Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa granted clemency to more than 4,000 prisoners, including some who were on death row, in an independence day amnesty on Thursday.

Zimbabwe marked 44 years of independence from white minority rule, which ended in 1980 after a bloody bush war. The country’s name was changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe.

The presidential amnesty, the second in less than a year, benefits female, older and juvenile inmates, the terminally ill and some who were originally sentenced to death.

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Those once on death row but who had their sentences commuted to life terms in previous clemency orders or through court appeals are to be freed provided they have been in prison for at least 20 years, according to the clemency order, which was announced Wednesday and due to take effect on Thursday.

All female prisoners who had served at least a third of their sentence by independence day are being freed, as are juvenile inmates who have served the same period.

Prisoners age 60 and older who have served one tenth of their sentences will also be released. Mnangagwa also pardoned the blind and others with disabilities who have served a third of their sentence.

The prisoners are being released in batches across the country.

However, those jailed for “specified” offences that include sexual offences, robbery, public violence, unlawful possession of firearms, human trafficking and theft or vandalism of electricity and telecommunications infrastructure won’t benefit from the amnesty.

All death row prisoners who have been in jail for at least 10 years had their sentences commuted to life in prison under the amnesty.

Zimbabwe has more than 60 inmates on death row. It wasn’t immediately clear how many of those had their sentences commuted to life under the amnesty.

Zimbabwe is one of more than a dozen countries in Africa and more than 50 across the world that have the death penalty, although the country’s last hanging was in 2005. Mnangagwa says he supports abolishing the death penalty, a move which was backed by the Cabinet in February and is now awaiting approval from Parliament.

Mnangagwa freed more than 4,000 prisoners in another clemency order last May aimed at decongesting the southern African nation’s overcrowded prisons, where conditions are usually harsh. At the time, Zimbabwe had about 22,000 prisoners crammed into prisons with a capacity of 17,000.

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Former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg was sentenced on Wednesday to five months in jail after pleading guilty to lying under oath during his testimony in the civil fraud case brought against former President Trump by New York Attorney General Letitia James. 

Weisselberg, 76, pleaded guilty on March 4 to two counts of perjury. He admitted to lying under oath on three occasions – depositions in July 2020 and May 2023 and on the witness stand at the trial last October – when he testified that he had little knowledge of how Trump’s Manhattan penthouse came to be valued on his financial statements at nearly three times its actual size.

To avoid violating his probation in a separate tax case, however, Weisselberg agreed to plead guilty only to charges related to his 2020 deposition testimony.

Weisselberg, wearing a black windbreaker and a surgical face mask, declined to address the court during the brief sentencing, which lasted less than five minutes. He was swiftly escorted from the courtroom in handcuffs following the proceeding to begin serving his sentence, The Associated Press reported.  

The civil fraud trial ended with Judge Arthur Engoron ruling that Trump and some of his executives had schemed to deceive banks, insurers and others by lying about his wealth on financial statements used to make deals and secure loans. The judge penalized Trump $455 million and ordered Weisselberg to pay $1 million. They are both appealing.

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In his decision, Engoron said he found Weisselberg’s testimony “intentionally evasive” and “highly unreliable.”

It will be Weisselberg’s second time behind bars. The former Trump Organization CFO served 100 days last year for dodging taxes on $1.7 million in company perks, including a rent-free Manhattan apartment and luxury cars. He will now again trade life as a Florida retiree for a stay at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex.

Trump’s family employed Weisselberg for nearly 50 years, then gave him a $2 million severance deal when the tax charges prompted him to retire. The company continues to pay his legal bills.

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Weisselberg has already testified twice in trials for Trump. His plea agreement does not require him to testify at Trump’s hush money criminal trial, which is scheduled to start with jury selection Monday. In agreeing to a five-month sentence, prosecutors cited Weisselberg’s age and willingness to admit wrongdoing. In New York, perjury is a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. Prosecutors promised not to prosecute Weisselberg for other crimes he might have committed in connection with his Trump Organization employment.

