FAFSA has everyone scouring their social media accounts.
If you’ve attended college, you’ve probably had to fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or a FAFSA, which is basically a set of documents asking the government for funds to help out with tuition. Because you need to “prove” your need for financial aid, “I’m telling FAFSA” became a meme to respond to people flexing on Instagram and Twitter.
When high schooler @worldwideliz_ tweeted an insanely well-produced prom video, showing off her crew’s luxury car and elaborate dresses, another Twitter user joked that FAFSA was watching.
Twitter user @_Ferrrg replied to the original clout video with the iconic GIF of rapper Birdman rubbing his hands in concern.
“FAFSA looking at this like,” they wrote, not even tagging the Federal Student Aid account.
But the next day, FAFSA responded with a similarly suspicious GIF of a child who is presumably sipping the tea.
Twitter users rightfully freaked out, but the thread turned into a surprisingly informational platform for FAFSA to answer questions.
And by the way, you can stop looking over your shoulder when you’re indulgent on Twitter. According to BuzzFeed, the Department of Education assured stressed college hopefuls that they “do not “monitor people’s [online] activities.”
“We don’t monitor people’s activity, instead we look for opportunities to engage with our customers to inform them about federal student aid and answer their questions … using words and GIFs,” the Department of Education said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
Apparently, social media users tend to send students’ extravagant prom posts to FASFA around this time every year. Although the account usually doesn’t respond, they took this opportunity to “embrace the channel’s humor.”
Keep up the prom flexes — but just know that FAFSA might respond.
Players of Cuba’s Los Leneros de las Tunas and Venezuela’s Cardenales de Lara play in the Caribbean Series baseball tournament at Rod Carew stadium in Panama City, Saturday, Feb. 9, 2019.Associated Press
President Donald Trump and his administration have decided to cancel a December deal that would have allowed MLB teams to sign Cuban players, according to the Washington Post.
The White House argued that the Cuban Baseball Federation was part of the Cuban government, which caused the deal to be nullified because trade with Cuba is currently banned.
The initial deal, which was expected to run through October 2021, allowed Cuban players to sign with clubs under similar rules as other international players from Japan and South Korea.
Players who were over 25 years old would be free to sign with organizations that paid a “release fee” to the Cuban club. Other players could sign minor league deals.
Tony Clark, executive director for the MLB Players Association, said in December the goal was to create a “safe, legal process for entry to our system” instead of defecting to the country while potentially using traffickers, perDavid K. Li and Mary Murrayof NBC Sports.
The U.S. Department of Treasury signed off on the deal at the time.
However, the Trump administration has now decided that the baseball federation is too closely aligned with the Cuban sports ministry. This is a change from the Barack Obama-era policy that decided the two were separate.
“Major League Baseball has been informed of the dangers of dealing with Cuba,” a senior administration official said, perCarol E. Lee and Josh Ledermanof NBC Sports.
Cuba has produced several notable players in recent years, including Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Cespedes. However, the new policy would have created more opportunities for younger players and allowed them to avoid the sometimes dangerous and costly process of defecting.
MLB teams were given a list of34 eligible playersfrom Cuba earlier this month.
President Donald Trump’s move to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group came despite Pentagon officials’ warnings that it could lead to retaliatory attacks against U.S. troops. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Donald Trump has declared on more than one occasion that he’s smarter than America’s military leaders.
And with his unprecedented decision Monday to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group, he’s setting up another test of that thesis.
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Trump chose to overrule the Pentagon after National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo advised that the top brass’ warnings about risks to U.S. troops are overblown, several officials with direct knowledge of the deliberations told POLITICO.
The president’s move came despite Pentagon officials’ warnings that it could lead to retaliatory attacks against U.S. troops by Iranian-backed forces in the Middle East and threats from Iranian leaders that U.S. troops could face “consequences.”
“Like most things Iran-related, DoD opposed,” said a senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe ongoing tensions between the White House National Security Council, which has mounted a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, and a Pentagon brass that has cautioned against unnecessary provocations.
Senior military leaders used the same rationale this winter to try to resist the decision to designate an Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militia group operating in Iraq known as Harakat al-Nujaba as a terrorist group.
