By Francesca Hangeior.

President Joe Biden on Friday commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug offences in what the White House called the largest single-day act of clemency in US history.

Those whose sentences were commuted were serving “disproportionately long sentences” compared to what they would receive today, Biden said in a statement.

He called the move “an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families.”

“With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in US history,” Biden said, adding that he may issue further commutations or pardons before he hands over power to President-elect Donald Trump on Monday.

Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoned 39 others last month.

Among those pardoned in December was Biden’s son Hunter, who was facing a possible prison sentence after being convicted of gun and tax crimes.

Biden has meanwhile reportedly been debating whether to issue blanket pardons for some allies and former officials amid fears they could be targeted for what Trump has previously called “retribution.”

In December, Biden also commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates on federal death row.

Three men were excluded from the move: one of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, a gunman who murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in 2018 and a white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers in 2015.

Trump has indicated that he will resume federal executions, which were paused while Biden was in office.

By Francesca Hangeior.

A Pakistani court on Friday convicted former Pakistan Prime Minister, Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi in a landmark graft case, sentencing Khan to 14 years in prison.

Khan, who has been held in custody since August 2023, was charged with around 200 cases but his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, claimed the latest conviction was being used to pressure him into silence.

“I will neither make any deal nor seek any relief,” Khan told reporters inside the courtroom after his conviction.

The anti-graft court convened in the jail near the capital Islamabad, where Khan is being held, and convicted him and his wife over a welfare foundation they established together, the Al-Qadir Trust.

“The prosecution has proven its case. Khan is convicted,” said Judge Nasir Rana, announcing a 14-year sentence for Khan and seven years for Bibi.

Khan maintains the cases are politically motivated and designed to keep him from returning to power.

The sentence has been delayed several times over the past month, with analysts saying the jail term was being used to pressure Khan into accepting a deal with the military to step back from politics.

Since being ousted from power in 2022, Khan has launched an unprecedented campaign in which he has openly criticised the country’s powerful generals.

He’s been previously handed four convictions, two of which have been overturned while the sentences in the other two cases were suspended. But, he remained in prison over pending cases.

Last year, a United Nations panel of experts found that Khan’s detention “had no legal basis and appears to have been intended to disqualify him from running for political office.”

Khan was barred from standing in February’s election and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party was hamstrung by a widespread crackdown.

PTI won more seats than any other party in the poll. Still, a coalition of parties considered more pliable to the influence of the military establishment shut them out of power.

David Lynch, the filmmaker celebrated for his uniquely dark and dreamlike vision in such movies as “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and the TV series “Twin Peaks,” has died just days before his 79th birthday.

His family announced the death in a Facebook post on Thursday.

“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole,’” the family’s post read. “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

The cause of death and location was not immediately available. Last summer, Lynch had revealed to Sight and Sound that he was diagnosed with emphysema and would not be leaving his home because of fears of contracting the coronavirus or “even a cold.”

“I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not,” Lynch said, adding he didn’t expect to make another film.

“I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it,” Lynch said. “I wouldn’t like that so much.”

Lynch was a onetime painter who broke through in the 1970s with the surreal “Eraserhead” and rarely failed to startle and inspire audiences, peers and critics in the following decades. His notable releases ranged from the neo-noir “Mulholland Drive” to the skewed gothic of “Blue Velvet” to the eclectic and eccentric “Twin Peaks,” which won three Golden Globes, two Emmys and even a Grammy for its theme music. Pauline Kael, the film critic, called Lynch “the first populist surrealist — a Frank Capra of dream logic.”

“‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Elephant Man’ defined him as a singular, visionary dreamer who directed films that felt handmade,” director Steven Spielberg said in a statement. Spielberg noted that he had cast Lynch as director John Ford, one of his early influences, in his 2022 film “The Fabelmans.”

“It was surreal and seemed like a scene out of one of David’s own movies,” Spielberg said. “The world is going to miss such an original and unique voice.”

“Lynchian” became a style of its own, yet one that ultimately belonged only to him. Lynch’s films pulled disturbing surrealistic mysteries and unsettling noir nightmares out of ordinary life. In the opening scenes of “Blue Velvet,” among suburban homes and picket fences, an investigator finds a severed ear lying in a manicured lawn.

Steven Soderbergh, who told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was a proud owner of two end tables crafted by Lynch (his numerous hobbies included furniture design), called “Elephant Man” a perfect film.

“He’s one of those filmmakers who was influential but impossible to imitate. People would try but he had one kind of algorithm that worked for him and you attempted to recreate it at your peril,” Soderbergh told the AP. “As non-linear and illogical as they often seemed, they were clearly highly organized in his mind.”

Lynch never won a competitive Academy Award. He received nominations for directing “The Elephant Man,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and, in 2019, was presented an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

“To the Academy and everyone who helped me along the way, thanks,” he said at the time, in characteristically off-beat remarks. “You have a very nice face. Good night.”

His other credits included the crime story “Wild at Heart,” winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; the biographical drama “The Elephant Man” and the G-rated, aptly straightforward “The Straight Story.” Actors regularly appearing in his movies included Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts and Richard Farnsworth.

Lynch was a Missoula, Montana, native who moved around often with his family as a child and would long feel most at home away from the classroom, free to explore his fascination with the world. Lynch’s mother was a English teacher and his father a research scientist with the U.S. Agriculture Department. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest before the family settled in Virginia. Lynch’s childhood was by all accounts free of trauma. He praised his parents as “loving” and “fair” in his memoir, though he also recalled formative memories that shaped his sensibility.

One day near his family’s Pacific Northwest home, Lynch recalled seeing a beautiful, naked woman emerge from the woods bloodied and weeping.

“I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods,” Lynch told Rolling Stone. “And it just seemed to me that people only told you 10% of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other 90%.”

He had an early gift for visual arts and a passion for travel and discovery. He dropped out of several colleges before enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, beginning of a decade-long apprenticeship as a maker of short movies. He was working as a printmaker in 1966 when he made his first film, a four-minute short named “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times).” That and other worked landed Lynch a place at the then-nascent American Film Institute.

There he began working on what would become his 1977 feature debut, “Eraserhead.”

“David’s always had a cheerful disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to dark things,” a childhood friend is quoted as saying in “Room to Dream,” a 2018 book by Lynch and Kristine McKenna. That’s one of the mysteries of David.”

Aside from furniture making and painting, Lynch was a coffee maker, composer, sculptor and cartoonist. He exuded a Zen peacefulness that he attributed to Transcendental Meditation, which his David Lynch Foundation promoted. In the 2017 short film “What Did Jack Do?” he played a detective interrogating a monkey.

Lynch was himself a singular presence, almost as beguiling and deadpan as his own films. For years, he posted videos of daily weather reports from Southern California. When asked for analysis of his films, Lynch typically demurred.

“I like things that leave some room to dream,” he told the New York Times in 1995. “A lot of mysteries are sewn up at the end, and that kills the dream.”