Por Kara Scannell, CNN

Los abogados de Sean “Diddy” Combs esperan convencer a un tribunal federal de apelaciones de que libere al rapero de prisión de inmediato y anule su condena por cargos relacionados con la prostitución, argumentando que participaba en voyeurismo y pornografía amateur; conducta que, según ellos, está protegida por la Primera Enmienda.

Se espera también que los abogados de Combs, que comparecerán este jueves ante el Tribunal de Apelaciones del Segundo Circuito, argumenten que el juez federal de distrito Arun Subramanian consideró “ilegalmente”, al calcular la sentencia, conductas por las que Combs fue absuelto.

“El tribunal de distrito se negó a hacer valer el veredicto del jurado”, escribieron los abogados de Combs en una presentación judicial de diciembre.

El fundador de Bad Boy Records fue declarado culpable el pasado julio de dos cargos de transporte con fines de prostitución, en violación de la Ley Mann, por organizar viajes para escorts con el fin de que realizaran actos sexuales con sus entonces novias, Cassie Ventura, y una mujer que testificó bajo el seudónimo de “Jane”.

Combs fue absuelto de cargos más graves, incluidos conspiración para cometer crimen organizado (racketeering) y trata sexual, tras un juicio de ocho semanas. Los fiscales alegaron que Combs coaccionó a las dos mujeres para que tuvieran relaciones sexuales con escorts masculinos, a menudo suministrándoles drogas para mantenerlas durante varios días. Las maratónicas sesiones sexuales —que con frecuencia eran filmadas— se conocían como “Freak Offs” y “noches de hotel”.

Combs fue condenado en octubre a 50 meses de prisión. Ha permanecido bajo custodia federal desde su arresto en septiembre de 2024.

Sus abogados argumentaron que debería ser puesto en libertad porque los acusados condenados por delitos similares relacionados con la prostitución suelen recibir sentencias de 15 meses. También están pidiendo al tribunal de apelaciones que absuelva a Combs de los cargos relacionados con la prostitución o que devuelva el caso a Subramanian para una nueva sentencia. Los fiscales están pidiendo a los jueces que confirmen la condena y la sentencia.

Los abogados de Combs dicen que la prostitución no está definida en la Ley Mann y piden al tribunal de apelaciones que rechace una “interpretación excesivamente amplia de la ley”.

“Los ‘freak-offs’ y las noches de hotel eran actuaciones sexuales altamente coreografiadas que implicaban el uso de disfraces, juegos de rol e iluminación escenificada, que se filmaban para que Combs y sus novias pudieran ver esta pornografía amateur más tarde. La producción y visualización de pornografía de este tipo está protegida por la Primera Enmienda y, por lo tanto, no puede ser objeto de enjuiciamiento de manera constitucional”, escribieron sus abogados en un escrito judicial.

“En otras palabras, el término ‘prostitución’ en la Ley debería limitarse a aquellas situaciones en las que un cliente que paga mantiene relaciones sexuales con la persona a la que se le paga”, escribieron sus abogados.

Los fiscales calificaron el argumento de Combs de “carente de mérito”.

“Combs se encuentra en una situación completamente distinta a la de los distribuidores de cine para adultos: contrató y transportó a trabajadores sexuales comerciales para que tuvieran relaciones sexuales con sus novias para su propia gratificaci

By Martin Goillandeau, Elizabeth Wolfe, Taylor Romine, Chris Boyette, CNN

(CNN) — The arrest of an American man who told authorities his wife fell overboard while on a dinghy in rough waters in the Bahamas has brought greater scrutiny to his account of what happened as the search for her enters a fifth day.

Brian Hooker was arrested by the Royal Bahamas Police Force on Wednesday in connection with the disappearance of 55-year-old Lynette Hooker, his lawyer confirmed to CNN.

He was arrested “for additional questioning based on some probable cause we have,” Royal Bahamas Police Force Assistant Commissioner Advardo Dames told Reuters. He was taken into custody as a suspect, Dames said, though no charges have been announced.

Brian Hooker “categorically and unequivocally denies any wrongdoing” in his wife’s disappearance, his attorney, Terrel Butler, said in a statement. “He has been cooperating with the relevant authorities as part of an ongoing investigation.”

The Michigan couple, both US nationals, have been sailing together for more than a decade, documenting their life at sea across social media.

The US Coast Guard said it opened a criminal investigation into Lynette Hooker’s disappearance as her family has called for a deeper probe into what happened.

Here is what officials and family members have said as the search for Lynette Hooker continues:

An ‘accident in unpredictable seas,’ husband says

Brian Hooker told authorities his wife fell from an 8‑foot dinghy near Elbow Cay in the Abaco Islands Saturday evening as the couple was traveling back to their yacht, “Soulmate,” according to police.

“Strong currents subsequently carried her away,” and “he lost sight of her,” police said Brian Hooker told them. Lynette Hooker was wearing the keys, also known as an engine safety lanyard, when she fell off the dinghy, which made the boat lose power, so he tried to paddle to shore, according to his account shared by police.