After no retaliation resulted, the White House “pushed back hard” against Pentagon arguments that designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would pose a risk to U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, said the senior defense official.
“It was pretty much a fait accompli from Pompeo and Bolton, and DoD basically got rolled over,” added a former administration official familiar with the deliberations who also insisted on anonymity. “I think the NSC’s read is that DoD’s faking it, that there isn’t a real risk. That’s been an ongoing theme with Bolton with respect to all things Iran.”
The IRGC, a paramilitary arm of the Iranian military, has been blamed for a series of terrorist attacks around the world dating back decades.
Its formal designation as a terrorist group is the first time the United States has labeled an official segment of another government as a terrorist group. Such designations, which carry a more robust set of economic sanctions against personnel and those with financial ties to the organization, typically are reserved for non-state actors.
In response to Monday’s decision, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif asked Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to declare U.S. Central Command, the American military headquarters responsible for the Middle East, a terrorist organization, Iranian state-run media reported.
The Pentagon would not say whether it had made any adjustments or issued any new warnings to itsforces deployed in the region. “As a matter of policy, we do not discuss adjustments to force protection levels or measures for operational security reasons,” a spokesperson said.
The CIA, which also operates paramilitary forces in the region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But many in the Pentagon’s top leadership were clearly against Trump’s move.
The Pentagon resistance came mainly from Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and top civilian officials including John Rood, the Pentagon’s top policy official, and Kathryn Wheelbarger, the acting assistant defense secretary for international security affairs.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who is auditioning to be the permanent Pentagon chief, has not been a leading opponent.
“It’s never been from Shanahan. It’s always been from Rood and the chairman and Wheelbarger and her Iran director,” the senior defense official said.
Still, Trump’s decision is par for the course for a president who has bucked the advice of military leaders on numerous occasions — including when ordering the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and bycriticizing NATO allies.
While campaigning for president, Trump declared at one point: “I know more about [the Islamic State] than the generals do. Believe me.”
Last year he also told an interviewer that he knew more about NATO than his then-Pentagon chief, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, a retired general.
“Frankly, I like General Mattis,” Trump told CBS’ “60 Minutes.” “I think I know more about it than he does. And I know more about it from the standpoint of fairness, that I can tell you.”
Trump made it clear early on he wanted the U.S. military to get out of Syria, where it was fighting the Islamic State, but for much of the first half of his term so far, Trump held off on the pull-out, doubling down on the fight against the terrorist group, also known as ISIS.
But late last year, Trump shocked nearly all of Washington – in that case including hawkish aides such as Bolton and Pompeo — by suddenly announcing that the U.S. would leave Syria, where the fight against ISIS was still ongoing.
In the months since, Pentagon and other officials have managed to convince Trump to walk back his decision some; the U.S. is leaving at least several hundred troops in Syria for the time being, but it’s anyone’s guess when Trump may suddenly pull the plug once more.
Trump also has dismissed the traditional U.S. approach to NATO by questioning the value of the 70-year-old military alliance and at times refusing to commit to its core concept of mutual defense. Trump’s main beef with NATO is that many of its other member states do not spend enough on collective defense.
He publicly dismissed the alliance despite advice from then Defense Secretary Mattis, a retired general who resigned late last year after the Syria pullout decision and used his resignation letter to highlight the value of alliances.
When it comes to Iran, Trump has repeatedly clashed with military leaders. Mattis, for instance, supported the Iran nuclear deal but Trump nonetheless decided to pull the U.S. out of the international agreement, which lifted sanctions in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.
According to the Trump administration, Iran is responsible for the deaths of at least 603 American service members in Iraq since 2003. Iran’s government, including through the IRGC, has backed a range of militias in Iraq that are often at odds with U.S. troops.
Some analysts and others thus downplay the idea that designating the IRGC a terrorist group could make things worse for U.S. troops.
“The IRGC has already killed a few hundred U.S. troops and looks for opportunities to support and facilitate those proxy forces who also want to do harm to U.S. troops—so how much more at risk could U.S. troops be than they already are?” said Luke Coffey of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which generally supports Trump.
Aside from military concerns about potential Iranian retaliation against U.S. troops in places such as Iraq and Syria, there also are legal concerns about how enforceable the penalties associated with such designations can be. For one thing, the IRGC plays a major role in Iran’s economy, and many foreign companies, not to mention individuals, may wind up providing so-called material support to the IRGC even if they do not intend to, including by purchasing non-military goods.
