Arizona

WNBA star Brittney Griner says she is returning to the Phoenix Mercury this season. Griner was freed in a prisoner exchange after serving nearly 10 months in a Russian prison. Griner wrote Friday in an Instagram post saying, "I intend to play basketball for the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury this season, and in doing so, I look forward to being able to say ‘thank you’ to those of you who advocated, wrote, and posted for me in person soon." The Mercury kick off the 2023 season at the Los Angeles Sparks.

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent. Sinema, in a op-ed in the Arizona Republic, cited increasingly partisan interests and radicalization of both political parties as the reason for her departure. The Washington Post's Mariana Alfaro joins LiveNOW's Andrew Craft to discuss what this move means for the Senate.

Cochise County has certified the 2022 Election by court order, ending the week-long legal saga. The vote was 2-0. Democrat Chairman Ann English and Republican Vice-Chairman Peggy Judd approved the vote, but Republican Supervisor Tom Crosby was absent from the meeting, even though he was mandated to attend by the judge. Cochise was the only county to not canvass the election by the November 28 deadline. The Cochise County board tried to hire an attorney for the hearing, but counsel did not make it in time and the board was required to represent themselves. The attorney the board hired petitioned for the case to be moved to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arizona, which does not exist.

Nov. 28 was the deadline set by Arizona law for counties within the state to approve the official tally of votes for the 2022 election, a process that is also known as the canvass. For 2022, all Arizona counties, except one, certified election results. Officials in Cochise County refused to certify the election, despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count. They voted to remove the certification item from the agenda, moving it to Dec. 2.

Officials with democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs' campaign say their headquarters in Phoenix was broken into. Hobbs' campaign manager said that the break-in happened earlier in the week, but did not give a precise time on when the break-in happened. Phoenix police said confirmed that officers responded to an incident in that area around 2 p.m. on October 25. The Hobbs campaign released three still photos from a security system of a person in a green shirt and shorts, but police said there is no suspect in this case yet.