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Judge rejects Sean 'Diddy' Combs' bid to toss prostitution convictions

admin - Latest News - October 1, 2025
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The judge in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ criminal case rejected the hip-hop mogul’s request to toss out his prostitution-related convictions Tuesday, setting the stage for his sentencing



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Sept. 30, 2025, 10:07 AM EDT / Updated Sept. 30, 2025, 8:50 PM EDTBy Scott Wong, Frank Thorp V and Kyle StewartWASHINGTON — The federal government is barreling toward a shutdown Tuesday night, with President Donald Trump and Democratic leaders engaged in a fierce blame game and trading insults about each other.Hours before the midnight deadline, the Senate on Tuesday gaveled out for the evening with plans to return on Wednesday. A shutdown is all but assured to begin after midnight.It’s unclear where the parties go from here. The Senate Tuesday evening voted down competing Republican and Democratic plans to stave off a shutdown.House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he hoped the defeat of the GOP bill — for a second time this month — “will open lines of communications” with Republicans. That has not yet happened.“Leader Schumer and I have made clear we are ready, willing and able to sit down and with anyone, anytime, any place to fund the government and to address the Republican health care crisis,” Jeffries said shortly before the Senate votes.Senate fails to pass funding bill, shutdown imminent00:36Bipartisan talks have been at a standstill in the 24 hours since the Big Four congressional leaders met with Trump at the White House Monday.The impacts of a shutdown would be felt by many. None of the millions of federal workers would be paid, and hundreds of thousands of them would be furloughed. In recent days, White House officials had tried to allow military personnel to continue receiving pay during a shutdown, according to a source familiar with the discussions, but those efforts were unsuccessful. So service members wouldn’t be paid during a shutdown, either.And the White House has threatened to fire federal workers in a shutdown as well. Asked Tuesday morning how many government employees his administration would lay off, Trump responded: “Well, we may do a lot, and that’s only because of the Democrats.”The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated Tuesday that a government shutdown would lead to the furlough of about 750,000 federal employees.Responding to Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who asked for the assessment, the CBO said of the furloughed workers: The “total daily cost of their compensation would be roughly $400 million. The number of furloughed employees could vary by the day because some agencies might furlough more employees the longer a shutdown persists and others might recall some initially furloughed employees.”Federal agencies, including the Defense and State departments, have already posted their plans for how they will operate.In the final hours before a shutdown, the two parties traded insults rather than serious proposals.Trump shared a crude post on Truth Social Monday night that showed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., with fake AI-generated audio, saying Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bulls—” and that if they give undocumented immigrants health care, they would vote for his party.The post depicted Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a mustache as he stood silently by Schumer’s side. Mariachi music played in the background.The video referenced a Trump talking point that Democrats are demanding health care for undocumented immigrants in exchange for their votes to keep the government open. Democrats have called that a lie. They have pushed to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies and to undo Trump’s Medicaid cuts, not to pay for health care for people who are in the country illegally.Schumer responded to the video on X, writing: “If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate. You can only throw tantrums.”Jeffries had tough words for Trump during a news conference on the steps of the Capitol on Tuesday morning. “Mr. President, next time you have something to say about me, don’t cop out through a racist and fake AI video,” Jeffries said, surrounded by dozens of rank-and-file Democrats. “When I’m back in the Oval Office, say it to my face.”The House leader also shared a photo on X of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. “This is real,” Jeffries wrote above the photo, which was taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 1997. (Trump has said he and Epstein had a falling out, and he was unaware of the financier’s crimes.)The personal insults indicated that the two sides were nowhere close to an agreement to keep the government’s lights on past Tuesday’s deadline.