President Donald Trump speaks to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh the State of the Union address before members of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol February 5, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The U.S. Supreme Court late Monday delivered a victory for the Republican Party by barring the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin from extending its Election Day deadline for the arrival of absentee ballots amid the pandemic, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh issuing an ominous concurring opinion that echoes President Donald Trump's false narrative on mail-in voting.

The 5-3 decision along ideological lines—with the court's five conservatives in the majority—blocked a request by Wisconsin Democrats and voting rights groups to revive a federal judge's ruling from last month that would have allowed mail-in ballots to be counted if postmarked by Election Day and received by November 9, a six-day extension of the current deadline of November 3 at 8:00 pm.

Wisconsin Republicans quickly appealed the order, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit blocked the ruling earlier this month.

In raising alarm about the potential consequences of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Wisconsin's strict Election Day deadline as ongoing mail delays heighten fears that many ballots could arrive late, legal analysts pointed with particular dismay at the reasoning of Kavanaugh, characterizing the right-wing justice's 18-page opinion (pdf) as a blaring signal of his willingness to abet a possible attempt by Trump to stop the counting of valid absentee ballots....

The mayor of Rome has said organised crime groups planned to kill her and her family because she was taking them on in parts of the Italian capital where they hold sway.

Virginia Raggi became the Eternal City’s first female mayor when she was elected in 2016 in a breakthrough for her party, the Five Star Movement, which now governs nationally. She is running for re-election next year.

She said in a pre-recorded TV interview that the Casamonica family, notorious for its criminal activity, targeted her after she demolished some of their illegally built villas in 2018, forcing her to live with a police escort.

“We have been informed that they were planning an attack against me and my family,” she said, without giving further details.

Raggi said she was also fighting other powerful mob clans, such as the Spada family in the seaside neighbourhood of Ostia and the Marando family in San Basilio, on Rome’s eastern outskirts.

“There are parts of Rome where people come close to me to tell me to keep on fighting but then they move away because they are afraid of being seen by the clans,” she said in the interview on Canale 5....

Emmanuel Macron gives a speech on secularism on 2 October, before the death of Samuel Paty, in which he said Islam was ‘experiencing a crisis across the world’. Photograph: Eric Tschaen/SIPA/Rex/ Shutterstock

On 6 October, when Samuel Paty, a popular history and geography teacher at a school in a quiet Paris suburb, presented a copy of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that provoked the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine five years ago, he self-evidently had no idea of the tragic consequence for his own life, French society or France’s relations with the Islamic world. What was intended as a classroom exploration of the freedom of thought has turned into a mini-clash of civilisations.

Ten days later, Paty was killed [by cutting off his head, because of a cartoon!], allegedly by a Russian-born teenager of Chechen [Islamic] heritage, sending an electric shock into France’s long debate about secularism, or laïcité. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, responded by saying France would not “renounce the caricatures”.

Since then Macron has been described as mentally ill by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; his ambassador to Pakistan has been summoned to condemn incitement of Islamophobia; and from Sana’a to Riyadh he has become a one-man axis of evil. French products are the subject of a boycott. Le Train Bleu restaurant in Doha, “a quintessential Parisian dining experience” in Qatar, is for instance hurriedly re-sourcing its products.

It would be easy to think that Macron, facing record Covid infections, might look at his in-tray and back off. But he appears to have done the opposite, ringing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with the Chechen origins of Paty’s alleged assailant in mind, to urge him to redouble Russia’s efforts to cooperate on terrorism....

A seafood restaurant at Hellshire Beach. The sea is now perilously close to the businesses on the shore. Photograph: Christopher Serju

....For years, this was the scene at the Hellshire Beach in Portmore, St Catherine, on a public holiday or weekend when Jamaicans and visitors alike would flock to one of the island’s most popular beaches. Today, however, parents no longer bring their children. The horses, along with most of the beachline, have long disappeared and the few visitors who come to Aunt Merl’s or Prendy’s on the Beach – two of the few remaining seafood restaurants left standing – are confined to the benches inside....

Photo credit: Peter Ma via Flickr

Environmental activists are calling for action over a stranded oil tanker holding 1.3-million barrels of oil off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

The ship, Nabarima, is a Venezuelan oil tanker used to contain crude oil and operated by an Italian energy company in conjunction with a local Venezuelan company.

According to Global Citizen, an international non-profit that campaigns for global climate action and is tracking the unfolding situation, if the ship does leak or sink the spill would be five times worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which are the two biggest oil spills in history....