By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr., Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sean “Diddy” Combs has been acquitted of the most serious charges in his federal sex trafficking trial, but that doesn’t mean the once-celebrated music mogul will see his business empire restored.

Combs, 55, who is one of the most influential figures in hip-hop history, was acquitted Wednesday of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges but convicted on prostitution offenses. Prosecutors painted a dark portrait of the mogul, with witnesses taking the stand to allege a pattern of violence and detail drug-fueled sex parties he reportedly called “freak-offs” or “hotel nights.”

Combs was convicted of flying people around the country, including his girlfriends and paid male sex workers, to engage in sexual encounters, a felony violation of the federal Mann Act. He could still be sentenced to prison for as long as a decade.

Here’s a closer look at how Combs’ business portfolio and public image have crumbled under the weight of the allegations.

Related Articles

The US plans to begin breeding billions of flies to fight a pest. Here is how it will work

A look at the potential sentence faced by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in his sex trafficking trial

Daughter of assassinated civil rights leader sees painful echoes of political violence in America

Gun suicides in US reached record high in 2023

Bryan Kohberger is set to plead guilty in University of Idaho stabbings to avoid the death penalty

What has happened to Combs’ business empire?

Before Combs was arrested and charged, his major business ventures had collapsed: He stepped down and later fully divested from Revolt TV, which was founded in 2013. The network offered a mix of programming focused on hip-hop culture, R&B music, social justice and documentaries.

He also reportedly lost a Hulu reality series deal and saw his once-iconic fashion brand Sean John vanish from Macy’s shelves.

After surveillance footage surfaced last year showing Combs physically assaulting singer Cassie, his then-girlfriend, in 2016, consequences mounted: New York City revoked his ceremonial key, Peloton pulled his music, Howard University rescinded his honorary degree and his charter school in Harlem cut ties.

Last year, Combs settled a legal dispute with Diageo, relinquishing control of his lucrative spirits brands, Ciroc and DeLeón. While many of his ventures have unraveled, his music catalog — for now — remains intact.

Where does Combs’ music stand?

Bad Boy Records may be synonymous with 1990s icons like The Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, Ma$e, and 112, but Combs kept the label relevant before his arrest with high-profile releases.

In 2023, Combs dropped “ The Love Album: Off the Grid,” which was his first solo studio album in nearly two decades, and Janelle Monáe released her critically acclaimed project “ The Age of Pleasure ” through Bad Boy. Both albums earned Grammy nominations, with Monáe’s effort recognized in the prestigious record of the year category.

Ahead of the “The Love Album” release, Combs made headlines by returning Bad Boy publishing rights to several former artists and songwriters, years after he was criticized for how he handled their contracts.

Bad Boy Records remains operational, but the label has been significantly shaken by Combs’ legal firestorm and it hasn’t announced any major upcoming releases.

Last week, a surprise EP called “Never Stop” released by his son, King Combs, and Ye (formerly Kanye West), showed support for the embattled mogul. The project was released through Goodfellas Entertainment.

Bad Boy Records remained active through 2022, backing Machine Gun Kelly’s “Mainstream Sellout” under the Bad Boy umbrella. He was a producer on MTV’s reality television series “Making the Band,” and “Making His Band,” launching the careers of artists like the girl group Danity Kane and male R&B group Day 26.

Could Diddy’s fortune be at risk?

Combs has been sued by multiple people who claim to have been victims of physical or sexual abuse. He has already paid $20 million to settle with one accuser, his former girlfriend Cassie. Most of those lawsuits, though, are still pending. It isn’t clear how many, if any, will be successful, or how much it will cost Combs to defend himself in court. Combs and his lawyers have denied all the misconduct allegations and dismissed his accusers as out for a big payday.

Federal prosecutors had informed the court that if Combs is convicted, they would seek to have him forfeit any assets, including property, “used to commit or facilitate” his crimes. They won’t detail exactly what property that might involve until after the trial is over.

How is Diddy’s music faring on streaming?

Despite the legal turmoil surrounding Combs, his music catalog remains widely available on major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. None of the streamers have publicly addressed whether they plan to adjust how his music is featured.

Interestingly, Combs’ music saw a roughly 20% boost in U.S. streaming between April and May 2025, his biggest monthly spike this year, according to Luminate. The numbers jump coincided with key moments in the trial, including testimonies from Cassie and Kid Cudi.

However, there was a slight drop-off with a 5 to 10% decrease in June compared to the previous month’s streams.

