On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN’s Cuomo PrimeTime, anchor Chris Cuomo described recent polling showing Warren catching — and even surpassing, in some cases — Sanders in the polls, and asked him “What do you think the reason is that Elizabeth Warren is catching up to you in polls? Do you believe that people see her as the more electable version of Bernie Sanders?”

“Well, I think we are running against a lot of problems,” Sanders said, and then described two of those “problems.”

“I think that there are certain number of people who would like to see a woman elected, and I understand that,” Sanders said. “There are people who would like to see somebody who was younger, and I understand that also. There are a lot of factors out there.”

“Elizabeth is a friend of mine, I think she’s running a good campaign,” Sanders continued, “but at the end of the day, Chris, whether it’s Biden or Warren, Elizabeth Warren, or anybody else, what I believe is that in fact I am the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump, and I think some of the polling shows that.”

The graying of America continues.

The national median age rose to 38.2 years last year, according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That suggests half of the U.S. population is more than 38-years-old and half is younger. By gender, the median for woman is 39.5 while for men its 36.9 years.

The aging of America is widespread with 49 of 50 states showing an uptick in older residents. North Dakota was the only state to see a decline in its median age, from 37 years in 2010 to 35.2 in 2018.

Instead of showcasing But­tigieg’s ability to lead through a crisis, however, the shooting is exposing what has long been considered an Achilles’ heel of his candidacy: his frosty relationship with South Bend’s black residents. Since arriving on Sunday, Buttigieg has alienated the family of the dead man, Eric Logan, 54, skipped a vigil at the scene of the shooting, and sought advice from outsiders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York.

On Wednesday, Buttigieg finally made his first extended public remarks about the shooting, appearing at South Bend police headquarters to lecture the city’s new cadet class about the importance of turning on their body cameras when they interact with members of the public. During Sunday’s shooting, the officer’s camera had been turned off.

“This is his nightmare,” said Jorden Gieger, a community organizer who is close to Logan’s family. “You have to imagine the first thing he said to the police chief was, ‘You all had one job: Don’t shoot a black guy while I’m running for president.’ ”

The shooting has handed But­tigieg the first significant challenge of his charmed campaign. To allies, his decision to leave the campaign trail and then hold two days of private meetings signals deliberate, considerate leadership. But to detractors, including many of South Bend’s black activists, his actions show that he still doesn’t get it.

Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who will appear on the Democratic debate stage next week, apologized Wednesday night after she attacked mandatory vaccinations as “draconian” and “Orwellian” at a Manchester, N.H., event.

“To me, it’s no different than the abortion debate,” Williamson said at the event, according to a tweet from an NBC News reporter. “The U.S. government doesn’t tell any citizen, in my book, what they have to do with their body or their child.”

After a request for comment from the Los Angeles Times, Williamson acknowledged making the remarks and said she misspoke.

“I understand that many vaccines are important and save lives,” Williamson said. “I also understand some of the skepticism that abounds today about drugs which are rushed to market by Big Pharma. I am sorry that I made comments which sounded as though I question the validity of life-saving vaccines. That is not my feeling and I realize that I misspoke.”

The Republican National Committee announced it raised $14.6 million in May, a record total for the month in a non-presidential election year, and ended the period with $37 million in the bank.

The committee said it also spent $12.3 million last month, and its cumulative spending of $62.9 million so far in 2019 is the largest outlay by the party for the first five months of any year – including those with presidential elections.

The announcement comes just a day after President Donald Trump topped his Democratic opponents by raising $24.8 million in less than 24 hours in connection with the formal launch of his re-election campaign. Some of that money was raised for the RNC, though those amounts weren’t included in the numbers the RNC reported on Thursday.

In a separate sign of possible turbulence for Mr. Biden’s candidacy, his campaign experienced the first departure of a prominent political consultant. Mark Putnam, a high-profile Democratic strategist and producer of television ads, confirmed in a brief phone call that he had recently left Mr. Biden’s campaign.

Mr. Putnam declined to address the reasons for his departure, though they did not appear to be related to Mr. Biden’s struggles over the last few weeks concerning abortion rights and race.

“I wish the vice president well,” Mr. Putnam said.

A frustrated Trump believed that national security adviser John Bolton and his director for Latin American policy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, “got played” by both the opposition and key Maduro officials, two senior administration officials said. As the president “chewed out the staff” in a meeting shortly after the April 30 failure, in the words of one former Trump official involved in Venezuela policy, he mused that he might need to get on the phone himself to get something done.

