One party is running on democracy and elections in 2022, and it’s not the Democrats.

Despite a broad consensus on the left that the country’s most revered institutions are in trouble, with President Biden and other leaders warning gravely that protecting voting rights and fair elections is of paramount importance, the vast majority of Democratic candidates are veering away from those issues on the campaign trail.

Instead, they are focusing on bread-and-butter economic topics like inflation and gas prices. Continuing to win elections must come first, the thinking goes — and polls and focus groups show that the issue of voting rights is far down the list of voters’ most urgent concerns.

“You cannot buy a lot of groceries with voting rights,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, a Texas state representative who organized Democrats’ flight from the state in July in a failed effort to block a Republican election bill. “Last summer there was nothing more important than voting rights, but the universe has shifted, and it’s become a conversation about our economy and inflation and the cost of goods.”

“Vladimir Putin is set to declare all-out war on Ukraine as his military chiefs seek ‘payback’ for their invasion failures,” the Telegraph reports.

“Frustrated army chiefs are urging the Russian president to drop the term ‘special operation’ used for the invasion and instead declare war, which would enable mass mobilization of Russians.”

People familiar with Bragg’s thinking said his hesitation in going forward is due in large part to his lack of faith in Cohen, a former Trump attorney and a convicted felon. Cohen wrote a book about his life as a Trump crony, and frequently criticizes the ex-president. He has made clear that he is willing to testify about how business was done at the Trump Organization if a case is brought.

He says that he met with investigators from the DA’s office about a dozen times before Dunne and Pomerantz left, but that no one from Bragg’s team has contacted him since. Pomerantz’s resignation letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post, echoed what Cohen has said publicly about the nature of the evidence, including statements of Trump’s financial condition that were submitted to lenders and other parties.

Trump’s “financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people,” Pomerantz wrote.

Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance violations and giving false information to a bank for his role in negotiating hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, allegedly on Trump’s behalf, during the 2016 campaign. Trump has said he was not involved with paying off Daniels and has denied having an affair with her. Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his role in a Trump Organization project in Russia.

While using witnesses convicted of crimes, especially lying, can be problematic, it is not unheard of for prosecutors to do so, especially when they have few other ways to make their case. Cohen’s prison sentence is complete, so prosecutors cannot offer him a benefit in exchange for his participation, which could boost his credibility before a jury.

SAN FRANCISCO — Last summer, Instacart had a rough reality check. After a year of explosive, pandemic-driven growth for its grocery delivery business, people were returning to grocery stores. Sales slowed. New customers were harder to find. It could have been the kiss of death for a start-up that expected to grow very fast.

So Apoorva Mehta, Instacart’s co-founder and chief executive, asked Uber and DoorDash, two top competitors, if they were interested in acquiring or partnering with his company, said eight people with knowledge of the talks. Nothing came of the discussions, and in early July Mr. Mehta said he would leave the top job at his company but stay on as chairman.

The tumultuous summer set the stage for Instacart’s current uncertainty as it tries to avoid becoming another pandemic boom company that has fizzled, like Peloton or Zoom. Mr. Mehta’s replacement, Fidji Simo, a member of Instacart’s board and a former executive at Facebook, now has to lead the company against competition that has become tougher since the pandemic started. She also has to manage skeptical investors who have been waiting at least four years for Instacart to go public.

When exactly that will happen became murkier last month when, in a rare move, Instacart said it was slashing its valuation by 40 percent to $24 billion, citing the “market turbulence” that has roiled technology companies. In addition, top executives have left, including two presidents, one of whom resigned after just three months.

For the past year, Mr. Abbott has transformed an unceasing flow of migrants over the border into a potent political message, seizing the role of defending the country from unauthorized migration as he runs for a third term in November. His aggressive posture has done little to stem the tide and also exposed him to fierce criticism that he is using his authority to meddle in a policy area that belongs to the federal government. Still, his efforts to tighten border security and harden Texas’s 1,254-mile frontier have helped Mr. Abbott, a Republican, hold off challenges from his right and made the lawyerly governor into a regular on Fox News.

Now Mr. Abbott is weighing whether to invoke actual war powers to seize much broader state authority on the border. He could do so, advocates inside and outside his administration argue, by officially declaring an “invasion” to comply with a clause in the U.S. Constitution that says states cannot engage in war except when “actually invaded.”

Top lawyers for Mr. Abbott and for the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, met this month to debate the move, which would put the state in a head-on collision with the federal government by allowing state police to arrest and deport migrants, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Abbott says he remains open to the approach, but he has expressed concern about unintended consequences.