“It looks to me like we’re headed for a shutdown,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., earlier Tuesday. “And you know me, I’m the most optimistic person you know.”High-stakes White House meeting as government shutdown deadline looms02:18Political theater dominated on Tuesday. Democrats filed onto the House floor during a pro forma session as the party’s top appropriator, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, attempted to offer her party’s plan to keep the government open. But Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who was presiding, did not acknowledge her and quickly adjourned. “Shame on you!” some Democrats jeered at Griffith. Democrats on the floor had a poster with Speaker Mike Johnson’s face on it and the words: “Missing Person.” Johnson, R-La., was in the Capitol on Tuesday and attended the Trump meeting a day earlier. But the House left town Sept. 19 after passing a seven-week funding bill and is not set to return until Oct. 7. By Tuesday evening, the GOP-controlled Senate made a last-gasp attempt to avert a shutdown but came up short. The upper chamber voted down competing Democratic and Republican funding plans, a repeat of earlier this month when the same bills failed to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to pass.The GOP bill had cleared the House on a party-line 217-212 vote on Sept. 19, but it was rejected Tuesday in the Senate 55-45, shy of the 60 votes needed to break a Democratic filibuster. Three members of the Democratic Caucus — Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Angus King, I-Maine — joined Republicans in voting yes; just one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted no with Democrats.The rival Democratic bill to fund the government was also rejected, on a party-line 47-53 vote.If a shutdown occurs, “that’s a sad day for the country, it truly is. We have to find a better solution,” said Fetterman, who voted for both bills. “As a senator, I think that’s one of our core responsibilities, keep the government open … and then debate and figure out some kind of compromise.”Republicans have argued that Democrats could avert a shutdown by simply voting for the House-passed continuing resolution, or CR, which would fund the government at current levels through Nov. 21.But Democrats said they are trying to stave off a looming “health care crisis.” Specifically, Democrats want any CR to include an extension of Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. They have also pushed for rolling back some of the cuts and changes to Medicaid that were enacted in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” earlier this year.Speaking to reporters in the Capitol after Monday’s meeting with Trump, Schumer said Trump appeared to be “not aware” of the impacts of expiring Obamacare subsidies on everyday Americans. And he urged Trump to try to convince GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to back a deal to extend those subsidies.”It’s now in the president’s hands,” Schumer said, with Jeffries at his side. “He can avoid a shutdown if he gets the Republican leaders to go along with what we want.”Scott WongScott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News. Frank Thorp VFrank Thorp V is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the Senate.Kyle StewartKyle Stewart is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the House.Brennan Leach, Gabrielle Khoriaty and Sahil Kapur contributed.
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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 2, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT / Updated Oct. 2, 2025, 8:41 AM EDTBy Jared PerloSam Altman singing in a toilet. James Bond playing Altman in high-stakes poker. Pikachu storming Normandy’s beaches. Mario jumping from his virtual world into real life.Those are just some of the lifelike videos that are rocketing through the internet a day after OpenAI released Sora, an app at the intersection of social media and artificial intelligence-powered media generation. The app surged to be the most popular app in the iOS App Store’s Photo and Video category within a day of its release.Powered by OpenAI’s upgraded Sora 2 media generation AI model, the app allows users to create high-definition videos from simple text prompts. After it processes one-time video and audio recordings of users’ likenesses, Sora allows users to embed lifelike “cameos” of themselves, their friends and others who give their permission. The app is a recipe made for virality. But many of the videos published within the first day of Sora’s debut have also raised alarm bells from copyright and deepfake experts.Users have so far reported being able to feature video game characters like Lara Croft or Nintendo heavyweights like Mario, Luigi and even Princess Peach in their AI creations. One user inserted Ronald McDonald into a saucy scene from the romantic reality TV show “Love Island.” The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the app would enable users to feature material protected by copyright unless the copyright holders opted out of having their work appear. However, the report said, blanket opt-outs did not appear to be an option, instead requiring copyright holders to submit examples of offending content.Sora 2 builds on OpenAI’s original Sora model, which was released to the public in December. Unlike the original Sora, Sora 2 now enables users to create videos with matching