Streaming makes up a fraction of an artist’s revenue and is calculated through a complicated process called “streamshare.” Most artists see very little pay from digital services.

What happened to other businesses like Sean John?

Sean John, founded in 1998, has gone largely dormant, with its presence disappearing from major retailers like Macy’s. There are no clear signs of a relaunch on the horizon.

In 2023, Combs launched Empower Global, an online marketplace designed to uplift Black-owned businesses and strengthen the Black dollar. He positioned the platform as a modern-day “Black Wall Street,” backing it with a reported $20 million of his own investment.

The platform debuted with 70 brands and planned to expand by onboarding new Black-owned businesses each month, aiming to feature more than 200 by year’s end.

However, as 2023 came to a close, several brands cut ties with Empower Global. It was reported that some cited disappointing performance and growing concerns over the misconduct allegations surrounding Combs.

AP Music Writer Maria Sherman contributed to this report.

By JOHN HANNA

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The U.S. government is preparing to breed billions of flies and dump them out of airplanes over Mexico and southern Texas to fight a flesh-eating maggot.

That sounds like the plot of a horror movie, but it is part of the government’s plans for protecting the U.S. from a bug that could devastate its beef industry, decimate wildlife and even kill household pets. This weird science has worked well before.

“It’s an exceptionally good technology,” said Edwin Burgess, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who studies parasites in animals, particularly livestock. “It’s an all-time great in terms of translating science to solve some kind of large problem.”

The targeted pest is the flesh-eating larva of the New World Screwworm fly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to ramp up the breeding and distribution of adult male flies — sterilizing them with radiation before releasing them. They mate with females in the wild, and the eggs laid by the female aren’t fertilized and don’t hatch. There are fewer larvae, and over time, the fly population dies out.

It is more effective and environmentally friendly than spraying the pest into oblivion, and it is how the U.S. and other nations north of Panama eradicated the same pest decades ago. Sterile flies from a factory in Panama kept the flies contained there for years, but the pest appeared in southern Mexico late last year.

The USDA expects a new screwworm fly factory to be up and running in southern Mexico by July 2026. It plans to open a fly distribution center in southern Texas by the end of the year so that it can import and distribute flies from Panama if necessary.

Fly feeds on live flesh

Most fly larvae feed on dead flesh, making the New World screwworm fly and its Old World counterpart in Asia and Africa outliers — and for the American beef industry, a serious threat. Females lay their eggs in wounds and, sometimes, exposed mucus.

“A thousand-pound bovine can be dead from this in two weeks,” said Michael Bailey, president elect of the American Veterinary Medicine Association.

Veterinarians have effective treatments for infested animals, but an infestation can still be unpleasant — and cripple an animal with pain.

Don Hineman, a retired western Kansas rancher, recalled infected cattle as a youngster on his family’s farm.

“It smelled nasty,” he said. “Like rotting meat.”

How scientists will use the fly’s biology against it

The New World screwworm fly is a tropical species, unable to survive Midwestern or Great Plains winters, so it was a seasonal scourge. Still, the U.S. and Mexico bred and released more than 94 billion sterile flies from 1962 through 1975 to eradicate the pest, according to the USDA.

The numbers need to be large enough that females in the wild can’t help but hook up with sterile males for mating.

One biological trait gives fly fighters a crucial wing up: Females mate only once in their weekslong adult lives.

Why the US wants to breed more flies

Alarmed about the fly’s migration north, the U.S. temporarily closed its southern border in May to imports of live cattle, horses and bison and it won’t be fully open again at least until mid-September.

But female flies can lay their eggs in wounds on any warm-blooded animal, and that includes humans.

Decades ago, the U.S. had fly factories in Florida and Texas, but they closed as the pest was eradicated.

The Panama fly factory can breed up to 117 million a week, but the USDA wants the capacity to breed at least 400 million a week. It plans to spend $8.5 million on the Texas site and $21 million to convert a facility in southern Mexico for breeding sterile fruit flies into one for screwworm flies.

How to raise hundreds of millions of flies

In one sense, raising a large colony of flies is relatively easy, said Cassandra Olds, an assistant professor of entomology at Kansas State University.

But, she added, “You’ve got to give the female the cues that she needs to lay her eggs, and then the larvae have to have enough nutrients.”