Brian Hooker said he last saw his wife swimming toward the shore, according to Richard Cook, fire team lead with Hope Town Volunteer Fire and Rescue.

The dinghy drifted toward Marsh Harbour, where it ultimately was beached, and Brian Hooker “traversed through the bush till he made it to Marsh Harbour Boat yards where he made contact with the local Police,” Cook said.

Hope Town Volunteer Fire and Rescue was notified at 5:12 a.m. and “searched extensively for 6 hours” but wasn’t able to find her, Cook said.

Before his arrest Wednesday, Brian Hooker provided a statement to CNN describing what he said was a boating mishap in deteriorating conditions.

“I am heartbroken over the recent boat accident in unpredictable seas and high winds that caused my beloved Lynette to fall from our small dinghy,” Brian Hooker said in the statement. “Despite desperate attempts to reach her, the winds and currents drove us further apart. We continue to search for her and that is my sole focus.”

CNN has reached out to police for more information.

Lynette Hooker wasn’t wearing a flotation device when she went overboard, according to Cook. On Tuesday, her daughter, Karli Aylesworth, told CNN Brian Hooker left her a voicemail saying authorities had found a flotation device he threw to his wife after she went overboard.

‘We have many unanswered questions’

Aylesworth said in a statement she had been given little information about what happened and wanted law enforcement agencies to carefully examine the circumstances surrounding the incident.

“My sole concern is to find out what happened to my mother and make sure a f

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — Climate change is pushing two iconic Antarctic species toward the brink of extinction — the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal, a new assessment finds. The new listings, published Wednesday by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, cite factors such as warming ocean waters, melting sea ice and declining availability of food to sustain such species.

The IUCN Red List of at-risk species is an authoritative census of species most at peril, as well as the causes of their decline. It is separate from classifications under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which listed the emperor penguin as “threatened” in 2022. The Antarctic fur seal is not currently listed under ESA classifications.

Both species are highly charismatic megafauna. The emperor penguin is the largest of all penguin species, reaching upwards of 3 feet in height and 100 pounds in weight. These birds — and their huge, fluffy feathered babies — were featured prominently in the classic March of the Penguins documentary. The fur seals, in contrast, are the smallest of the Antarctic seal species and live primarily on sub-Antarctic islands. They were hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century, but legal intervention and conservation projects had brought them back. Now, they’re in danger again.

The emperor penguin is moving from “Near Threatened” to “Endangered” on the IUCN Red List, based on new projections that its population will be cut in half by the 2080s. Satellite data show that emperor penguins lost about 10% of their population between 2009 and 2018, totaling a loss of more than 20,000 adult penguins.

The main factor that is driving populations down is climate change-related early breakup and losses of sea ice, said Philip Trathan, a member of the IUCN working group that completed the penguin Red List assessment.

“For emperor penguins, sea ice is their primary habitat,” Trathan told CNN. “They breed on fast ice,” which is sea ice connected to the coastline. “They molt on fast ice or on ice floes. They feed within the sea ice in polynyas, leads and cracks in the ice.”

“As sea ice decreases, their habitat also decreases,” Trathan said. “Major sea ice loss resulting from regional climate change remains an ongoing threat and will likely reduce breeding success and adult survival in the long-term.”

Seasonal sea ice in the Antarctic has significantly declined since 2016, he said, which has led to increased or even complete breeding failure in nearly half of the known colonies of emperor penguins throughout Antarctica.

Trathan said there are two threads of evidence that helped establish the emperor penguins’ status change: satellite image analyses supported by assessments completed on the ground, as well as population model assessments.

As for the Antarctic fur seal, its status is being moved from “Least Concern” to “Endangered” on the IUCN Red List after its population shrank by more than 50 percent between 1999 and 2025. The seals’ population decline is also tied to climate change, the IUCN found, which is reducing the availability of krill, their main food source.

Kit Kovacs, who worked on the Antarctic fur seal assessment, told CNN that as surface water temperatures close to Antarctica increase, krill is going farther offshore and into deeper waters to get to colder areas. “This makes the krill much less accessible to land-based krill predators,” Kovacs said.

“These new listings in the South Atlantic Ocean mirror changes that have already taken place in the North Atlantic Arctic where hooded seals, harp seals and ringed seals have already been shown to be in serious decline,” Kovacs said.

The-CNN-Wire
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By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN

(CNN) — Americans’ opinion of space exploration is pretty high.

In an Ipsos poll conducted last week just after the launch of Artemis II, US adults say, 62% to 34%, that the benefits of NASA sending people into space are worth the costs, with nearly identical levels of support among both parties.

Even amid dismal ratings for the US government overall, views of NASA remain relatively starry-eyed. The agency gets an 80% favorability rating in Ipsos’ survey. And, in contrast to opinions of many other agencies, opinions of the space program are relatively unpolarized.

