WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether states can continue to count late-arriving mail ballots, which have been a target of President Donald Trump.

The justices took up an appeal from Mississippi after a panel of three judges nominated by the Republican president on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the state law allowing ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day to be counted violated federal law.

Mississippi is one of 16 states and the District of Columbia that accept mailed ballots received after Election Day as long as the ballots are postmarked on or before that date, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The case will be argued in the late winter or early spring. A final ruling almost certainly will come by late June, early enough to govern the counting of ballots in the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons for dozens of Trump allies are largely symbolic. It applies only to federal crimes, and none of the people named in the proclamation were ever charged federally over the bid to subvert the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It doesn’t affect state charges, though state prosecutions stemming from the 2020 election have hit a dead end or are just limping along.

The move, however, underscores Trump’s continued efforts to promote the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from him even though courts around the country and Trump’s own attorney general at the time found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome. Reviews, recounts and audits of the election in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss also affirmed Biden’s victory.

PARIS >> France’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy was freed from prison Monday after a Paris appeals court granted him release under judicial supervision, less than three weeks after he began serving a five-year sentence for criminal conspiracy in a scheme to finance his 2007 election campaign with funds from Libya.

Sarkozy, 70, left La Santé prison by car and later quickly stepped into his home in western Paris. The brief scene was in contrast to his very public incarceration 20 days earlier, when he walked down the alley near his house hand-in-hand with his wife and former supermodel Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as he waved to supporters.

MANILA, Philippines >> Typhoon Fung-wong blew out of the northwestern Philippines on Monday after setting off floods and landslides, knocking out power to entire provinces, killing at least eight people and displacing more than 1.4 million others.

The typhoon was forecast to head northwest toward Taiwan.

Fung-wong lashed the northern Philippines while the country was still dealing with the devastation wrought last week by Typhoon Kalmaegi, which left at least 224 people dead in central provinces on Nov. 4 before pummeling Vietnam, where at least five were killed.

Canada is no longer measles-free because of ongoing outbreaks, international health experts said Monday, as childhood vaccination rates fall and the highly contagious virus spreads across North and South America.

The loss of the country’s measles elimination status comes more than a year after the highly contagious virus started spreading.

Canada has logged 5,138 measles cases this year and two deaths. Both were babies who were exposed to the measles virus in the womb and born prematurely.

Measles elimination is a symbolic designation, but it represents a hard-won battle against the infectious disease. It is earned when a country shows it stopped continuous spread of the virus within local communities, though occasional cases might still pop up from travel.

An outbreak of botulism tied to ByHeart baby formula has made at least 15 infants sick in 12 states, a California health official said Monday.

Nine cases of infant botulism type A have been confirmed, with results on six others pending, said Dr. Erica Pan, health officer for the California Department of Public Health. That’s an increase from 13 cases in 10 states reported on Saturday.

Federal and state officials are investigating the outbreak, which began in mid-August. No deaths have been reported.

ByHeart, a maker of organic baby formula based in New York, recalled two lots of its Whole Nutrition Infant Formula over the weekend.

“Consumers in possession of this product should stop using it immediately,” California officials said.

LONDON >>U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened legal action against the BBC over the way a speech he made was edited in a documentary aired by Britain’s national broadcaster.

BBC chairman Samir Shah on Monday apologized for the “error of judgment,” which triggered the resignations of the BBC’s top executive and its head of news.

Director-General Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness quit Sunday over accusations of bias and misleading editing of a speech Trump delivered on Jan. 6, 2021, before a crowd of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington.

The hourlong documentary — titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” — was broadcast as part of the BBC’s “Panorama” series days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. It spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.” Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

— Denver Post wire reports