Some hawkish anti-Iran voices in Washington are pushing Trump to do even more to isolate and weaken the Iranian regime, in the hopes that it will somehow collapse. But opponents of that hardline approach worry that the moves he’s making now will not destroy the regime, but will instead make it harder for the U.S. to use diplomacy to deal with Tehran in the future.
There are a lot of unpopular opinions out there. Some are polarizing (I will go to my grave defending the honor of pineapple on pizza), while some takes aren’t actually that controversial.
But every so often there is one opinion so devious, so purely evil, that it rises above the rest. I’m talking, of course, about eating cereal with water.
Redditor u/DubitablyIndubitable shared their beliefs on how this breakfast food should be eaten with a post that has since become the top of all time on the subreddit r/unpopularopinion.
The reaction was a swift and intense “thanks, I hate it!” This was compounded by the fact that he admitted he doesn’t even drink the cereal water (two words that shouldn’t be together), the same way you would drink the leftover cereal milk in the bowl.
“It’s just for the texture it provides the cereal,” the wrote.
What?
The saga continues, when it turns out that he breaks another sacred rule of cereal-eating. Folks, this person pours the water (and I still can’t believe this) first, and then pours the cereal.
While there seems to be no reason to disrespect cereal like this, u/DubitablyIndubitable responded to comments by saying that he “[doesn’t] like milk and cereal is dry. Water is the logical solution.” Reddit user u/Elimacc replied with “Dude, just like, pick a different breakfast. Instant oatmeal with water is fine.” Agreed.
Even the moderator of the subreddit chimed in on the thread.
Although in the spirit of what the subreddit specifically asks for, many users were actually grateful that for once, this opinion was sincerely unpopular. Not prejudice thinly disguised as an “opinion,” not political discourse, just genuinely a banal unpopular opinion.
That’s how much ice Earth’s glaciers lost in the 55 years between 1961 and 2016. An international team of scientists used satellite and direct field observations to conclude that Earth’s glaciers have melted such a profound sum of ice in the last half-century. They published their report Monday in the journal Nature.
This grand figure also means the planet is losing, on average, 335 billion metric tons of ice per year. (For reference, there are 2 trillion pounds of ice in just 1 billion tons.)
“In other words, every single year we are losing about three times the volume of all ice stored in the European Alps, and this accounts for around 30 percent of the current rate of sea-level rise,” Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich and lead author of the research, said in a statement.
The map below, developed by the European Space Agency, illustrates where this ice loss has occurred. Alaska leads the race with over 3019 gigatons lost in total, or 816 million 747s.
The world’s total ice loss between 1961 and 2016.
Image: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY / ADAPTED FROM ZEMP ET AL. (2019) NATURE / DATA COURTESY OF WORLD GLACIER MONITORING SERVICE
The pronounced melting in Alaska is little surprise. Earth’s polar regions are the fastest warming region on Earth, warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe.
Overall, the over 9 trillion metric tons of melted ice equates to a little over an inch of sea level rise, or 27 millimeters, over the 55-year period.
But, critically, it’s not just melting glaciers that are driving sea level rise, which has raised sea levels by around 9 inches along portions of the East Coast in the last century. The ocean is absorbing vast quantities of heat, and is expanding. Specifically, the absorbent oceans soak up over 90 percent of the heat trapped by human-generated greenhouse gas emissions.
What’s more, the pace of melt is expected to pick up as the planet continues on its accelerated warming trend — stoked by the highest levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in millions of years.
Projections of sea level rise by century’s end are between two and three feet, though NASA scientists admit this is almost certainly a “conservative estimate.” In more extreme scenarios, the number could be as much a six feet by 2100.
There is only one region of the world, southwest Asia, that has gained some ice mass since the 1960s. But its neighbor, southeast Asia, lost a similar amount of ice, canceling these fleeting gains.
Overall, the picture is clear. Greenland is in hot water. Ice loss in the Antarctic is picking up steam. The vast Himalayan glaciers have a dire future, at best. And you don’t need to be a scientist employing sophisticated satellite technology to see what’s transpiring on Earth.
Alaska’s famous Mendenhall Glacier is vanishing in front of the public’s eyes. In 1850, there were an estimated 150 sizable glaciers in what is now Glacier National Park. Today, there are 26 glaciers large enough to be counted.
The reason for such wide-scale planetary change is not due to the whims of weather, natural variation, volcanoes, or other factors climate scientists have considered for decades.
“We know it’s caused by global warming and human emissions of these greenhouse gases,” NASA oceanographer Josh Willis, who has been watching Greenland melt into the sea, told Mashable. “The basic physics of the warming planet have been known for over a century.”
Three US service members and a contractor have been killed by an improvised explosive device close to a base near Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, the United States military has said.
The blast took place on Monday close to Bagram airbase, the largest US military facility in Afghanistan.
In a statement, the military said three other US service members were wounded and were receiving treatment.
The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack.
A 52-year-old lawyer and former foreign service officer, Francis Cissna became director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in October 2017. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Groups that represent President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration base urged him Monday to retain top immigration official Francis Cissna amid a staffing shakeup driven by White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.
Miller has pushed in recent days to oust Cissna, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as part of a White House housecleaning as the administration grapples with a surge of migrant families arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned Sunday and the White House on Friday announced the withdrawal of Ronald Vitiello, its nominee to become director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In addition, Secret Service Director Randolph Alles is vacating his position, the White House said Monday. “Mr. Alles will be leaving shortly,” said White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “and President Trump has selected James M. Murray, a career member of the USSS, to take over as director beginning in May.”
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a grassroots organization that seeks lower levels of immigration, pronounced himself confounded by reports that Cissna may be removed from his post at USCIS.
“He’s great. He’s worked in this issue for years, he’s extremely knowledgeable,” Beck said. “He’s exactly the type of person who needs to be in DHS in leadership.”
A 52-year-old lawyer and former foreign service officer, Cissna became director of USCIS in October 2017. During his tenure, he issued a steady stream of memos and guidance that toughened the process to obtain certain visas for workers and students, among other changes.
Cissna’s agency continues to work on regulations aimed at reducing legal immigration, including the so-called public charge rule, which could block immigrants from obtaining a green card if they’ve received public benefits in the past or are deemed likely to do so in the future.
A September profile of Cissna in POLITICO identified him as one of the more quietly effective Trump officials furthering the administration’s restrictionist agenda on immigration.
But as the number of Central American families arrested at the southwest border skyrocketed in recent months, the White House grew frustrated with Cissna’s performance, according to a person familiar with the situation. USCIS does not deal directly with border security, but senior administration officials argued that he allowed the agency’s bureaucracy to sidetrack major initiatives, the person said.
Miller has pressed Cissna, unsuccessfully, to launch more experimentally and legally questionable policies, according to three people familiar with the situation.
Cissna’s defenders contend that he strove to adhere to the law while Miller pressed to overstep legal boundaries.
“If they push out the uber-competent guy that the left hates because he’s getting things done within the law and the right loves because he’s actually being faithful to the president’s campaign promises, they’re even bigger idiots than we already know,” one former DHS official said.
Jessica Vaughan, a policy director with the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, praised Cissna‘s deliberate but legally effective style.
“He’s gone like a tortoise rather than a hare,” she said — an approach that, she argued, will have more lasting effects.
Moreover, Cissna has taken action “in a way that has largely avoided the flaming lawsuits and bad optics of other controversial policies, like family separations and the vetting executive order,” Vaughan said. “He’s just gone about his business steadily using the constitutional authorities that are available.”
Chris Chmielenski, deputy director at NumbersUSA, said he supports Cissna, but that some policies could move along faster. He cited the administration’s plan to revoke work permits for spouses of H-1B visa holders, but added that he wasn’t clear what has held up the regulation. A related proposed rule has been under review at the White House budget office since late February.
“There are a few things that have not been done yet that they’ve talked about, and that we’d like to see swifter movement on,” he said.
Eliana Johnson and Nancy Cook contributed to this report.
Jordan Peele’sUs is more tension than horror. The box office-hit follows Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her family’s terrifying journey as the four come face to face with their doppelgängers — referred to as the “tethered” in the film. There’s the imposing copy of father Gabe (Winston Duke), all brute force and flared nostrils; a teenage look-alike of daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), her head slightly bowed with a full, unnerving smile on her face; a snarling, growling feral version of son Jason (Evan Alex), rarely seen without a mask; and Adelaide’s wide-eyed, gruff-voiced other. These four are cunning, silent, and, it seems, much stronger than their upper-middle class counterparts. As the film’s plot races towards answers for why they exist, the tension repeatedly rises and falls.
The film’s startling soundtrack, helmed by veteran composer Michael Abels, acts as a storyteller in its own right, imbuing each scene with an unsettling feeling that lingers until the very end. Abels handled the “gospel horror” of Get Out after Peele discovered him on YouTube. And the success of Get Out carved out a special space for him in the movie industry and Peele’s inner circle. “He has given me a full chance to express my creativity within his vision so any time that I get to work with him, it has been blessed territory,” the composer tells MTV News over the phone.
MTV News spoke to Abels about the sounds of Us, the choice to use “I Got 5 On It,” and what would he do to his own doppelgänger.
MTV News:How did your approach to composing music for Us differ from Get Out? I read that for Get Out, Jordan Peele provided you with a script and you created music based on that.
Abels: Jordan likes to hear music in pre-production, before he’s even shot any film, because it helps him to design the sonic world of the film as well as the visual world. The difference here is that it was a different story and the music has to identify with the characters in this film and tell their story. He wanted me to experiment with duality in music, just because duality is an overarching theme in the film itself. Instruments that normally don’t go together. There’s a solo violin, but there’s also a cimbalom (a kind of instrument that looks like a piano but is played with hammers). There’s a track where a kalimba, berimbau, and didgeridoo are playing together and they are all from different cultures, so there was a lot of experimenting with traditional and nontraditional sounds specifically to come up with the sonic palette for Us.
MTV News: The cimbalom became Umbrae’s (Zora’s doppelgänger) defining sound. Did you find have other instruments to serve as opposites for other cast members?
Abels: Not as specifically as that one because it seems like there are decisions that happen as a result of working on the film and it’s not like I said, “OK, I have these four characters and this is her instrument, this his instrument…,” and so forth. I could start out that way, but then the film evolves and different scenes need different sorts of music and that would be too restricting. The cimbalom seemed to work really well in the scenes with Umbrae and her smiling mischief.
Another thing is that there’s a solo violin and that happens a lot over Red, which is Adelaide’s doppelgänger, and the violin somehow had a very good way of expressing Red’s quest for justice. So there’s a menacing malevolence to her, but there’s also a freedom of spirit that she has. The violin was very good at balancing those two feelings.
Universal
MTV News: What do the tethered represent to you? How did you look to reflect this in the music?
Abels: Jordan doesn’t give people a specific example of what the tethered represent because he wants the audience to be able to participate in the process of deciding what metaphors resonate best with them about the film. The tethered are people who don’t have opportunities in their lives. They are restricted in their ability to function as fully independent individuals and have access to things that we have that we take for granted. If that reminds you of anyone, whether its a group in society or yourself, that’s sort of the idea that’s in the realm of what this film is talking about. I think anyone can identify, in their own lives, times where they haven’t been free to express themselves or haven’t had the opportunities that others have had.
One of the great things about the film is that because you can identify with the characters on some level, not only are you terrified of them in one sense, you can empathize with them on another. That’s one of the beautiful dualities in us, one of the many dualities that are present. There are times that the music empathizes with them and is not terrifying but, in fact, lonely and isolated. Particularly, the track called “Human,” where you’re in the underpass and you see their world. There’s some empty low sounds of wind whistling through an empty cavern, sounds we call “ambiance,” that are musical but are in the background creating a kind of sonic environment. Then there are voices. There are a lot of voices in the score and at that point, they aren’t even saying words, they are just kind of moaning in a very anguished and lonely way. All these things are designed to create the feelings that the tethered have and why they act the way to do.
MTV News: Where did the inspiration come from for “Anthem“?
Abels: It came from my original conversation with Jordan about the type of music that he wanted to hear in the film. He decides this idea of duality, and the second thing that he said to me was that he wanted to start the film with children’s voices. In his films, one of the things that he’s really known for is taking something that you think of in one context – usually, that context being very sweet innocent or happy — and recasting it with images that cause you to look at in an entirely different way. So with children’s voices, we would think of them as being very sweet and innocent, so he wanted me to start with that and show people that children’s voices can be very scary and disturbing.
The thing that you need to get from “Anthem,” as an audience, is that there are a group of people and they are organized, so the tune is sort of like a battle cry. You hear this very march-like, militaristic music and you can tell that this group of people have an evil intent even if you can’t understand what they are saying. But then, also it’s important for this battle cry to not sound like it’s coming from some culture other than our own. So rather than a militaristic Western march, the beat drops and it’s really funky and goes against the voices, not with it. It’s made up of drums from a bunch of different cultures and that was my way of letting people know that this is a march for the people of all the people.
MTV News: Who would you say are the villains of the film – the humans or the tethered?
Abels: That’s the whole nature of the film: The tethered are human, and that’s the most important thing to understand about them. They are not aliens. They are us. The film makes it unclear how much they are separate from us and how much they are literally a part of who we are. You’re meant to come away asking that question. To me, I think the answer is clearly both.
Universal
MTV News: If put in the same situation as Adelaide, would you kill your doppelgänger or let them live? Why?
Abels: That’s such a great question. Well, one thing about Jordan’s storytelling, and something I think is key to his brand, is that his characters act as any normal person would do in incredible situations. For example, they call the police at the beginning and not at the end. And they say humorous things, very darkly humorous things in upsetting situations because that’s what people do. Humor is key for us to be able to handle stressful situations. The reason I bring that up is because would I kill my doppelgänger? I sure wouldn’t want to, but if my double was going to kill my children, I think the answer is that I would.
MTV News: How different do you think the film’s energy would have been if instead of the horrified rendition of “I Got 5 On It,” playing in the background of the showdown between Adelaide and Red, the original song, “Pas de Deux” from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, was played?
Abels: It would have been different, that’s for sure. How different though, I couldn’t tell you. The phrase “Pas de Deux,” it comes from classical ballet. It’s a name given to a scene in a ballet that features the prima ballerina and the head male dancer and so they do a duet. The rough translation of “Pas de Deux” is “duet.” The original intention from the script was that the scene would be underscored by “Pas de Deux” from The Nutcracker. There’s a long version of that scene that is scored that way. The idea was that we would use that music, or I was going to make a horror version of that, and it was an exciting challenge that I was looking forward to, but it was clear to Jordan, following the response of the trailer, what needed to be done.
(JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)
He’s a visionary with his own ideas, but he also responds to feedback. I think that comes from his improv comedy background where so much of what people who improvise do is in response to where the audience is allowing them to go creatively. It was clear to him that there had to be some payoff for the response that people were having. So we decided to use “5 On It” as this thing that got twisted for final battle instead of Tchaikovsky, and I think it was a very great choice.
Ahmed Abdirzak has filed to dismiss his lawsuit against Conor McGregor after the UFC star smashed his phone in March.
Per TMZ Sports, Abdirzak’s suit against McGregor—for battery, assault and the intentional infliction of emotional distress—has been dismissed “with prejudice,” so the pair likely reached an out-of-court settlement regarding the matter.
The Irishman was arrested after breaking the phone outside the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami and taking it with him, and he’s still facing criminal charges of robbery and criminal mischief.
It’s said those charges could carry a potential maximum six-year prison sentence if he’s convicted.
The charges were reduced from strong-armed robbery to robbery by sudden snatching, both felonies, while the criminal mischief charge was originally a felony before being reclassed as a misdemeanor. The original charges could have carried a combined 20-year prison sentence.
TMZ leaked footage of the March 11 incident in which McGregor can be seen stamping on the phone:
Abdirzak, 22, was seeking in excess of $15,000. He said he was trying to take a photo of the 30-year-old, who “flew into a rage and punched [Abdirzak’s] smartphone out of his hand” and then “repeatedly” stomped on it.
The former two-weight champion left with the phone and was later arrested at a nearby mansion where he was staying with his family.
His arraignment will take place Wednesday. Per ESPN’sAriel Helwani, McGregor will not have to personally attend the hearing if he submits a written not guilty plea in advance.
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