Related Articles

After Diddy’s conviction, here’s where his business ventures stand

A look at the potential sentence faced by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in his sex trafficking trial

Daughter of assassinated civil rights leader sees painful echoes of political violence in America

Gun suicides in US reached record high in 2023

Bryan Kohberger is set to plead guilty in University of Idaho stabbings to avoid the death penalty

Fly factories once fed larvae horse meat and honey and then moved to a mix of dried eggs and either honey or molasses, according to past USDA research. Later, the Panama factory used a mix that included egg powder and red blood cells and plasma from cattle.

In the wild, larvae ready for the equivalent of a butterfly’s cocoon stage drop off their hosts and onto the ground, burrow just below the surface and grow to adulthood inside a protective casing making them resemble a dark brown Tic Tac mint. In the Panama factory, workers drop them into trays of sawdust.

Security is an issue. Sonja Swiger, an entomologist with Texas A&M University’s Extension Service, said a breeding facility must prevent any fertile adults kept for breeding stock from escaping.

How to drop flies from an airplane

Dropping flies from the air can be dangerous. Last month, a plane freeing sterile flies crashed near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, killing three people.

In test runs in the 1950s, according to the USDA, scientists put the flies in paper cups and then dropped the cups out of planes using special chutes. Later, they loaded them into boxes with a machine known as a “Whiz Packer.”

The method is still much the same: Light planes with crates of flies drop those crates.

Burgess called the development of sterile fly breeding and distribution in the 1950s and 1960s one of the USDA’s “crowning achievements.”

Some agriculture officials argue now that new factories shouldn’t be shuttered after another successful fight.

“Something we think we have complete control over — and we have declared a triumph and victory over — can always rear its ugly head again,” Burgess said.

By SOPHIE BATES

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — More than 60 years after a white supremacist assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers, his daughter still sees the same strain of political violence at work in American society.

Related Articles

Here’s how millions of people could lose health insurance if Trump’s tax bill becomes law

A day outside an LA detention center shows profound impact of ICE raids on families

Trump keeps saying the GOP mega bill will eliminate taxes on Social Security. It does not

Paramount to pay $16 million in settlement with Trump over ’60 Minutes’ interview

Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban

“It’s painful,” said Reena Evers-Everette. “It’s very painful.”

Evers-Everette was 8 years old when her father, a field secretary for the NAACP, was shot to death in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

A few months after Evers’ killing in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down. The deaths of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy followed later that decade.

Now, experts say the level of political violence in America over the past few years is likely the highest it’s been since the 1960s and 1970s. The past year alone has seen the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers, and two assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

At a four-day conference celebrating Evers’ life just before what would have been his 100th birthday on July 2, his daughter was joined by the daughters of slain civil rights leaders: Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and Bettie Dahmer, the daughter of civil and voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer. The 2025 Democracy in Action Convening, “Medgar Evers at 100: a Legacy of Justice, a Future of Change,” was held in Jackson.

“I just was feeling so much pain, and I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through that,” Kennedy said, recalling that after her father died, she prayed for the man who killed him. “I was saying, ‘Please don’t — please don’t kill the guy that killed him.’”

Two-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams spoke at the event, denouncing efforts by the Trump administration to strip the names of activists from Navy vessels, including possibly Evers.

“They want to take his name off a boat because they don’t want us to have a reminder of how far he sailed us forward,” Abrams told the conference crowd.

Two-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, right, sits next to Arekia Bennett-Scott, the executive director of Mississippi Votes, at the 2025 Democracy in Action Convening in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Sophie Bates)

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has undertaken an effort to change the names of ships and military bases that were given by President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, which often honored service members who were women, people of color, or from the LGBTQ+ community.

Abrams drew parallels between acts of radical political violence and the Trump administration’s use of military resources against protesters in Los Angeles who were demonstrating against immigration enforcement actions.

“Unfortunately, we cannot decry political violence and then sanction the sending of the Marines and the National Guard to stop protesters and not believe that that conflicting message doesn’t communicate itself,” Abrams told The Associated Press. “What I want us to remember is that whether it is Medgar Evers or Melissa Hortman, no one who is willing to speak for the people should have their lives cut short because of what they say.”

In addition to her father’s life and legacy, Evers-Everette wants people to remember the hatred that led to his assassination.

“We have to make sure we know what our history is,” she said. “So we don’t repeat the crazy, nasty, racist mess.”

By ILLIA NOVIKOV

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine is forging ahead with early plans for joint weapons production with some international allies, top officials said, while warning Wednesday of potential consequences of the U.S. decision to halt some arms shipments promised to help Kyiv fight off Russia’s invasion.

“Any delay or hesitation in supporting Ukraine’s defense capabilities will only encourage the aggressor to continue war and terror, not seek peace,” Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said.