dialogue and sound effects.AI models ingest large swaths of information in the “training” process as they learn how to respond to users’ queries. That data forms the basis for models’ responses to future user requests. For example, Google’s Veo 3 video generation model was trained on YouTube videos, much to the dismay of some YouTube creators. OpenAI has not clearly indicated which exact data its models draw from, but the appearance of characters under copyright indicates that it used copyright-protected information to design the Sora 2 system. China’s ByteDance and its Seedance video generation model have also attracted recent copyright scrutiny.OpenAI faces legal action over copyright infringement claims, including a high-profile lawsuit featuring authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jodi Picoult and newspapers like The New York Times. OpenAI competitor Anthropic recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims from authors who alleged that Anthropic illegally downloaded and used their books to train its AI models. In an interview, Mark McKenna, a law professor and the faculty director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy, drew a stark line between using copyrighted data as an input to train models and generating outputs that depict copyright-protected information.“If OpenAI is taking an aggressive approach that says they’re going to allow outputs of your copyright-protected material unless you opt out, that strikes me as not likely to work. That’s not how copyright law works. You don’t have to opt out of somebody else’s rules,” McKenna said.“The early indications show that training AI models on legitimately acquired copyright material can be considered fair use. There’s a very different question about the outputs of these systems,” he continued. “Outputting visual material is a harder copyright question than just the training of models.”As McKenna sees it, that approach is a calculated risk. “The opt-out is clearly a ‘move fast and break things’ mindset,” he said. “And the aggressive response by some of the studios is ‘No, we’re not going to go along with that.’”Disney, Warner Bros. and Sony Music Entertainment did not reply to requests for comment.In addition to copyright issues, some observers were unsettled by one of the most popular first-day creations, which depicted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stealing valuable computer components from Target — illustrating the ease with which Sora 2 can create content depicting real people committing crimes they had not actually committed. Sora 2’s high-quality outputs arrive as some have expressed concerns about illicit or harmful creations, from worries about gory scenes and child safety to the model’s role in spreading deepfakes. OpenAI includes techniques to indicate Sora 2’s creations are AI-generated as concerns grow about the ever-blurrier line between reality and computer-generated content.Sora 2 will include moving watermarks on all videos on the Sora app or downloaded from sora.com, while invisible metadata will indicate Sora-generated videos are created by AI systems.However, the metadata can be easily removed. OpenAI’s own documentation says the metadata approach “is not a silver bullet to address issues of provenance. It can easily be removed either accidentally or intentionally,” like when users upload images to social media websites.Siwei Lyu, a professor of computer science and the director of the University of Buffalo’s Media Forensic Lab and Center for Information Integrity, agreed that multiple layers of authentication were key to prove content’s origin from Sora. “OpenAI claimed they have other responsible use measures, such as the inclusion of visible and invisible watermarks, and tracing tools for Sora-made images and audio. These complement the metadata and provide an additional layer of protection,” Lyu said.“However, their effectiveness requires additional testing. The invisible watermark and tracing tools can only be tested internally, so it is hard to judge how well they work at this point,” he added.OpenAI addressed those limitations in its technical safety report, writing that “we will continue to improve the provenance ecosystem to help bring more transparency to content created from our tools.” OpenAI did not immediately reply to a request for comment.Though the Sora app is available for download, access to Sora’s services remains invitation-only as OpenAI gradually increases access. Jared PerloJared Perlo is a writer and reporter at NBC News covering AI. He is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 7, 2025, 3:21 PM EDTBy Maya Rosenberg and Jay BlackmanWASHINGTON — Federal funding for air travel in rural areas will run out Sunday if the government shutdown continues, threatening to isolate remote communities across the country.The Essential Air Service (EAS), established in 1978, provides funds to airline carriers to operate out of rural airports for routes that would otherwise be unprofitable. The program is a lifeline for remote communities because it connects them to cities with larger airports, ensuring access to medical treatments, work opportunities and commercial goods that would otherwise be a lengthy