内容摘要：“We can introduce you to our partners in Moscow, you can send the payment to them in a Russian bank and they send money to us here,” he said.

“We can introduce you to our partners in Moscow, you can send the payment to them in a Russian bank and they send money to us here,” he said.

On his heels came President Donald Trump. As with so many of his actions in his first 100 days, Trump was acting as if he were already running out of time. He had barely taken the oath of office before he issued 1,600 pardons to those said to be guilty of insurrection in the often-violent storming of the Capitol in 2021. Sure enough, this provoked outrage among some and was characterised by the chief of the Capitol Police as a “slap in the face” to all his officers.Trump has since continued his spate of pardons. Some are fairly predictable: 21 of his recent grants concerned the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act, a law that prohibits violence, intimidation, and interference with individuals seeking or providing reproductive health services – generally, then, people picketing abortion clinics. Here, he was courting the anti-abortion rights wing of MAGA.

White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement that Trump is “always pleased to give well-deserving Americans a second chance, especially those who have been unfairly targeted and overly prosecuted by an unjust justice system”.As a principle, this is fair enough, but normally there must be some evidence of remorse and rehabilitation. This week, in contrast, he pardoned Scott Jenkins, a longtime supporter and former Sheriff who had been found guilty in 2024 of accepting more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for making several businessmen into official law enforcement agents. “Sheriff Scott Jenkins, his wife Patricia, and their family have been dragged through HELL,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network. Yet Jenkins had merely been dragged through the US trial system, like millions of others, and he had not even turned himself in to start his sentence.Then there was the Reality TV couple, Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted in 2022 for defrauding banks of more than $36m by submitting false bank statements and other records. They spent their ill-gotten gains on luxury cars and travel, and it is difficult to see what they did to merit special treatment.

Which brings us to the latest case, that of Larry Hoover, the notorious founder of the Chicago Gangster Disciples, convicted of ordering the murder of a rival, along with a laundry list of other offences. Prosecutors did not even bother to bring many cases to trial. Indeed, at a hearing last year, a judge asked one of Hoover’s lawyers: “How many other murders is he responsible for?”Trump commuted his federal sentence, which is unlikely to achieve much more than to transfer him to the less pleasant Illinois prison, where he must serve 200 years on a state murder conviction. What does this achieve, and what was the president’s motive for doing it?

One particularly odd element of these pardons is that CBS News reports that many of the beneficiaries had not even made a formal application. Trump just reached out and acted on his own. In some instances, he seems to have been relying on what he saw on television. He has said he is considering clemency for those convicted in the 2020 conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government. “I did watch the trial,” he said. “It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job…”

Even if it is currently sometimes corrupt, or simply arbitrary, I would not abolish the president’s prerogative of mercy. I am in favour of considering second chances in all cases, for as a society we are much too punitive. But if citizens are to maintain any sense of respect for the judicial system, there should be a degree of consistency.Fonseka was a five-time Best Actress winner at Sri Lanka’s Presidential Film Awards. Her most recent win was in 2006 for her role in Ammawarune. She also won international accolades at the Moscow International Film Festival and the New Delhi Film Festival.

She became Sri Lanka’s first female television drama director in the 1980s, a time when women’s participation behind the camera was unusual. Fonseka also had a short-lived foray into politics, serving as a member of Sri Lanka’s parliament from 2010 to 2015 under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa.Film critic and journalist Anuradha Kodagoda told Al Jazeera that Fonseka was “rare and unique in Sri Lankan cinema” for the range of characters she played.

Petite and fair, with an oval face and soft features, Fonseka was a “pioneer” in representing working-class women onscreen, and “represented the beauty idol for Sri Lankan women”, said Kodagoda.“She portrayed her characters very organically and authentically. That is the magic of it, I think,” Kodagoda said.