That stands out because views about the country’s space program haven’t always been so positive. In polls taken shortly after Americans first landed on the moon in 1969, less than half the public thought the costs were justified – 39% in a 1970 Harris poll, and 41% in an NBC/AP survey fielded nine years later. But in the years since, Gallup has found, views of the space program’s merits have charted a steady upwards trajectory, reaching a record 64% when they last asked around the moon landing’s 50^th anniversary.

One polling caveat here: Unlike the space programs they’re asking about, survey questions don’t exist in a vacuum. Polling that’s focused more on costs can tell a different story. In a 2003 CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey, support for launching a new program to send astronauts to the moon was 22 points lower if the phrase “spending billions of dollars” was mentioned in the question.

Public opinion polling, much like America’s space program, came of age during the mid-20^th century, meaning that we have plenty of data of Americans’ views of space throughout the years. A few other findings from those surveys, courtesy of the polling archives at Cornell University’s Roper Center, are below.

The public was initially dubious about the chances of a moon landing

Asked by Gallup in 1949 whether “men in rockets will be able to reach the moon” within the next 50 years, just 15% said yes. About five years later, confidence in the men in rockets’ prospects had more than doubled to 38%. And by 1957, asked to guess at a timeline for reaching the moon, around 40% expected it to happen in the next quarter-century or so, although 14% still gave answers that were reported by the pollsters as falling into the category of “never, silly.”

Most Americans are just fine down here, thanks

Americans’ early skepticism about space flight was even stronger when they were asked if they might like to go along. In a Gallup poll conducted near the start of 1955, just 9% said they’d like to go along on the first rocket ship to the moon if asked, and two years later, just 5% said they’d volunteer to be the first one up in a spacecraft.

In more recent years, interest in experiencing space travel has increased, although it still often falls short of a majority. In a 1999 CBS News poll, 21% said both that they expected “vacation cruises in outer space” to be a feature of the 21^st century and that they would like to go. (The same percentage, 21%, told CNN/Time pollsters in 2000 that they’d board a spacecraft if asked by “beings from another planet.”)

In a 2019 AP-NORC poll, about half of Americans said they’d take a chance to orbit the Earth, with 41% saying th

By Katelyn Polantz, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump White House touted its surge of National Guard members to Washington, DC, last summer as the way to put more dangerous perpetrators in the nation’s capital behind bars. But in nearly a dozen criminal cases since the surge began, people who were found to be carrying weapons and charged in federal court have walked free.

The Justice Department has had to drop illegal gun possession cases in recent months after judges on the federal trial-level court in DC have repeatedly found fatal flaws in the cases — largely because the guns were found during unconstitutional police searches.

Several attorneys in Washington say the failed gun possession cases should never have been brought into court because they were weak from the start, and that the cases being charged — sometimes after months of briefings and hearings before they are dismissed — capture a diminished US Attorney’s Office under US Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

Even with crime declining in Washington, the cases have exposed a problematic aftermath of Trump administration policies, nearly a dozen sources say. Those policies in DC have prompted more policing, more cases charged despite their merits, and the gutting of the experienced career attorneys pool at the Justice Department, according to 10 people connected to the courts in the district, including former DC US Attorney’s Office prosecutors and defense attorneys.

These sources declined to use their names in this story because they still have work related to the US Attorney’s Office.

“That should never happen,” a former prosecutor from the DC US Attorney’s Office told CNN. “The prosecutors should know all the evidence and know how it was obtained. If there’s any vulnerability, they should know that and take that into account.”

Pirro rejected questions of whether the cases with faulty police searches were worth charging.

“Look, crime is at a historic low,” she said in a recent interview with CNN. “You can’t criticize this office.”

“We are talking about a period during a surge when arrests increased dramatically, and our focus was on bringing safety to the people of the District,” Pirro said, though a spokesperson, later this week. “As such, we are willing to take cases that are close calls to protect the community, even though that does not mean a judge will always agree with us.”

Since she’s become US attorney, the former New York county judge and Fox News host says she’s taken steps to train law enforcement on the streets in DC to do constitutionally sound searches. That’s included lecturing officers in the city’s Anacostia neighborhood about the process and using body camera footage to show them approaches to searches, as well as training FBI recruits.

One of the trainings took place as recently as March, the US Attorney’s Office said, and continued a yearslong practice of the office providing training to law enforcement on best practices under current case law.

“With the cases brought to my attention, my focus is to make sure that the evidence seized was seized in a proper and constitutional manner,” Pirro said.

Some cases, like one before Judge Tanya Chutkan in the DC District Court this year, began with a swarm of federal officers canvassing the city’s streets as part of the “federal takeover” policing surge last summer. Seven US Marshals surrounded a man’s car on East Capitol Street because he was double-parked. They then searched the car without having a valid legal reason to, the judge found.

That illegal handgun possession case is still ongoing, but Chutkan has thrown out of court the evidence from the search, which includes the gun, according to court recor