travel away. “Money runs out this Sunday. So there’s many small communities across the country that will now no longer have the resources to make sure they have air service in their community,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press conference Monday. “Every state across the country will be impacted by the inability to provide the subsidies to airlines to service these communities.”The EAS gives money to regional air carriers in 177 communities across all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico, according to DOT. The Regional Airline Association, an advocacy group for regional airlines that receive EAS funds, said that “commercial air service at EAS airports had an economic impact of $2.3 billion and supported more than 17,000 U.S. jobs” before the pandemic. FAA announces possible staffing issues potentially caused by government shutdown 02:10“This program is an essential economic lifeline for over 500 rural communities who are often hit the hardest whenever there is disruption in the National Airspace System,” the association said in a statement. “[We] continue to urge Congress to come together and reopen the government for the good of the American public. The current government shutdown only adds stressors to an air transportation system that is already plagued with delays, disruptions, and cancellations.”As the shutdown continues with no end in sight, the Federal Aviation Administration is already confronting staffing shortages and slight increases in sick calls as air traffic controllers work without pay. NBC News reported Monday that no air traffic controllers were expected at Hollywood Burbank Airport in the Los Angeles area for hours, and that the main airports in New Jersey and Denver also experienced staffing issues.We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you’re a federal employee who can’t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.Congress appropriated nearly $500 million to the EAS in 2024; The expenditure is typically bipartisan, serving rural communities in states across the country. However, earlier this year, President Donald Trump looked to slash the program’s budget by $308 million in his discretionary budget. He had recommended eliminating the program in its entirety in a budget blueprint during his first term. The federal funding is particularly important for Alaska, where the state’s hundreds of islands and vast swaths of tundra make traveling by air a necessity. According to an October 2024 Transportation Department report, Alaska received more than $41 million in EAS subsidies. Duffy told reporters that the “number one user” of rural airspace is Alaska, and that the state “will be impacted” if funding runs out. “This is almost breathtaking, when you think about the implications for these communities, because there is no road for any of these places,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told NBC News on Monday. “This is a big stressor right now.”Murkowski said that Alaska Airlines would maintain service at a handful of airports regardless of EAS funding but that she was worried for smaller carriers. She added that she was trying to get in touch with Duffy. Alaska Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, Murkowski’s fellow Alaska senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, said he was already in talks with the transportation secretary about the issue. “We’re working through it to make it have as little impact as possible. These are EAS subsidies, but this just goes to the whole damn Schumer shutdown,” Sullivan said, referring to the GOP nickname for the shutdown, which Republicans say was caused by Democrats. “But right now, what I’m trying to do is work with the secretary of transportation, who I was exchanging text messages and voice messages with, to try and limit that kind of damage.”Ryan Huotari, the manager of the Sidney-Richland Airport in Sidney, Montana, said the airport and his community depend on EAS funding.“If the EAS didn’t exist, I don’t think it would be able to function,” Huotari said of the airport. “Our winters out here are 20-below, they’re pretty treacherous. It’s pretty scary driving from here to Billings. I’d rather be in an airplane than a car.” Sidney is only an hour flight away from Billings, Montana’s largest city, but it’s about a four-hour drive each way. Huotari says that the airport is crucial for people who can’t make the eight-hour round trip, like the elderly who need medical care in Billings, or the oil workers who commute between the two areas. Huotari, who helmed the airport during the last shutdown in 2018, said he’s used to the EAS being on the budgetary chopping block but, with no solution in Congress in sight, this time he’s worried.“My biggest concern is getting people paid. There are a lot of federal grants out there that I’ve got right now,” he said. “There’s a lot of money hanging out there, like in the millions.”Maya RosenbergMaya Rosenberg is a Desk Assistant based in Washington, D.C.Jay BlackmanJay Blackman is an NBC News producer covering such areas as transportation, space, medical and consumer issues.Brennan Leach and Frank Thorp V contributed.
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