“If we do use this strategy, it could expose law enforcement in the state of Texas to being prosecuted,” Mr. Abbott said during a recent news conference. But, he added: “Is it something we’re looking into? Yes.”

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City understands the assignment: to keep the nation’s largest city safe amid an alarming rise in violent crime. At least 40 of the people shot so far this year in New York were children and teenagers, or one in every 10 shooting victims. One of those children, Kade Lewin, 12, was shot and killed while sitting with relatives in a parked car in Brooklyn.

But Mr. Adams appears to be in a time warp, with his approach to crime stuck somewhere around the year 1994. He is championing language that has been used to promote criminal justice policies that are harmful and long outdated.

In an interview with NY1 News on April 13, Mr. Adams claimed that those who protested police violence, such as the killing of George Floyd in 2020, failed to also protest gun violence. “If Black lives matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when Floyd was murdered should be on the street right now stating that the lives of these Black children that are dying every night matters,” he said.

In an interview with “60 Minutes” on April 24, the mayor repeated the line. “Democrats don’t like talking about intervention. But we have to lean into the discomfort of the immediate things we must do. Because you can’t say Black lives matter when a police officer shoots a young person, but does that Black lives matter when a 12-year-old baby was shot?”

Mr. Adams’s choice of words was an unwelcome throwback. In the 1990s, long before the Black Lives Matter movement, similar language about the need to focus on so-called Black-on-Black crime was pervasive in public discussion of crime and policing. This trope was often used to deflect discussion from structural racism or calls for police reform. Black conservatives have also sometimes used such language, often while talking about the need for self-reliance among Black Americans.

The first warnings about Brian A. Benjamin came early, just three days after Kathy Hochul learned she would become governor of New York and began a hurried search for her second-in-command.

At the top of a 63-page vetting report, two flags drew attention to potential legal concerns about Mr. Benjamin’s use of campaign funds, according to three people familiar with the document. Among them were news accounts of dozens of potentially fraudulent contributions steered to Mr. Benjamin’s failed campaign for New York City comptroller.

When Ms. Hochul and her team pressed for answers, Mr. Benjamin, then a state senator from Harlem, suggested he had made innocent mistakes and gave the impression that all outstanding issues were being resolved. But he failed to disclose something far more troubling: Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office had already served a subpoena to his comptroller campaign, inquiring about the suspicious donations, according to two people familiar with the subpoena.

On Aug. 26, after just a two-week search, Ms. Hochul named Mr. Benjamin as her lieutenant governor. Less than a year later, that decision and the hasty vetting process that led to it have come to haunt Ms. Hochul’s young administration.

New York will hold its congressional and state Senate primaries on Aug. 23, a state judge ordered Friday.

Steuben County Judge Patrick McAllister said that special master Jonathan Cervas will finish drawing up new maps by May 20.

In the meantime, state and local election officials will prepare to once again hold separate primaries in June and August.

New York is set to hold gubernatorial and state Assembly primaries in June, unless lawmakers decide to delay.

Luke the rescue dog has finally found love.

In February, the 5-year-old shelter pup from Kent, England, earned the title "heartbreaker" when he made headlines for getting stood up at his Valentine's Day-themed adoption party. Before the poorly-attended event, Luke had spent over 200 days at the Battersea Brands Hatch shelter.

Luke's story of being unlucky in love touched many who felt "shattered," according to a release from Battersea, about the dog throwing a party where nobody came. News of the pup's bad luck spread worldwide, leading Battersea Brands Hatch to receive mountains of mail from Luke's growing fanbase. Many of the dog's admirers sent him toys, handwritten love notes, donations, and letters expressing their interest in bringing the canine home.

Karl and Jill Kendrick of Derbyshire, England, were among the many who inquired about adopting Luke home after learning that the dog got stood up at his Valentine's Day adoption party. After learning about the Kendricks, Battersea Brands Hatch found that the couple, and their two daughters, would make the ideal forever family for Luke.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s decisive victory over right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen this week put White House chief of staff Ron Klain in an upbeat frame of mind.

“An interesting observation, just FYI,” President Joe Biden’s top aide alerted his Twitter followers. Klain noted that Macron won by a double-digit margin even as his public approval rating was an abysmal 36 percent, before adding a portent-filled, “Hmmm….”

Hmmm, indeed. Klain’s likely thought bubble isn’t hard to guess: No need to wet the bed, Democrats, over Biden’s political travails and their implications for 2022 and 2024. Perhaps one person thirsting for these drops of reassurance was Klain himself.

His analysis, however, is the kind of reassurance that is only soothing to people who already have come to terms with the knowledge that they are in a dire situation. Let’s not lose hope: These experimental drugs seem to be potentially effective in certain types of patients. We’ll need you to sign a waiver.