Summer arrives this week with Maduro still in place, and little indication that he is imminently on his way out, or that the Trump administration has a coherent strategy to remove him. The president, officials said, is losing both patience and interest in Venezuela.

New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.

The result is a hook or hornlike feature jutting out from the skull, just above the neck.

In academic papers, a pair of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, argues that the prevalence of the bone growth in younger adults points to shifting body posture brought about by the use of modern technology. They say smartphones and other handheld devices are contorting the human form, requiring users to bend their heads forward to make sense of what’s happening on the miniature screens.

House Democrats erupted Wednesday at the White House’s repeated interference in their nearly eight-hour interview with Hope Hicks, a longtime confidante of President Donald Trump who was a central witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation.

Several House Judiciary Committee members exiting the closed-door interview said a White House lawyer present for her testimony repeatedly claimed Hicks had blanket immunity from discussing her tenure as a top aide to the president, including during the presidential transition period. Democrats said she wouldn’t answer questions as basic as where she sat in the West Wing or whether she told the truth to Mueller.

“We’re watching obstruction of justice in action,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.).

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm Matthew Kacsmaryk to a lifetime federal judgeship despite his record of hostility toward LGBTQ rights and abortion rights.

Kacsmaryk fought against protections for LGBTQ people in employment, housing and health care. He called including protections for LGBTQ people in the Violence Against Women Act “a grave mistake.” In 2015, when Utah passed nondiscrimination protections, Kacsmaryk called the law “a bad idea” because it suggests that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity should be taken as seriously as other forms of discrimination. He signed a 2016 letter that called being transgender “a delusion.”

He also criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, describing that case as one in which “seven justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to abortion hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the shadowy ‘penumbras’ of the Bill of Rights, a celestial phenomenon invisible to the non-lawyer eye.” (What?)

Federal and state policy changes to the nation’s primary cash assistance program for low-income mothers and their children in the 1990s, including time limits and loss of the entire family’s assistance if a parent didn’t meet a work requirement, “have come at a cost to the next generation, particularly to boys,” according to a new study. Adolescent boys most at risk of exposure to these policies were likelier to skip school, damage school property, or get in a serious fight; adolescent boys and girls most at risk of exposure were likelier to use marijuana and other substances. 

The league announced that it will create a virtual sports-betting game, called NBA Last 90, that will splice random highlights from real NBA games and combine them. Gamblers will then wager on the outcome.

Done in collaboration with the NBA players union and U.K.-based Highlight Games Ltd., the product will tap the league’s vast archive of games to create an unlimited number of gambling opportunities. It will be available starting next season, in legal U.S. and European markets.

Former attorney general Jeff Sessions has not ruled out running next year for his old Senate seat from Alabama, the state’s senior senator said Wednesday, as Republicans braced for the expected entrance into the race of Roy Moore, their failed 2017 candidate.

“Sessions I don’t think has ruled it out,” Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters. “I’ve talked to him about it. I think if he ran he would be a formidable candidate, formidable. I’ve not encouraged him to run, but he’s a friend, and if he ran I think he’d probably clear the field.”

Sessions, who held his Senate seat for 20 years, declined to comment on questions about his plans, an assistant said.

Five anchorwomen at NY1, one of the country’s most prominent local news channels, sued the network on Wednesday over age and gender discrimination, alleging a systematic effort by managers to force them off the air in favor of younger, less experienced hosts.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, portrays a newsroom at odds with the friendly image that has made NY1 a beloved institution among New Yorkers. And it publicized tensions that have long afflicted the TV news business, where older women’s careers often fade as male counterparts thrive.

The plaintiffs range in age from 40 to 61 and include Roma Torre, one of the channel’s longest-serving anchors. “We feel we are being railroaded out of the place,” Ms. Torre said in an interview. “Men age on TV with a sense of gravitas, and we as women have an expiration date.”

Ms. Torre, 61, and her co-plaintiffs — Amanda Farinacci, Vivian Lee, Jeanine Ramirez and Kristen Shaughnessy — said the leadership team installed by Charter Communications, the cable giant that acquired NY1 in 2016, reduced their airtime and anchoring slots, excluded them from promotional campaigns and consistently ignored their concerns.

The Trump administration finalized its biggest climate policy rollback Wednesday, requiring the U.S. power sector to cut its 2030 carbon emissions 35 percent over 2005 levels — less than half of what experts calculate is needed to avert catastrophic warming of the planet.

