If President Trump's calls for his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, to join him in taking a drug test before or after Tuesday night's presidential debate were ever serious, they gained little traction. On Tuesday, Trump's campaign moved on to a new demand: that both candidates subject themselves to a pre-debate, third party inspection for electronic ear pieces.

The calls came after a conspiracy theory that Biden would wear such a device spread on social media, including several accounts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. Biden's campaign denied reports that it had earlier agreed to an inspection.

The Trump campaign's unfounded speculation that Biden is planning to cheat — whether via electronics or performance-enhancing drugs — during the debate has coincided with their insistence that the former vice president is a strong debater, which runs counter to their usual depiction of him as a gaffe-prone candidate whose mental fitness should be called into question.

UPDATE: This piece has been updated to reflect the Biden campaign's denial it agreed to a pre-debate inspection. Tim O'Donnell

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is under close scrutiny following multiple sexual harassment allegations and revelations of withheld COVID-19 data, but most voters haven't fully turned against him.

In a Quinnipiac poll released Thursday, voters gave Cuomo a split 45-46 percent approval rating, down almost 30 points since his nearly-peak approval at the height of the pandemic in New York last year. Even though his overall approval has plummeted, voters don't necessarily think he should resign.

Cuomo has faced some calls to step down after three women accused him of sexual harassment, including two former aides. The governor apologized on Wednesday, but said he "never touched anyone inappropriately" and said he would not resign. Quinnipiac found that 40 percent of New York voters believe he should resign, while 55 percent say he should not. Perhaps surprisingly, just 21 percent of Democrats say Cuomo should step down, and 74 percent say he should stay.

Even so, while voters aren't united in saying Cuomo should leave office immediately, there's more consensus that he shouldn't run again. A full 59 percent said he should not run for re-election in 2022, and 36 percent said he should. Democrats were more split on the question, with 50 percent saying he should run again, and 44 percent disagreeing.

There's more bad news for Cuomo on the coronavirus front, seeing as 56 percent of those polled approve of his handling of the pandemic, down from 81 percent who approved last May. That could be related to Cuomo's office reportedly acknowledging they withheld data on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes across the state, undercounting by as much as 50 percent. While 75 percent say his handling of the issue was wrong, 51 percent say he did something "unethical, but not illegal."

Quinnipiac surveyed 935 registered voters in New York from March 2-3. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points. See more results here. Summer Meza

Former President Donald Trump may have been permanently booted from Twitter, but YouTube will let him have his account back — just not yet quite yet.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said at an event Thursday that the former president, who was suspended from YouTube in January, will be allowed to use his account again once there's no longer an "elevated risk of violence" in the United States.

"We will lift the suspension of the Donald Trump channel when we determine the risk of violence has decreased," Wojcicki said, Politico reports.

YouTube suspended Trump's account in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying he violated the platform's "policies for inciting violence." The suspension was initially said to be for at least a week, but it was later extended.

The video platform never said Trump's suspension would be permanent, though, contrasting with Twitter, which booted Trump from the platform forever due to his actions surrounding the riot. Trump was also suspended from Facebook, a decision that's being reviewed by the platform's independent oversight board and could potentially be overturned.

Wojcicki didn't offer a specific timeline for when Trump's account could come back online but she said that, after Capitol Police warned of a potential plot to breach the Capitol building on Thursday, it's "pretty clear" that the "elevated violence risk still remains." Brendan Morrow

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) takes President Biden's insults as a compliment, actually.

On Wednesday, Biden criticized lawmakers in Texas and Mississippi who opted to fully reopen all state businesses and end mask mandates even as the pandemic rages on, calling the move a "mistake" and deeming it a result of "Neanderthal thinking." The last thing the country needs as the vaccine rollout ramps up, Biden added, is "Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything's fine, take off your mask, forget it. It still matters."

Though Biden didn't mention Tennessee or Blackburn specifically, Fox Business host Stuart Varney asked her to react to his comments on Thursday. She said the comments should be viewed as complimentary, somehow.

"Stuart, we were called 'Neanderthals' when I led the fight against the imposition of a state income tax in Tennessee,” Blackburn said. "Do you know what I did? I started the Neanderthal Caucus!"

