TRUMP SIGNS SPENDING PLAN, AVOIDING SHUTDOWN

WASHINGTON» President Donald Trump signed an $854 billion spending bill Friday to keep the federal government open through Dec. 7, averting a government shutdown in the weeks leading to November’s midterm elections.

Trump signed the legislation to fund the military and several civilian agencies without journalists present as the fate of his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, continued to hang in the balance. The House and Senate approved the spending plan this week.

But the passage — which avoids a shutdown before the elections that will determine control of Congress — also comes without significant new funding for Trump’s long promised and longstalled wall along the U.S.Mexico border, a fact he’s called “ridiculous.”

India’s top court lifts temple’s ban on women who menstruate.

NEW

DELHI» India’s Supreme Court on Friday lifted a temple’s ban on women of menstruating age, holding that equality is supreme irrespective of age and gender.

The historic Sabarimala temple had barred women age 10 to 50 from entering the temple, one of the largest Hindu pilgrimage centers in the world.

Some religious figures consider menstruating women to be impure. But the court ruled 41 the practice of excluding women cannot be regarded as an essential religious practice.

The temple argued the celibate nature of Sabarimala temple’s presiding deity Lord Ayyappa was protected by India’s Con stitution. The top court’s verdict is part a string of recent rulings that recognize more rights of women, challenging deeply conservative Indian society. On Thursday, it scrapped a law which did not allow wives to bring criminal charges against adulterous husbands.

Pope defrocks Chilean priest at center of abuse scandal.

Pope Francis has defrocked a Chilean priest who was a central character in the global sex abuse scandal, invoking his “supreme” authority to stiffen an earlier sentence because of the “exceptional amount of damage” the priest’s crimes had caused.

In a statement Friday, the Vatican said Francis had laicized 88yearold Fernando Karadima, who originally was sanctioned in 2011 to live a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for having sexually abused minors in the upscale San tiago parish he ran.

“It is without doubt an exceptional measure, but Karadima’s grave crimes have caused exceptional damage in Chile,” Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said.

Balin, founder of Jefferson Airplane, dies at 76.

Marty Balin, a patron of the 1960s “San Francisco Sound” as founder and lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane and coowner of the club where the Airplane and other Bay Area bands performed, has died. He was 76.

Balin died Thursday in Tampa, Fla., on the way to a hospital, spokesman Ryan Romenesko said. The cause of death was not immediately available.

The darkeyed, babyfaced Balin was an exfolk musician who formed the Airplane in 1965 and within two years was at the heart of a nationwide wave that briefly rivaled the Beatles’ influence and even helped inspire the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album. The Airplane was the breakout act among such San Franciscobased artists as the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, many of whom played early shows at the Matrix, a ballroom Balin helped run and for which the Airplane served as house band.

The Airplane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Macedonia or North Macedonia? Vote tests a nation’s identity.

SKOPJE,

Macedonians have had a country to call their own for less than three decades. Now the citizens of one of Europe’s youngest countries are being asked to weigh matters of national identity and national interest as they decide a fundamental question: what their homeland will be called.

A referendum set for Sunday in Macedonia seeks voter support for changing the Balkan nation’s name to North Macedonia. Greece has agreed to drop longstanding objections to neighboring Macedonia joining NATO and eventually becoming a member of the European Union, if the new name is approved.

The proposed “North” prefix might seem minor, but it touches a nerve in the former Yugoslav republic that declared independence in 1991, and in Greece, which has a province named Macedonia.