The Affordable Clean Energy rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, demands much smaller carbon dioxide reductions than the industry is already on track to achieve, even without any federal regulation. As of last year the U.S. power sector had cut its greenhouse gas emissions 27 percent compared with 2005.

Addressing an audience of supporters, including coal miners from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the new policy will overturn a climate policy that would have imposed higher costs on low and middle-income Americans.

Contractors told me that Cognizant had lured them away from less demanding jobs by promising regular schedules, bonuses, and career development, only to renege on all three.

They described a filthy workplace in which they regularly find pubic hair and other bodily waste at their workstations. Employees said managers laugh off or ignore sexual harassment and threats of violence. Two discrimination cases have been filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since April.

They said marijuana use is so prevalent that the site manager jokingly complained at an all-hands meeting that he had gotten a contact high walking in the door.

More than anything else, the contractors described an environment in which they are never allowed to forget how quickly they can be replaced. It is a place where even Keith Utley, who died working alongside them, would receive no workplace memorial — only a passing mention during team huddles in the days after he passed. “There is no indication that this medical condition was work related,” Cognizant told me in a statement. “Our associate’s colleagues, managers and our client were all saddened by this tragic event.” (The client is Facebook.)

A wealthy Manhattan couple has emerged as significant financiers of the anti-vaccine movement, contributing more than $3 million in recent years to groups that stoke fears about immunizations online and at live events — including two forums this year at the epicenter of measles outbreaks in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Hedge fund manager and philanthropist Bernard Selz and his wife, Lisa, have long donated to organizations focused on the arts, culture, education and the environment. But seven years ago, their private foundation embraced a very different cause: groups that question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

How the Selzes came to support anti-vaccine ideas is unknown, but their financial impact has been enormous. Their money has gone to a handful of determined individuals who have played an outsize role in spreading doubt and misinformation about vaccines and the diseases they prevent. The groups’ false claims linking vaccines to autism and other ailments, while downplaying the risks of measles, have led growing numbers of parents to shun the shots. As a result, health officials have said, the potentially deadly disease has surged to at least 1,044 cases this year, the highest number in nearly three decades.

Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was buried at dawn on Tuesday in a furtive and closely guarded ceremony attended by his wife and two sons.

Reporters were barred from the short ceremony and coverage of Mr. Morsi’s death was muted.

Only one major newspaper, Al Masry Al Youm, reported it on its front page, under a headline that failed to mention he was a former president. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has yet to make a public comment.

Presidential candidates and lawmakers alike have been bellyaching about how the Democratic National Committee is handling the party’s glut of White House hopefuls — but so far, rank-and-file Democratic voters are trusting the process.

That’s according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, which shows a majority of voters planning to vote in a Democratic primary or caucus aren’t even familiar with complaints about the DNC’s criteria for the party’s presidential debates. Only 39 percent say they have heard “a lot” or “some” about the complaining over the DNC’s rules for qualifying for the debates, while 61 percent haven’t heard much about it — or anything at all.

Efforts to get Boeing Co.’s MAX jetliners back in the air have been delayed in part by concerns about whether the average pilot has enough physical strength to turn a manual crank in extreme emergencies.

The problem, which hasn’t been previously reported on, has been the focus of weeks of engineering analysis, simulator sessions and flight testing by the plane maker and American air-safety officials, according to people familiar with the details.

Turning the crank moves a horizontal panel on the tail, which can help change the angle of the plane’s nose. Under certain conditions, including at unusually high speeds with the panel already at a steep angle, it can take a lot of force to move the crank in certain emergencies. Among other things, the people familiar with the details said, regulators are concerned about whether female aviators—who typically tend to have less upper-body strength than their male counterparts—may find it difficult to turn the crank in an emergency.

At the event, Mr. Biden noted that he served with the late Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation. Mr. Eastland was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973.

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

He called Mr. Talmadge “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”

“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

CNN cut away from its coverage of President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign kickoff Tuesday night shortly after he spurred the crowd to chant “CNN sucks.”

Just minutes into his rally speech Tuesday at the Amway Center in Orlando, Fla., Trump referred to his 2015 campaign announcement as “a defining moment in America history,” adding to “ask them right there” as he pointed to the media covering the event.

The crowd then chanted “CNN sucks,” a line that has become a staple at Trump campaign events, before Trump said that “there is a lot of fake news back there” and that the “amount of press we have tonight reminds me of the Academy Awards before it went political and their ratings went down the tubes.”

CNN then cut away from its live broadcast roughly six minutes in.