The eye of Hurricane Milton crossed the Florida coastline near Siesta Key at around 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening with sustained winds blasting at 120 mph. Follow our live coverage here.

Nearly 3 million Americans have already voted in the 2024 election. As expected, Democrats are outnumbering Republicans two-to-one in early votes cast in states that report party affiliation.

As of 6:43 p.m. on Oct. 9, 2,877,590 people had cast ballots in states that report early voting data, according to an update from the University of Florida’s Election Lab website. Of that figure, nearly 504,000 people had voted early in person, and more than 2.37 million had voted by mail, the tracking site found.

About 47.5 million mail-in ballots have been requested so far. In comparison, more than 92 million mail-in ballots were requested through the 2020 election, according to the university. In the states reporting how people voted by party, 56.3 percent of people who had returned early ballots were Democrats, representing about 732,378 voters. Another 27.4 percent were Republican, representing 356,797 voters, and 16.2 percent, or 210,980, were independent or members of a third party. Read the full story here›

New research by a pair of prominent economists suggests that the U.S. economy has been in a recession for the last two years after inflation adjustments are taken into account.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, cumulative inflation since 2019 has totaled nearly 25 percent. But inflation figures have been understated by nearly half, resulting in cumulative growth to be “overstated by roughly 15%,” say economists EJ Antoni and Peter St. Onge.

“Moreover, these adjustments indicate that the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022,” they wrote in a new study published in Brownstone Journal. Undercounting inflation has implications for economic growth because rapid price changes have bolstered the nominal values of a wide array of economic metrics “without resulting in any real change.” Read the full story here›

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