Trump’s lawyers took issue with Weisselberg’s perjury prosecution, accusing the Manhattan district attorney’s office of deploying “unethical, strong-armed tactics against an innocent man in his late 70s” while turning “a blind eye” to perjury allegations against Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who is now a key prosecution witness in the case against Trump involving hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office and Weisselberg’s lawyer Seth Rosenberg declined to address the court, according to the AP.

Trump valued the penthouse in his financial statements from at least 2012 to 2016 as though it measured 30,000 square feet. A former Trump real estate executive testified that Weisselberg provided the figure. The former executive said that when he asked for the apartment’s size in 2012, Weisselberg replied: “It’s quite large. I think it’s around 30,000 square feet.”

However, state lawyers noted, Weisselberg got an email early in that year with a 1994 document attached that pegged Trump’s apartment at 10,996 square feet. Weisselberg testified that he remembered the email but not the attachment and that he did not “walk around knowing the size” of the apartment.

After Forbes magazine published an article in 2017 disputing the size of Trump’s penthouse, its estimated value on his financial statement was cut from $327 million to about $117 million.

As Weisselberg was testifying last October, Forbes published an article with the headline “Trump’s Longtime CFO Lied, Under Oath, About Trump Tower Penthouse.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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New York Yankees legend Mariano Rivera expressed his belief that former President Trump could knock it out of the park if he is elected as president in November, and he endorsed him on Tuesday.

Rivera appeared on WABC radio’s “Sid & Friends” with Sid Rosenberg and said he would vote for his friend in a presumptive race against President Biden.

“President Trump, he’s my friend,” the all-time Major League Baseball saves leader said. “I can’t deny that. I will tell that to anyone. Before he was the president, he was my friend. Because of that, I’m going to vote for him.”

Trump awarded Rivera the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019. Trump, a Yankees fan, praised Rivera as “maybe the greatest pitcher of all time.”

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“Throughout Mariano’s incredible career, he remained a humble man with a deep Christian faith. The Lord doesn’t care about wealth or fame. The Lord cares about goodness and love in our hearts,” Trump said at the time.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor, and Rivera followed in the footsteps of other great athletes – Tiger Woods and Jerry West.

Rivera told Rosenberg receiving the medal was an “amazing moment.”

The former Yankees closer spent his entire career in New York. He played 19 seasons, recorded 652 saves and won five World Series championships.

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Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman lives on as a larger-than-life figure in the oft-told annals of American military history. 

The most intimate and unknown details of the man behind the legend are uncovered at the Sherman House Museum in Lancaster, Ohio.

It opens for the season today, Wednesday, April 10. 

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“Sometimes we turn these heroes, like we’ve done with George Washington, almost into gods. I think that does a disservice to them,” Michael Johnson, director of the Sherman House Museum, told Fox News Digital.

“I think it needs to be presented that these were ordinary people who did extraordinary things when the moment came, and that’s what set them apart.”

Sherman was born in the home in 1820 and lived there until his father died when the future West Point cadet and U.S. Army legend, one of 11 children, was just 9 years old.

The general has long been remembered as a fearsome military commander, which included a notorious reputation in the American south. 

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But the legend of the warrior overshadows the thoughtful artist discovered at the Sherman House Museum: patron of the theater, Renaissance man and beloved old commander called “Uncle Billy” by his men long after the war.

The museum displays a copy of Sherman’s brilliant illustration, “Death of Centaur,” which he drew while a cadet at the United States Military Academy. 

The original still hangs at West Point today.

“Artistry ran through the Sherman family,” said Johnson. “He loved the theater and he loved the arts. He finished top of his class at West Point in art.”

“Artistry ran through the Sherman family. He loved the theater and he loved the arts.”

The museum displays needlepoint by the soldier’s mother, Mary Hoyt Sherman, and four chairs carved with scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. 

Sherman had the chairs made after the war when he lived in New York City, where he became a prominent supporter of its famous theater scene.

Among other little-known contributions to American history: Sherman, while living in New York, personally selected Ellis Island as the location to place the Statue of Liberty, gifted by the people of France.

The life of the man known at the Sherman House Museum contrasts sharply with the fearsome wartime leader.

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Sherman led the Union force that overran and burned the little crossroads city of Atlanta to the ground in November 1864. 

