Asked if the White House still has faith in Andrew Cuomo, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Covid response team will continue to work with the New York governor to implement its pandemic response.

“We have of course watched the news of a number of lawmakers call for that (resignation), but I don’t have any additional announcements,” Psaki says.

Follow live with The Independent.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has announced he will not run for re-election, instead serving out the rest of his term until it ends in December.

Mr Vance, whose investigation into Donald Trump’s finances and business dealings is one of the highest-profile cases against the former president, said in a letter to staff announcing his departure that he considered the job “a privilege of a lifetime”.

“I never imagined myself as District Attorney for decades like my predecessors,” he wrote. “I never thought of this as my last job, even though it’s the best job and biggest honour I’ll ever have. I said 12 years ago that change is fundamentally good and necessary for any institution.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened up on Friday for the sixth day, maintaining the record levels hit in recent days as Wall Street looks set for its best week in more than a month.

However, after hitting an all-time high on Thursday, the S&P 500 dipped at the market opening. As did the tech-centric Nasdaq, though it held on to the rebound it made from a significant dip early in the week.

That dip was caused by investors favoring energy, mining, and industrials companies poised to benefit more from an economic recovery and stimulus.

At 10am the Dow stood at 32,620, up 135.27 points from the opening bell; the S&P was at 3,931, down 8.15; and the Nasdaq stood at 13,261, down 137.43.

Oliver O’Connell reports.

Oliver O’Connell reports.

“Quarantine-fatigued” Americans are reportedly leaving their homes and going out more than they were before the pandemic struck.

Mobile phone movement, which shows when the device is moved more than one mile away from someone’s home, was tracked by researchers at the University of Maryland, who found the rate was higher in the first week of March 2021 compared to last year.

Depending on location, the number of daily trips one was higher by at most 13.6 per cent compared to this time last year.

Danielle Zoellner has more.

“I’ve got love for Rep Mondaire Jones but I’m Rep Jamaal Bowman. I’m here to do my job, C-SPAN, please, do yours,” wrote the latter on Twitter on Wednesday after the broadcaster’s deeply embarrassing gaffe.

Here’s Gino Spocchia’s report.

The Russian president mocked the events of 6 January in Washington, DC, during a meeting at the Kremlin on increasing investment activity, according to the Associated Press.

“Some of the people who took a stroll to the US Congress – 150 people were arrested, they face imprisonment from 15 to 25 years.

“Will all these internal controversies end there or not? We do not know, but we want it to end, because we are interested in stable relations with all our main partners.”

With Carlson increasingly finding himself the face of Fox News (and, arguably, the entire American conservative movement) in the wake of Trump, here’s a nice little throwback to see you through Friday: Jon Stewart accusing the human bowtie of “partisan hackery” from his CNN Crossfire days in 2004.

A Republican lawmaker in Arizona has defended GOP-sponsored legislation to restrict ballot access as a means to protect “the quality of votes”, arguing that “everybody shouldn’t be voting” as Republicans in at least 43 states introduce dozens of bills to curb voting rights, compelled by spurious fraud claims and election conspiracy theories in the wake of 2020 elections and disproportionately impacting black voters.

More from the permanently-aggrieved Fox pundit, who claims – not for the first time I’m sure – that he’s the real victim here, not the women in the military he disparaged.

So much so, in fact, that he’s even been made the subject of a government plot, apparently.

Graeme Massie takes this one.

The Biden administration is hitting back at claims from the governor of Texas that its “open border policies” are to blame for a surge of unaccompanied children at the US-Mexico boundary.

“That is absolutely incorrect,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a testy exchange with Fox News’s Peter Doocy during a Thursday press briefing. “The border is not open. The vast majority of individuals apprehended or encountered at the border continue to be denied entry and are returned.”

The Border Patrol says it apprehended nearly 700 unaccompanied minors on Wednesday, well above its 450-child daily average.

Psaki said the administration’s focus was treating them humanely even as others are told to go home.

Here’s more from Josh Marcus.

Here’s Alex Woodward on how the new president’s address last night compared to the one his predecessor gave on 11 March 2020 just as the coronavirus was beginning to take hold.

The QAnon congresswoman for Georgia told the former Trump strategist and Breitbart editor (yuck and yuck) that “the system needs to be torn down” and launched into an astonishing assault on America’s capital city during an interview on his no-doubt-highly-lucrative War Room show.

Oliver O’Connell listened in so you don’t have to.

New York Assembly speaker Carl Heastie has authorised the opening of an impeachment investigation into the state’s governor by the body’s judiciary committee after Cuomo was accused of sexual harassment by six women.

Graeme Massie has the very latest.

In February, Cyrus Vance’s office won its bid to obtain eight years’ of Donald Trump’s taxes and financial documents after the Supreme Court ruled in his favour.

But it now seems he is not seeking re-election, leaving the future of the criminal investigation he has spent two years working on in the hands of his eventual successor.

Tucker isn’t the only anchor losing his mind over at Fox.

Shweta Sharma has this on Hannity’s bizarre accusation that Biden is “taking credit” for his predecessor’s achievements (again, half a million dead?) just a day after Trump issued a statement saying he deserved the acclaim for the “China Virus” vaccines promising to liberate the world from lockdown.

The staggeringly entitled Fox News host ranted at the president in response to yesterday’s primetime address and his cautious approach to Independence Day social gatherings in particular, howling: “Who are you talking to? This is a free people, a free country. How dare you tell us who we can spend the Fourth of July with?”

Er, the commander-in-chief elected to lead the nation out of a vicious pandemic that has killed 530,000 Americans maybe?

Graeme Massie has more from Carlson’s rabid rebuttal.

Like AOC, the House speaker has been ridiculing the Republicans for their invented fury about the “cancellation” of Dr Seuss.

Pelosi dismissed GOP concerns over the recent surge in migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border as a bad-faith political distraction, likening the party’s line of attack to its recent outrage that the publishers of the popular children’s books had decided to stop selling certain titles containing seemingly racist images.

“Well I guess their Dr Seuss approach didn’t work for them. So now they’ve had to change the subject,” she said at her weekly Capitol Hill press conference on Thursday regarding the criticism of Democrats’ immigration policy.

“We do not prioritise our values and how we can make a difference in the lives of the American people to be attuned to the bankruptcy of ideas that the Republicans have,” she added.

Griffin Connolly has this report.

Christopher Miller, who was acting defence secretary during the final weeks of the Trump administration, has turned on his former employer over the events of 6 January.

The official said the relationship between Trump’s speech in Washington, DC, that day and the subsequent insurrection appeared to be “cause-and-effect”, comments that represent a rare instance of a high-ranking Trump official agreeing with the central premise behind the former president’s second impeachment.

Asked in a Vice News interview due to be released this weekend about whether Trump was responsible for the riot, Miller said: “I don’t know but it seems cause-and-effect. Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried to overrun the Capitol, without the president’s speech? I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened.”

Mayank Aggarwal has more.