Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has twice made history for Democrats: She steered her party’s campaign arm as Democrats narrowly won the majority last year, and she is the first and only Latina in the Senate.

Now, the 2022 midterms threaten to erase both feats.

Nevada, with its hard-hit, hospitality-centered economy, exemplifies the most critical challenges Democrats face in their fight to keep the Senate majority. They need an economic revival that leaves behind the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic and brings down one of the highest state unemployment rates in the U.S. The state will also test the party’s appeal to Latino voters: President Joe Biden carried the Latino vote handily in 2020, but Donald Trump made big inroads in Nevada and other swing states that Democrats hope was a blip, not the beginning of a trend.

Throw in a midterm election environment with Democrats in control of the White House, and it amounts to a difficult reelection test for the first-term senator just as she’s getting her first taste of her party in power in Washington. Cortez Masto is warning Democrats to take her race seriously.

Cummings testified that in February 2020, Johnson viewed COVID-19 as a "scare story" and suggested that he could have England's chief medical officer inject him with the virus on live television to reassure the public.

Herd immunity — either in September 2020 after a single peak or January 2021 after a second peak — was viewed by the U.K. government as an "inevitability" up until mid-March, Cummings testified. Downing Street has denied that purposely aiming for herd immunity, which would have resulted in mass death, was ever government policy.

Cummings testified that on March 13, a health department official went to him and said: "I have been told for years there was a plan for this. There is no plan. We are in huge trouble. I think we are absolutely f**ked. I think we are heading for disaster. We are going to kill thousands of people."

Cummings said that Health Secretary Matt Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly." He said he relayed that opinion to Johnson multiple times.

An information technology company has backed out of running the hand recount of ballots in the infamous Arizona election audit.

The contract with Pennsylvania-based Wake TSI ended as scheduled on May 14, the original completion date for the hand count of ballots cast in Maricopa County, and the company chose not to renew its contract, reported AZCentral.

"They were done," said Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson and former state GOP chair. "They didn't want to come back."

The Scottsdale-based technology company StratTech Solutions is now in charge of the hand count, although it's not clear the firm has any election or auditing experience.

The Republican Governors Association on Tuesday threw out Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a top Trump ally, after he showed up to its spring conference in Tennessee, he told POLITICO in an interview.

Lindell said he had flown to Nashville on Monday to attend the three-day meeting starting on Tuesday, but that only a few minutes after he collected his credential at the JW Marriott Hotel, an event coordinator in the lobby told him he was not allowed at any of the official RGA events.

An RGA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday night that Lindell tried to join transportation for members only for a dinner at the Tennessee Governor's Mansion and was denied. The person added: “These events are for RGA members, and Mike Lindell is not currently an RGA member.”

Lindell rose to political fame in the last year as he became a top ally of then-President Donald Trump, even speaking at a White House event in the early weeks of the pandemic. Trump called him a friend during that Rose Garden press briefing. After the 2020 election, Lindell became one of the most prominent people touting Trump's falsehoods about a stolen election, and he hosted a feature-length documentary on the One America News Network about the subject.

NEW YORK — There was a shakeup in the race for New York City mayor on Tuesday as a new PIX11, NewsNation, Emerson College poll showed candidate Kathryn Garcia surging from fourth place to lead the crowded field of contenders.

The poll found Garcia, a former NYC Sanitation Department commissioner, leading the Democratic primary with 21% of votes. She was followed closely by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams — a steady frontrunner in all three PIX11 polls — who garnered 20% of votes from those surveyed.

Rounding out the top five were Andrew Yang at 16%; New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer at 10%; and former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio Maya Wiley at 9%.

The only other candidate to poll above 5% was nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, who got 7%.

...snip...

When factoring in the city’s new ranked choice voting system, Garcia maintained a narrow lead in all rounds of the latest poll except for round 6, when Adams won by 0.3%.

The disturbing video went viral across India in a matter of hours: Scores of bodies, feared to be of covid-19 victims, washed up on the shores of the holy Ganges River in the northeastern state of Bihar. The villagers were surprised and suspected the bodies had floated from far away, according to a reporter on the ground.

Investigators are still trying to understand what happened, but it appears to be another grim reminder of the raging death toll in the country — a death toll that is going largely undercounted, especially in rural areas, even as the official figures break records: On May 19 there were more than 4,500 deaths reported in a single day.

While a lot of media coverage has focused on the lack of oxygen and hospital beds in large cities, the real carnage is unfolding in our villages, where access to basic health care is virtually nonexistent.

India’s leading Hindi newspaper, the Dainik Bhaskar, has dispatched brave reporters to several towns in Uttar Pradesh, which neighbors Bihar and is governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and their dispatches should shame the collective conscience of the nation. The journalists counted more than 2,000 bodies that had either been dumped or hurriedly buried by local officials in a clear effort to underplay the coronavirus casualties in the region.

Village after village is being wiped out in Uttar Pradesh, and it’s impossible not to draw a link to local elections that were not postponed. People traveled to the state from cities like Mumbai and Delhi to cast their votes, and they brought the virus with them, infecting an already vulnerable population.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — There’s no road trip, no soul searching. No beard or blogging. But Beto O’Rourke is making a political life decision again.

Three years after becoming Democrats’ breakout star out of Texas, and a year removed from crashing back to Earth in a short-lived presidential run, O’Rourke is again weighing another campaign — this time for governor.

But now O’Rourke, who teased an announcement of his bid for the White House on the cover of Vanity Fair, is being quiet about it. He says he hasn’t ruled out anything, but isn’t saying much else. And Texas Democrats are itching for an answer.

“Impatience is not the word for it,” Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said. “But anxious is.”

UK aircraft have been ordered to stay away from Belarusian airspace, following Sunday’s forced diversion of a Ryanair plane.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said he has instructed the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to request airlines avoid Belarusian airspace “in order to keep passengers safe”.