"facing off" is a clever way to say "to be or come in competition, to fight against." It's clever here because the actual phrase "to face off" coincides with people making ugly faces. Haha!' A "mug" is portrait of a person. The word "mugshot" is used to describe a police photo of a suspect who has been arrested. The word "mean" refers to "looking aggressive." Scores of: many in part: partially (not all the way, not entirely) Millions in damages are being sought: this means that the lawyers for this company (Kinder Morgan) want to have a trial where the protesters would be condemned to pay millions of dollars in penalties for hindering the work of the company. A meme poking fun: a meme is an image that people use on the internet to make a funny statement. Memes can be drawings or pictures of normal persons or animals. Usually, people go to a website where they can enter a funny sentence, as if the person or animal in the meme picture said that sentence. "to poke fun" means to laugh about another person. You can poke fun and the other person can laugh with you or you can poke fun and hurt the other person. "at the assertion": an assertion is a statement. The lawyer for the company Kinder Morgan made the assertion that the company's workers could not do their work because people were looking at them with funny faces. This is very silly to say. It is even sillier that the company now wants millions of dollars from all the people making funny faces. The memes make fun of the lawyer and the company for wanting money like that. "constitute assault": this is part of the sentence "[The] BC. Supreme Court head last week [said] that facial expressions constitute assault." A high court in Canada said that making funny faces is the same as {constitutes} being aggressive {assault}. I hope this helps!