A renewed Russian push to capture more land has put Ukraine’s short-handed defenses under severe strain in the all-out war launched by Moscow nearly 3½ years ago. Russian missiles and drones are battering Ukrainian cities. U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to find a peace settlement have stalled.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said it hadn’t received any official U.S. notification of a suspension or revision of agreed arms delivery schedules. Officials have requested a phone call with their U.S. counterparts to verify the status of specific items in the pipeline, it said in a statement.

As Washington — Ukraine’s biggest military backer — has distanced itself from Ukraine’s war efforts under President Donald Trump, a bigger onus has fallen on European countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday held their first direct telephone call in almost three years. Macron’s office said that during their two-hour conversation, the French leader underlined France’s “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and called for a ceasefire.

Washington’s decision could remove some of the most formidable weapons in Ukraine’s battlefield arsenal, including some air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery and other weapons, according to AP sources.

The U.S. decision should prompt European Union countries to spend more on developing Ukraine’s defense industry, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said.

“It just underlines the need for Europe to do more, and also to invest more in Ukraine,” Lund Poulsen told reporters. “We could do even more, to give them a stronger way of fighting back.”

Denmark on Tuesday took over the EU’s rotating presidency for six months. It is already investing directly in Ukraine’s defense industry, which can produce arms and ammunition more quickly and cheaply than elsewhere in Europe.

Denmark is also allowing companies from Ukraine to set up shop in Denmark and manufacture military equipment on safer ground. Lund Poulsen said the first companies could start work as soon as September, and he urged European partners to follow suit.

Ukraine prepares for joint investments in defense

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his daily address on Tuesday evening said officials are preparing with a sense of urgency for upcoming meetings with EU countries and other partners to talk about cooperation in weapons manufacturing.

Defense Minister Rustem Umerov announced that draft legislation on joint weapons production with allies is expected to be put to a vote in the Ukrainian parliament later this month. The proposed laws were shown to national defense companies on Tuesday, Umerov said.

The program includes plans to create a special legal and tax framework to help Ukrainian defense manufacturers scale up and modernize production, including building new facilities at home and abroad, according to Umerov.

Earlier this week, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said during a visit to Kyiv that Germany aims to help Ukraine manufacture more weapons more quickly. He was accompanied on the trip by German defense industry representatives.

Washington concerned about reduced stockpiles

The U.S. is halting some weapons deliveries to Ukraine out of concern that its own stockpiles have declined too far, officials said Tuesday. Certain munitions were longer-term commitments promised to Ukraine under the Biden administration, though the Defense Department didn’t provide details on what specific weapons were being held back.

The details on the weapons in some of the paused deliveries were confirmed by a U.S. official and former national security official familiar with the matter. Both requested anonymity to discuss what is being held up as the Pentagon has yet to provide details. The halt includes some shipments of Patriot missiles, precision-guided GMLRS, Hellfire missiles and Howitzer rounds.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. chargé d’affaires, John Hinkel, on Wednesday to discuss ongoing defense cooperation.

Deputy Foreign Minister Maryana Betsa thanked the U.S. for its continued support, but emphasized the “critical importance” of maintaining previously allocated defense packages, especially for bolstering Ukraine’s air defense.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Pentagon’s decision will help bring a settlement closer, because “the fewer weapons supplied to Ukraine, the closer the end of the (war) is.”

Europe can’t fill all the gaps

Under Trump, there have been no new announcements of U.S. military or weapons aid to Ukraine. Between March and April, the United States allocated no new aid to Ukraine, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute, which tracks such support.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022. For the first time since June 2022, European countries surpassed the U.S. in total military aid, totaling 72 billion euros ($85 billion) compared with 65 billion euros ($77 billion) from the U.S., the institute said last month.

Related Articles

Iran’s president orders country to suspend cooperation with UN nuclear watchdog IAEA

Hamas is open to a ceasefire. But Netanyahu says there’s no room for Hamas in postwar Gaza

Today in History: July 2, Civil Rights Act signed into law

The Dalai Lama says he plans to reincarnate, ensuring the institution will continue

Mexican banks face cascading consequences following US sanctions

Analysts say Ukraine’s European allies can fill some of the gaps and provide artillery systems. But they don’t possess alternatives to the U.S.-made HIMARS missiles and air defense systems, especially Patriots, which are crucial to help defend Ukrainian cities.

It’s not clear how much weaponry Ukraine possesses or what its most urgent needs are.

Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine