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For the first time in their careers, Russ and Lil Baby have joined forces for a new collaboration. The track, which is entitled “Ugly,” is one Russ has been teasing for the better part of the last week. The new release is an equally triumphant and egotistic effort that finds both rappers asserting their dominance and presence in whatever space they step in.

“I don’t gotta say, ‘What’s up’ to you, I don’t gotta say, ‘Hey,’” Russ proclaims on the track. “And if you talk sh*t, then it’s up with you, and that’s where it’s gon’ stay.” As the production’s trumpets continue to blare throughout Russ’ first verse, Lil Baby sticks to the track’s display of overconfidence with 16 bars that focus on his luxury cars, jewelry, and monetary gains while he brushes off issues in his love life as a result of his infidelity.

“Ugly” also arrives with a music video that sees Russ and Lil Baby in a strip club having the time of their lives as a slew of women dance around them. The song comes after a successful 2020 for both acts. Russ shared his third album, Shake The Snow Globe which was initially a 14 track effort with help from Rick Ross, Kiana Lede, Benny The Butcher, and more before a deluxe edition with seven more songs arrived.

He also dropped his Chomp EP which found him going toe-to-toe with some of today’s best lyricists including Ab-Soul, Kxng Crooked, and Black Thought. As for Lil Baby, he had last year on lock thanks to the success of his My Turn album and “The Bigger Picture,” the latter which helped him land a pair of nominations at the upcoming Grammy awards.

You can watch the “Ugly” video above.

Unfortunately for DaBaby, he’ll have to spend the early moments of the new year in handcuffs after he was arrested in Beverly Hills. According to TMZ on Thursday, the North Carolina rapper and his crew had just finished shopping at a Moncler store on Rodeo Drive when they were approached by officers who stopped and detained them, then conducted a search.

Sources close to the officers reveal that an employee at the store made a 911 call to report that DaBaby and the three other men that were with him were carrying weapons. Law enforcement discovered a loaded handgun during the search and ultimately arrested the “Rockstar” rapper on a misdemeanor charge of carrying a loaded firearm.

Onlookers in the area captured his arrest on camera, one that was peaceful. At first, the rapper and his crew were all placed in handcuffs, but TMZ reports that DaBaby was the only one taken into custody. Fans will have to wait and see how the situation plays out, but for the time being the rapper and his supporters can look forward to the upcoming Grammy Awards.

DaBaby landed a number of nominations in categories that include Record of the Year, Best Melodic Rap Performance, and Best Rap Song, all of which boast his chart-topping “Rockstar” single with Roddy Ricch. He also earned a nomination in the Best Rap Performance category for “BOP.”

(via TMZ)

Roddy Ricch is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Bridgerton is one of Netflix’s most watched shows at the moment, making a long run for the period drama about courtship in London likely. But one of its biggest stars may have his sights set on a much bigger franchise if betting odds are to be believed.

According to Variety, an emerging candidate on the betting markets to become the next James Bond is the Duke himself from the Shondra Rhimes-produced drama. That’s Regé-Jean Page to those who haven’t streamed the steam drama, which premiered recently and has risen to the top of the platform’s most-watched shows.

And as the show’s popularity has grown, so have the odds that Page may actually be in the running to replace Daniel Craig in the role.

Ladbrokes’ odds on which actor will play the next Bond is a closely followed process in the U.K. Page is now just 5/1 in the betting with Ladbrokes to replace Craig as Bond, having previously been 40/1 before Christmas.

“Tom Hardy still leads the way as favorite, with James Norton close behind in second place. But it really is all to play for in the race for 007 and RJP has a great chance if the odds are anything to go by,” Ladbrokes representative Alex Apati tells Variety.

It would certainly be an interesting path to Bond for Page, who plays the Duke of Hastings on the Regency drama. And a Ladbrokes rep explained to Variety that these sort of shifts in odds tend to happen for actors who get notoriety for a particular role, only to have their odds drop once the attention fades. But with speculation that a new Bond will be announced before the last Craig-led Bond film hits theaters, Page may have become the talk of Netflix at just the right time.

[via Variety]

Through the first three weeks of the NBA’s regular season only one game has been postponed due to a team not being able to play due to COVID-19 protocols, when the Rockets were forced to postpone their opener with the Thunder on the first full night of the season.

However, that may soon change after what transpired in Brooklyn on Thursday night. The 76ers lost to the Nets, 122-109, but apparently learned of a positive test result from a player during the game that has resulted in the entire team being quarantined in New York while they go through contact tracing protocols, per Shams Charania of The Athletic. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports Seth Curry, who did not play in Thursday’s game with ankle soreness, was the player who tested positive and was on the bench for the first quarter before results came back.

The Sixers were on the second night of a back-to-back, having played the Wizards on Wednesday in Philadelphia before traveling to Brooklyn on Thursday. As such, contact tracing is going to be very interesting to see what is determined as close contact as, while Curry didn’t play, he was in the locker room before the game and with the team in the traveling party. The Nets are still planning on flying to Memphis, without Kyrie Irving who missed Thursday’s game due to personal reasons, despite the Sixers news, likely because Curry was not on the floor.

It is not the first time the sports world has dealt with the issue of a player testing positive during a game, as it happened in the World Series with Justin Turner being pulled in the clinching game for the Dodgers. However, that was the final game of the season and as such, we never heard much about any fallout in testing or spread. Just as was the case with that news emerging, that Curry’s test returned positive during a game, even if he was out with an unrelated injury, calls into question the league’s protocols that allow games to be played before all the most recent tests are returned.

What comes next will be very important, both in how the Sixers contact tracing goes and what test results come back over the next week, particularly for the Sixers, Nets, Wizards, and their opponents. Philadelphia’s next scheduled game is Saturday against the Nuggets and then Monday in Atlanta against the Hawks and Tuesday back in Philly against the Heat (who play in Philly again on Thursday). Those three games would be the ones that, should contact tracing deem a majority of the team to be Curry’s close contact, would be potentially postponed under the league’s guidelines that call for close contacts to quarantine for seven days while registering negative tests each day before they’re allowed to return to the floor.

Michael Porter Jr. has not played for the Denver Nuggets in the last week due to contact tracing that has put him in the league’s COVID-19 protocols that requires a player return seven straight negative tests before they can return to play after being deemed a close contact of someone who has tested positive.

Porter Jr. is far from the only player to end up in a contact tracing situation, as we’ve seen it with John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Kevin Durant, and others to start the season. However, on Thursday, word broke from The Athletic’s Shams Charania that Porter Jr., who just cleared his seven-day quarantine, has had 10-14 days added on.

Given how the league’s COVID-19 protocols are written, the 10-plus day time frame would seem to indicate a positive test, as contact tracing calls for just a 7-day quarantine, like the one he entered last Thursday. In the four games he played at the start of this season, Porter Jr. averaged 19.5 points and 6.8 rebounds per game on strong efficiency, as he entered the starting lineup and performed well offensively as the Nuggets sorted things out. In his absence, Denver has gone 2-1 with both wins coming over the Timberwolves, and are in action currently against Dallas.

On the lower end of his new quarantine period, Porter Jr. would miss at least four more games for Denver (they play Utah in 10 days exactly), while the 14-day timeframe would mean he would miss six games. Will Barton has re-entered the starting lineup in Porter Jr.’s absence and may have to remain there for some more time.

The Brooklyn Nets knocked off the Philadelphia 76ers by a 122-109 margin at Barclays Center on Thursday evening and, under normal circumstances, that result wouldn’t turn heads in the NBA world. However, the Nets operated without both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in the game and received 28 points off the bench from Joe Harris to aid in pulling off the upset. The Durant absence was known as he remains in the league’s health and safety protocols, but just hours before tip-off word broke that Irving was not playing due to what the team listed as personal reasons.

After the win, a report from Joe Vardon of The Athletic states that the All-NBA point guard is not expected to join the Nets on their road trip to Memphis for their game on Friday.

The team confirmed the news shortly after Vardon’s report.

Nets head coach Steve Nash expressed before Thursday’s game that he had not spoken to Irving and was unaware of the reasoning behind his absence. First and foremost, there is the hope that everything is alright with Irving and his family at this time, and even with curiousness around the reasoning, it is important to keep that in mind.

On the basketball side, Durant remains out due to health and safety protocols and, despite the positive result on Thursday, the Nets are not in an ideal position to operate without both stars. Irving is off to a strong statistical start, averaging 27.1 points, 6.1 assists and 5.3 rebounds per game, and Durant looks to be close to his old self after missing a year with an Achilles injury. Standout guard Spencer Dinwiddie is also out with a long-term injury, and the Nets are constructed, at least in part, to support the talents of their top two players.

That said, Brooklyn will face a Memphis team that is also short-handed on Friday without Ja Morant, Jaren Jackson Jr. and others. From there, the Nets return home to face the Oklahoma City Thunder on Sunday in their follow-up contest.

In 2021, the music industry isn’t exactly the main concern for 50 Cent. Nowadays, the Queens native spends his time producing one of the TV industry’s most popular shows, Power. However, despite this path away from creating music, it doesn’t mean that 50 won’t take a moment to celebrate his past accolades and successes, something he took a moment to do on Thursday.

In a post to his Instagram page, 50 Cent reflected on his 2003 hit, “In Da Club” on its 18th anniversary. His phenomenal 2003 year began with the release of the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ single and nearly two decades later, the record still finds its way into various spaces, giving 50 more than enough of a reason to celebrate.

“Hey you ain’t gonna believe this one, but 18 years ago today i dropped a song i recorded in LA and it’s still spinning 1,000 times a week at radio,” he said in the caption of the Instagram post. He also took a moment to thank Eminem for putting him on and helping to launch his rap career. “I tell @eminem i love him for what he did for me, he put me on.”

This is the second time in recent months that 50 had a reason to celebrate “In Da Club.” Back in November, the song became the second pre-YouTube era hip-hop video to surpass a billion views on the platform.

Getting back to regular business, 50 Cent also made sure to plug his “Part Of The Game” single and his upcoming Power Book III: Raising Kanan spin-off which is set to begin in the summer. You can view 50 Cent’ Instagram post above.

The NFL Playoffs begin this weekend with the Wild Card round and, in fitting fashion after a bizarre 2020 season, the slate features six (!) games instead of four. Obviously, football fans won’t be complaining about the extra action to consume, though, and it does provide a bit of additional opportunity for handicapping. Week 17 was also kind, at least in this space, with a 4-1 record that quite honestly should’ve been 5-0. Alas, the Seahawks and Rams put together an unbelievable, 34-point fourth quarter to zoom over the total, leaving us without the elusive perfect week.

Still, the end of the season was quite positive, giving us some confidence as the postseason arrives. Before getting into the five-pack of selections for this week, let’s check in on the full-season progress.

• Week 17: 4-1
• 2020 Season: 43-40-2

Come get these winners.

Indianapolis Colts and Buffalo Bills UNDER 51.5 points

It’s a little bit scary to root for punts and field goals with this Bills offense right now. They’ve been a juggernaut for a while, and that explains why this total is where it is. With that out of the way, this number opened at 52.5 in most places and has fallen despite most of the action being on the Over. We like that indicator but, more than that, the Colts should be deploying a conservative, run-based attack that will keep the clock churning, and Indianapolis has the defense to at least slow Buffalo down a little bit. I wouldn’t love this any lower than where it is now, but it’s a good number.

Los Angeles Rams (+3.5) over Seattle Seahawks

The Seahawks closed -1/-1.5 against the Rams two weeks ago at home… and now it’s 3.5? Los Angeles might be without Jared Goff but, as we said last week (in a winning spot for us), the gap between Goff and his backup does not project to be as large as you may think. The Rams have the better defense and a solid enough running game. Anything more than a field goal is juicy in this spot.

Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Seahawks UNDER 42.5 points

For the first time this season, we’re firing twice on the same game. This is hideous given how low the total is, but it’s also the right side. The Seahawks went Under in seven straight games before last week and, as noted above, that was a hideous beat on an Under that was quite clearly the right side. For whatever reason, Seattle has chosen to travel back in time, relying on a ball control offense and churning clock in the process. The Seahawks are also playing (much) better on defense and, well, the Rams are awesome defensively. A number this small is going to scare some people off, but not us.

Chicago Bears (+10.5) over New Orleans Saints

Look, I get it. No one wants to have Mitch Trubisky on the road. I don’t either. This isn’t your older brother’s Saints offense, though, and New Orleans laying more than ten points against a decent team is tough. This is admittedly my least favorite play of the five, but we must stand on principle.

Cleveland Browns (+6) over Pittsburgh Steelers

Prior to the news about Kevin Stefanski, I thought this number should’ve been +3. I understand a little bit of a move with the Browns playing without him, but this moving all the way to +6 is a bridge too far. The Browns should be able to keep things interesting using their running game and, if nothing else, Pittsburgh’s offense can’t be described as dynamic. Taking anything away from last week’s game would be a fool’s errand, but I would’ve liked the Browns +6 in Pittsburgh last week as much as I do now.

Most everyone remembers the Saudi government murdering dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Turkey in 2018. Many also remember Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos getting his phone hacked and his dick pics leaked in alleged extortion attempt some months later. But the piece of the puzzle the public seems to have forgotten is that the final analysis showed that Bezos’s phone had been hacked by the Saudis, through a WhatsApp message from Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin-Salman (MBS) to Bezos.

This was presumably as payback for the Washington Post’s (owned by Bezos) critical coverage of the Saudis in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder. This after Khashoggi was himself murdered as retaliation for his critical MBS coverage in Bezos’ post.

That the leader of a close US ally had a dissident dismembered and then stole dick pics from the world’s richest man to help cover it up seems like it should’ve been a bigger story. Now, the full story of how it happened — the murder, the hack, the coverup — is being told in Bryan Fogel’s new documentary, The Dissident.

The documentary, releasing January 8th as a VOD rental, details, along with a few other works like, Assassins, about North Korea’s assassination of Kim Jong-nam in a Malaysian airport, a scary new world in which not just information, but government-sponsored assassins flow freely across international borders, murdering anyone who badmouths them with relative impunity.

Directing a movie about a leader who hacks tech titans and murders journalists across borders would seem to be a risky undertaking. Luckily that’s sort of Bryan Fogel’s bag, having won an Oscar in 2018 for Icarus, a movie in which he dug into Russia’s program to help its athletes dope without getting caught. Vladimir Putin, obviously, has his own history of murdering critics (allegedly), and Fogel’s main subject in Icarus is still in hiding. So Fogel knows a thing or two about investigating people who might kill him.

Yet Fogel soon found that merely making an insanely dangerous movie was only half the battle, he also had to get it released. And when, after a star-studded Sundance premiere attended by Hillary Clinton and widespread acclaim for the film, Fogel still couldn’t find a distributor, he felt the reach of MBS’s power in a different way.

In a media ecosystem where five big streamers control most of the content, all are afraid of offending big markets run by wealthy despots who could hurt their bottom line, and there’s a lot of Saudi money sloshing around in the film industry. In that way, MBS or the Chinese government don’t even need to assert direct control; to some degree, fearful execs will censor themselves.

One of the big takeaways seems to be this: the free flow of global capital is impeding the free flow of information, not to mention human rights. I spoke to Fogel recently about what it took to make the film, and the battle to get someone to distribute it.

—

So in Icarus you covered a decades-long cheating program in Russia, and then in this you’re going after MBS in Saudi Arabia. And these are people who sort of have a history of killing journalists. What gives you the courage to take on these kinds of projects?

These stories feel bigger than me and I feel compelled, I guess, as an activist to try to tell stories that can have impact. The funny thing is, Icarus, obviously there was a lot of stakes and there are still a lot of stakes and Grigory [Rodchenkov] is still living in hiding, but that journey and the accolades that the film received, and then the true changing of policy literally because of that film, the IOC banned Russia from the 2018 Olympic Games, five months after the film came out. And literally just a week ago, Congress and Trump signed into law a bill called RADA, the Rodchenkov Anti-doping Act, which criminalizes doping in sport and gives the United States abilities to investigate international doping scandals. And you go, wow, that’s the impact that a film can make. So I felt a burden that I had to continue on this path. I couldn’t go and go make a Disney film, because I had a friend who basically lives in hiding for the rest of his life from speaking the truth. What kind of person would I be if I went and took on a project for a payday rather than continuing to try to do work to bring truths and human rights abuses to light? I was looking for what that story was going to be. And sadly, during those first two weeks of October, 2018, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi unfolds on a global stage. This checked all the boxes of what I was looking to do and do next as a filmmaker and so I embarked on what has now been that two years journey.

How much have you had to teach yourself about cybersecurity just to protect your subjects in these movies?

You know, with Icarus we all started using burner phones and I used some burner phones with this one, too. We were working with different security consultants and then the FBI got involved and then dealing with U.S. intelligence… It basically becomes way, way outside of making a film. It’s like, okay, at one hand, you’re making a film, on the other hand, you’re literally in a real-world international political crisis. It’s a similar thing with this and there are a couple of security experts that appear in the film. Needless to say, they’ve been helpful in giving advice.

When you connect with those experts and dissident groups within those countries… how do you make sure they’re not infiltrated by U.S. security services?

You don’t. I mean, this world is only as good as the next hack, the next thing. So the way that this works is here’s the best analogy, right? You have cancer and if they think you have cancer in your abdominal area, they’re going to test for abdominal cancer, right? But you could have lung cancer that is never going to be detected because the only thing they tested for is abdominal cancer. Well, the same thing goes in hacking or security. You can only test based on what you know, and what you don’t know is what you don’t know. So the ability to detect Pegasus [the program used to hack Bezos’s phone] comes from these cybersecurity experts like John Railton-Scott and Citizen Lab, knowing all these servers that people communicate with. These main couple hundred servers that every single time we do a search it’s pinging that satellite, it’s going through that server, an Apple server, an Amazon server, a Google server.

Well, if they develop another way in, that detection system goes by the wayside. And so it’s a constant cat and mouse game. As revealed in the film, it turns out that a hacking group selling cybersecurity figured out that you could literally hack a phone by infiltrating a hole in WhatsApp. And all you had to do was call the person’s phone, using WhatsApp and the virus was on that person’s phone and they had full access to their device. So WhatsApp then closes the wormhole. I read yesterday that there was a back channel in Apple that they had just discovered where a guy basically set up a Wi-Fi in another room that your phone would connect to and just through that Wi-Fi they could get into the phone and hack it.

What we see, whether it was Snowden’s leak of the NSA or what you see in The Dissident and the hacking of Omar and Jamal or Jeff Bezos in this, this is the new frontier of war. Which is basically extortion for information, embarrassment over information, or being able to gain access to somebody’s device and then basically committing acts of violence or otherwise. And Pegasus hasn’t just been used by the Saudis. Ghana used it to go basically kill the opposition party. Mexico used it to basically go target journalists that were investigating the Mexican government for helping the drug traffickers. This is being used for all sorts of nefarious purposes and I’m sure there’s a lot of good purposes in it too.

This is the reality of this day and age, and, I think, also one of the main reasons why the film has struggled to have a big global streamer take it on.

Going back to the Bezos hack, it seems like such a huge story that not that many people know about. Did that go undercovered or did it just get sort of drowned out by other stories?

What had happened is Bezos basically is all of a sudden he’s trying to be extorted by the National Enquirer, right? Saying, “We have naked selfies of you, and we know you’re having an affair and we have the text messages,” and he’s going, “How is this possible?”

And as you see in the film at the same time, there’s this whole smear campaign against him and the Washington Post going on on Saudi Twitter, where he’s getting these weird messages from MBS. And the investigation reveals that data is streaming out of his phone and that it’s connecting to a server known to be a Saudi server. And Gavin de Becker wrote a piece on The Daily Beast basically saying, I have uncovered this hack and Bezos basically got in front of it and wrote a Medium post saying, “Hey, I am being extorted. And I believe that this is what’s happening.”

So those two pieces came forward from both Gavin de Becker and the Daily Beast and Jeff Bezos in the Medium but none of them specifically said the Saudis had hacked him. But then the ensuing investigation by cybersecurity experts determined that it was a hack of his phone that had happened through that WhatsApp message, that it was likely Pegasus. And I’ve worked with the UN investigators and with individuals on the Bezos team for months before that information became public so that I could have that be a part of the film. And the story came out of his hack right before the Sundance Film Festival, knowing that we didn’t want this information coming out for the first time in the film, that we wanted it to be validated through journalistic publications such as The New York Times and Washington Post and others that could investigate the evidence.

But then it seems like in the public mind that the connection between that original Bezos scandal and the Saudi government, it doesn’t seem like that is widely known still, even.

I think that so much gets lost, and I think it’s hard also to have sympathy for the richest man in the world. They go, okay, you were cheating on your wife, it got exposed, it cost you $40 billion and we don’t feel sorry for you. But the bigger takeaway from that is how scary that is. And also what we’re seeing, which to me is the bigger takeaway of this, is the fear that has been instilled in major corporations around the world and governments. I mean, we’re just learning in the last few days that Russia has hacked all over these government servers, right? No one is safe.

That fear of retribution, boycott, loss of business interests, loss of subscribers, loss of being able to sell your iPhones in that country, or being able to do business is being taken into account in a much more meaningful way than it should be. Because as all of these companies are now global businesses, and these streaming companies are streaming globally, it becomes harder and harder and harder to have a free flow of information.

There is an article in The New York Times just yesterday talking about the five big global streamers and how projects are being stopped because the interest of these companies is purely to grow their subscribers, sell their technology. And if that means that 800 people need to be beheaded in Saudi Arabia for tweeting against the government, well, so be it, because they’ve got hundreds of billions of dollars to invest. That’s a scary place I think that we’re finding ourselves in.

Can you tell me about the difficulties in finding distribution for this movie because of the content?

I mean, we premiered it at Sundance. We went and did six months of work post-Sundance to refine the film and bring that transcript to light, but that’s another story. Anyway, we were met with standing ovations. Hillary Clinton was at our premiere, Hatice (Khashoggi’s widow, a major character in the film) was with me, Agnès Callamard was with me and the amazing critical response to the film was so humbling. And then here we were, the hot film of Sundance, it’s on the top of the top lists, and we had not a single offer, not for $1, not for a million dollars, not for $10 million to acquire and distribute the film — not one.

And you go, how can that be? How can you be an Oscar-winning filmmaker that brings a film about a huge global story, Jamal Khashoggi was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, that is a murder mystery, that’s a cinematic thriller that has been acclaimed by publications, by critics, and yet it’s not worth a penny? So this is the world we’re living in, that you can spend two years risking your life to go make a film like this, to fight for justice and accountability and none of these companies will have your back.

Luckily months after Sundance, Tom Ortenberg and Briarcliff Entertainment stepped forward to acquire the film. And it was out December 25th in limited theaters and January 8th on VOD for rental, but it will not be available on the big streamers. I’m very grateful to Tom and Briarcliff for having the balls to do this, and disappointed that we are in this environment where business and money and shareholder accountability and subscriber growth is clearly taking precedent over bringing films like this to the mainstream.

How do they hold them back?

Look, these media conglomerates are very different companies today than they were a few years ago — whether that’s WarnerMedia which is now AT&T and Warner Brothers and HBO and all those other stations, or then you have Disney, which is Disney and Hulu and the theme parks and the entire Disney empire, and you have Netflix and you have Amazon, right? So you’re basically down to four companies that control pretty much the flow of all media and content. All four or five of these companies and Apple are huge global companies valued among the highest in the world. And with that comes a singular purpose, growth, shareholder price, market growth, subscriber growth, money, investment — how do we get more of that?

That simply doesn’t align with human rights. Because that means you can’t do business with China, it means that you wouldn’t distribute The Dissident, it means you wouldn’t take on Salman. This is the world with the monopolization of these media companies. The more they consolidate — and I can’t see them really consolidating more — with that there is a cost. That cost, I think is freedom of speech, freedom of press and holding authoritarian regimes accountable of the crimes such as murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Because in their minds, business interests will come before their human rights abuses.

‘The Dissident’ is available for VOD rental January 8th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

With less than two weeks left until his presidency officially comes to an end, Donald Trump has reportedly prepared a list of potential names to pardon before he exits office. According Bloomberg and those familiar with the matter, his list includes senior White House officials, family members, and himself of course, but it’s a pair of notable names in the music industry on the list that has caught some people’s attention.

Rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black both appear on the president’s list of potential pardons. Lil Wayne infamously posed with the president for a picture back in October after they met about Trump’s ‘Platinum Plan.” Wayne is currently facing firearm charges after a December 2019 incident at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport with federal agents. An anonymous tip led agents to search the rapper’s plane where they discovered a gold-plated Remington 1911, .45-caliber handgun in his possession. As a result, he was charged with illegal possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, one he pled guilty to, and faces up to 10 years in prison due to a prior gun charge on his criminal record.

Kodak Black, on the other hand, is currently in prison after he was charged with falsifying paperwork to obtain a firearm. Celebrities like rapper Lil Yachty and Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson both asked the president to pardon Black. Jackson also promised a $1 million donation in a now-deleted tweet to charity if the president pardoned Kodak.

Other names who are being considered for a pardon include Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Stephen Miller, personnel chief John McEntee, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle.

(via Bloomberg)