The Brief

All nine people aboard a jet that crashed near homes in Greenacres, near West Palm Beach, have died, the transportation secretary said. The aircraft had departed Austin, Texas, and was headed to the Bahamas, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters there appeared to be no casualties on the ground. Details about what may have caused the crash had not been shared.

A federal judge on Saturday threw out President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch. The suit concerned a story about a letter to Jeffrey Epstein that was purportedly written and signed by Trump as part of a birthday book.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the case with prejudice, ruling that Trump did not show the defendants made defamatory statements with actual malice, as the law requires. NPR quoted the judge as saying the president was "grasping at straws."

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska's Senate race if the Republican incumbent loses. She wrote that the relief sought is "infeasible" because many voters have already cast ballots and those ballots have been mixed together to the point that they cannot be matched to specific voters. The DOJ had asked the court to separate ballots showing votes for a second candidate named Dan Sullivan, which Alaska's attorneys called meritless.

Incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan has vowed to honour the outcome of the race, according to Al Jazeera. Sullivan and allies have accused Democrats of recruiting the second candidate to confuse voters, and he denies knowing of any such plot. Alaska's top federal prosecutor did not say what crimes are being investigated.

A federal judge ordered the federal government to stop demanding that state and local election officials separate out ballots and to stop threatening criminal prosecution for noncompliance. The order followed letters asking officials to set aside ballots of possible non-citizen voters.

A PBS analysis found that more than 40% of names on a DOJ list of alleged noncitizens were not on California's voter rolls. It also found that thousands of U.S. citizens appear to be flagged as ineligible on the list. PBS also reported that the Justice Department is urging sanctions against an analysis critical of its noncitizen voting claims; attorneys for an immigrant rights group filed papers on Saturday saying their analysis found more than 40% of people on the list do not appear in the state's voter file.

Two days before the midterms, Paxton and Talarico are competing for the Texas Senate seat while Trump campaigns virtually. Early balloting totals were approaching 50 million heading into the weekend, compared with about 112 million total votes in the 2022 midterms. Al Jazeera now reports more than 50 million votes cast, a record for early voting.

Al Jazeera reported Democrats remain ahead in national polls, and BBC described the roughly $500 million Texas race as possibly the most closely watched of the cycle.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, 53, was hospitalized on Saturday after experiencing a stroke, his office said. His chief of staff said he started experiencing numbness in his arm while at his son's hockey game.

Al Jazeera reported that Murphy, who is not up for re-election this year, is alert.

Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost the August Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed by a slim margin, endorsed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, two days before the election. PBS reported the endorsement came after she was uninvited to a joint event with El-Sayed the same day.

BBC reported that one top Democrat called the move a "despicable betrayal," and Al Jazeera reported that Stevens was heckled as a "traitor." CBS had reported that El-Sayed asked Stevens not to attend his final campaign events. Stevens had demanded that he condemn an outside group's ad and apologize for comments about Israel, while El-Sayed said she was "intent on relitigating" their primary.