President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a temporary government spending bill that keeps agencies operating into December, after Congress punted key spending decisions until after the November election.

The bill generally funds agencies at current levels through Dec. 20, setting up the prospect of a government shutdown fight just before the holiday season. Lawmakers did agree to add $231 million to bolster the Secret Service after the two assassination attempts against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Money was also added to aid with the presidential transition.

The measure easily passed Congress on Wednesday on a bipartisan basis, 341-82 in the House and 78-18 in the Senate, with Republicans supplying all the no votes in both chambers.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., billed the measure as doing “only what’s absolutely necessary,” a statement directed at members of his own conference concerned about spending levels. Johnson said the only alternative to the continuing resolution at this stage would have been a government shutdown.

The temporary measure was needed because Congress is nowhere close to completing work on the dozen annual appropriations bills that fund much of the federal government. The House has passed five of the 12 bills, mostly along party lines. The Senate has passed zero.

U.S. suicide rate still high, but leveling off

U.S. suicides last year remained at about the highest level in the nation’s history, preliminary data suggests.

A little over 49,300 suicide deaths were reported in 2023, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number that could grow a little as some death investigations are wrapped up and reported.

Just under 49,500 were reported in 2022, according to final data released Thursday. The numbers are close enough that the suicide rate for the two years are the same, CDC officials said.

U.S. suicide rates have been rising for nearly 20 years, aside from a two-year drop around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. So “a leveling off of any increase in suicide is cautiously promising news,” said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University public health professor who studies suicide.

A 2-year-old national crisis line allows anyone in the U.S. to dial 988 to reach mental health specialists. That and other efforts may be starting to pay off, Keyes said, but it “really remains to be seen.” If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

Smarmatic, Newsmax settle election claims

A settlement was reached Thursday in a defamation lawsuit pitting an electronic voting machine manufacturer targeted by allies of former President Donald Trump against a conservative news outlet that aired accusations of vote manipulation in the 2020 election.

The settlement was announced just a few hours after jury selection began in a lawsuit filed by Florida-based Smarmatic against Newsmax.

Smartmatic claimed that Newsmax program hosts and guests made false and defamatory statements in November and December 2020 implying that Smartmatic participated in rigging the results and that its software was used to switch votes.

Newsmax countered that it was simply reporting on newsworthy allegations being made by Trump and his supporters, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and conservative attorney Sidney Powell. Newsmax has said the lawsuit represented a threat to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

“Newsmax is pleased to announce it has resolved the litigation brought by Smartmatic through a confidential settlement,” Newsmax said in a prepared statement.

D.C. disbars Giuliani over election activities

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, months after he lost his law license in New York for pursuing false claims that then-President Donald Trump made about his 2020 presidential election loss.

The brief ruling from Washington D.C.’s appeals court said Giuliani did not respond to an order to explain why he should not be disbarred in Washington after he was in New York last summer.

Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, called the decision “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice.” Giuliani has argued that he believed the claims he was making on behalf of the Trump campaign were true.His advocacy of Trump’s false election claims has also led to criminal charges.

Giuliani was one of the most vocal defenders of Trump in 2020, pushing unsubstantiated claims of large-scale voter fraud in the election the Republican lost to President Joe Biden.

Okla., Ala. execute convicted murderers

Alabama used nitrogen gas Thursday to execute a man convicted of killing three people in back-to-back workplace shootings, the second time the method that has generated debate about its humaneness has been used in the country

Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was pronounced dead at 6:38 p.m. local time at a south Alabama prison.

Miller was convicted of killing three men — Lee Holdbrooks, Christopher Scott Yancy and Terry Jarvis — in 1999 and the state had previously attempted to execute him by lethal injection in 2022.

Also Thursday, Oklahoma executed a man for his role in the 1992 fatal shooting of a convenience store owner after the governor again rejected a recommendation from the state’s parole board to spare a death row inmate’s life.

Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52, received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and was declared dead at 10:17 a.m.

“A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death,” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement explaining why he declined to commute Littlejohn’s sentence to life in prison without parole. “As a law and order governor, I have a hard time unilaterally overturning that decision.”

Stitt has granted clemency only once out of the five times that the parole board has recommended it during Stitt’s nearly six years in office. Oklahoma has carried out 14 executions under Stitt, having resumed them in 2021 after a more than six-year hiatus.

Judge revisits armorer’s ‘Rust’ conviction

A judge heard arguments Thursday on whether to dismiss a criminal conviction against a movie armorer in the shooting death of a cinematographer by actor Alec Baldwin and said she’ll rule next week on whether to skuttle the case or order a retrial.

In a remote court hearing, an attorney for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed challenged her March conviction for involuntary manslaughter, alleging that prosecutors failed to share evidence including ammunition that might have been exculpatory in the shooting death that occurred on the set of the Western movie “Rust” in 2021.

Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer is reconsidering the armorer’s felony conviction after throwing out an involuntary manslaughter case against Baldwin midtrial on similar grounds.

“This pattern of (evidence) discovery abuse occurred in Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s case in the same manner as it did in Mr. Baldwin’s case,” said Jason Bowles, lead defense attorney to Gutierrez-Reed.

— From news services