It was a cultural watershed event in American history. Among other things, the burning of Atlanta inspired the beloved Civil War fictional epic “Gone With the Wind.”

He then led his troops on a conquest of Georgia all the way to Savannah. It’s gone down in history as Gen. Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea.” 

It’s considered a harbinger of the “total war” to follow in the 20th century. 

American GIs in World War II marched to victory across Europe and Asia supported by some 50,000 Sherman tanks, adding to the legend of his name.

Sherman lived a fascinating life before the Civil War, too, said Johnson.

He graduated from West Point in 1840 and retired from the Army for the first time in 1853.

In 1859, the man later notorious for ravaging the South took a job as the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. 

He returned to service for the Union when Louisiana seceded from the Union in January 1861. 

The southern institution the Ohio native helped establish is known today as Louisiana State University.

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Meta promises the next generation of its custom AI chips will be more powerful and able to train its ranking models much faster. 

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The commander of a US Navy warship is apparently a not-so-sharpshooter.

A commanding officer of the USS John S. McCain, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, was mocked online after he was photographed holding an assault weapon with its scope mounted backward as he took aim at a target known as a “killer tomato.”

Cmdr. Cameron Yast “observes the live-fire exercise event. The ship is in U.S. 7th Fleet conducting routine operations,” read a caption posted by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service alongside an image of him holding up the weapon with the Trijicon VCOG installed backward while pointed at a large target balloon.

It noted that the “7th Fleet is the U.S. Navy’s largest forward-deployed numbered fleet, and routinely interacts and operates with Allies and partners in preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific Region.”

Several people also pointed out that Yaste’s shooting stance and technique were not exactly on the level of, say, a US Marine.

One user on X wrote: “US Navy just killing it on Instagram,” alongside laughing and cringing emojis.

Soon after eagle-eyed viewers spotted the tactical blunder, the Navy yanked the embarrassing image from the official Defense Department database.

“Thank you for pointing out our rifle scope error in the previous post. Picture has been removed until EMI is completed!” the US Navy said after removing the photo.

Yaste earned a commission through the Navy ROTC in 2006, according to his official bio. He also attended the Naval Post Graduate School where he earned a master’s degree in astronautics.

He was previously the combat systems and weapons officer aboard the USS Hopper.

The Post has reached out to the US Navy for comment.

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Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has called the situation in Russia and Kazakhstan “very, very tense” as fast-melting snow and ice swell rivers in Russia’s southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan.

Both countries have declared a state of emergency after battling the rising rivers for over five days.

Kazakhstan has evacuated 96,272 people since the start of the floods. Russia itself has evacuated more than 7,000, mostly from the Orenburg region.

The floods in Orenburg began with the collapse of a dam on Saturday. Although President Vladimir Putin is frequently shown on Russian state television meeting officials and traveling across the country, the Kremlin said he is not yet planning to visit the flood-hit region.

The river’s water level in the city of Orenburg was above 10 metres on Wednesday, state news agency Ria Novosti reported, citing the regional governor. Photos shared by Russian news outlets showed roads covered in water, submerged fields and partially submerged houses.

The water was approaching high-rise buildings, Ria Novosti said, and more than 300 homes were flooded overnight, according to state news agency Tass.

People in the city of Orsk gathered in a rare protest Monday, calling for compensation after their homes were damaged. Protests are unusual in Russia, where authorities have consistently cracked down on any form of dissent following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

 Hundreds of people gathered in front of the administrative building in Orsk on Monday, and videos posted on Russian social media showed people chanting “Putin, help us!” and “Shame!”

Other videos on social media showed angry Russians refusing to leave the areas near their homes because they said thieves were looting abandoned houses with boats.

A criminal probe has been launched to investigate suspected construction violations that may have caused the dam to break. Local authorities said the dam could withstand water levels up to 5.5 metres. On Sunday, the level in Orsk reached 9.7 meters, according to Russia’s water level information site AllRivers.

The Ural River, about 2,428 kilometres long, flows from the southern section of the Ural Mountains into the north end of the Caspian Sea, through Russia and Kazakhstan.

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