Republicans, or whatever other party is involved, they don’t care about the land. They care about money. And that’s because they want power.”

Some labor leaders see new job opportunities

Data centers have found an ally in organized labor, including Mike Gage, president and secretary-treasurer of the Nebraska State AFL-CIO. Gage said he personally was worried that some workers are seeing their jobs replaced by AI, but that the centers can also create construction jobs and longer-term positions for people running the finished product.

“This problem is also a very big opportunity for some small communities,” Gage said. He noted that a data center built decades ago in Council Bluffs, Iowa, near Omaha, still employs about 60 people today.

Heather McKenzie, who works in labor relations in Lincoln, said putting more data centers in Nebraska can slow an exodus of skilled young people leaving the state.

“I don’t think that enough people understand that this is going to create really good jobs,” she said. “I think a lot of people view it in a negative sense because it’s being sprung on them.”

Chris Backemeyer, a Democratic congressional candidate in the district that includes Murdock, is a former State Department employee. He said he heard about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates offering to host data centers for the U.S., which might concentrate technology outside the country.

“That scares the bejesus out of me,” Backemeyer said.

Trump champions data centers, but some Republicans are wary

The president has warned about China’s technology gains and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that a federal pause on data center construction might be a “dangerous prospect.”

Still, most registered voters oppose building a data center in their area, according to a July Fox News poll, including 60% of Republicans and 53% of MAGA voters.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year ban on large data centers. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a fellow Democrat, said his administration would no longer prioritize data center projects when it comes to issuing construction permits or granting developers lucrative tax exemptions if they don’t meet certain standards.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a halt on approval of new data centers until audits determine their impact on the state’s electrical grid.

Abbott told ABC News that data centers hadn’t been working in collaboration with state or local officials and “basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

The Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm is worried enough about the issue potentially deciding races in Ohio, that it drafted a memo outlining how to respond. But politicians on both sides of the aisle have turned data centers into a punching bag.

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican running for an open House seat, has pledged to halt their construction.

“If Silicon Valley wants to build their liberal empire, they can do it somewhere else,” he said in an ad.

That overlaps with an ad for the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Democrat Paige Cognetti, who said “we are not for sale” when it comes to data centers. Cognetti is trying to unseat first-term Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan in a battleground district.

Trump is undeterred, saying that what data centers mean “for a community is jobs and lots of money and lower taxes.” The president has also conceded, however, that tech companies and developers maybe “can use a little public relations help.”

Seeking to soften fears about rising utility prices, Trump says his administration has urged data centers to build their own power plants.

Yet, during a recent meeting in the conservative East Texas town of Tyler, residents complained of being forced to live in a “gas cloud” so data centers can get enough electricity.

The complaint echoed a similar objection from Kardal Coleman, who leads the Democratic Party in big-city Dallas County. He wrote a recent email decrying data centers for “replacing our jobs, polluting our air, and exacerbating the climate crisis, not to mention the noise disturbing our neighborhoods.”