"Neanderthals are hunter-gatherers, they're protectors of their family," she continued. "They are resilient. They are resourceful. They tend to their own. So, I think Joe Biden needs to rethink what he is saying."

As The Daily Beast and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) noted, the comments were oddly in the present tense, though Neanderthals are extinct, and Blackburn, ironically, has said she does not believe in evolution. Watch the clip below. Summer Meza

Former President Donald Trump has released a new post-presidency statement, and Democrats might just be glad he did.

The former president, who remains permanently banned from Twitter, released a statement Thursday once again raging against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), blasting him as the "most unpopular politician in the country" while blaming him for Republicans' Senate losses in Georgia — losses for which Trump himself has been blamed by other Republicans.

One of the reasons Republicans lost the two Georgia Senate runoffs in January, Trump argues, was "Mitch McConnell's refusal to go above $600 per person on the stimulus check payments when the two Democrat opponents were touting $2,000 per person in ad after ad."

The statement offered "quite the pre-stimulus political gift to Democrats," wrote National Journal's Josh Kraushaar, while The Washington Post's Dave Weigel noted that Trump "remarkably" used this opportunity to "validate Biden's messaging on the $1,400 checks instead of whacking him and Democrats for curtailing them."

Indeed, Trump writes that "the $2,000 will be approved anyway by the Democrats," while offering no comment on the fact that the new checks are actually for $1,400, nor on Biden's recent compromise that narrows the eligibility. Politico's Gabby Orr observed that Trump "could have put out a statement saying the income phase-outs in the Biden stimulus bill are going to mean he gave checks to more Americans," but "instead he's still targeting his own party with stuff like this."

This was just Trump's latest statement in this vein after he released another one last month describing McConnell as an "unsmiling political hack." He also mentioned McConnell in a recent Conservative Political Action Conference speech, in which he took credit for McConnell's recent re-election. McConnell told Fox News he "didn't watch" the speech and that "we're dealing with the present and the future, not looking back to the past." Brendan Morrow

As if we needed more evidence that the pandemic has been rough on everyone, experts say sinking U.S. birth rates point to widespread societal challenges, and could cause further complications later on.

Data from 29 states showed a 7.3 percent drop in births in December 2020, nine months after the pandemic began in the U.S., CBS News reports. Birth rates have been declining for years, and its not surprising major economic disruption would cause a dip, but preliminary numbers suggest the pandemic has led to an especially notable drop — in the wake of the Great Recession, birth rates fell by 3 percent, CBS notes.

University of Maryland sociologist Phil Cohen told CBS the "scale of this is really large," and argued the decline "means things are not going well for a lot of people."

A column by two Brookings Institution economists in The New York Times outlines some of the struggles that have people postponing or avoiding expanding their families: a weak labor market, job and income loss, school closures, and fewer social activities, to name some. The economists similarly predicted last year that "tremendous economic loss, uncertainty, and insecurity" would lead to a major baby bust. But in addition to the challenges that have caused the bust, the decline could cause issues well into the future.

With 300,000 fewer babies born this year than would otherwise be expected, the Times column says "we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come." Notably, a smaller work force will mean "lower economic productivity and fewer workers to contribute to the tax base. It also means a lower ratio of workers to retirees, which stresses Social Security." It could also contribute to the "loneliness epidemic," and as demography professor Dowell Myers told CBS, the birth rate can be seen as a "barometer of despair."

Read more about the drop and what economists suggest should be done at The New York Times. Summer Meza

Who's been trolling Marvel fans? It's been Paul Bettany all along.

The WandaVision star on Thursday admitted he was joking when he repeatedly hyped up a major cameo in the hit Disney+ show, as he was apparently just talking about himself.

During numerous interviews promoting the series, the Vision actor teased that he got to work with "an actor that I really admire and that I've always wanted to work with," adding that "we have these explosive scenes" together. Fans spent weeks trying to figure out who he meant and getting excited for a massive surprise cameo, with one popular guess being X-Men star Patrick Stewart.

But then the penultimate WandaVision episode last week revealed another Vision also played by Bettany, leading fans to ask if they just got pranked because the actor he was talking about was actually, well, Paul Bettany. While appearing on Good Morning America on Thursday, Bettany said that's, indeed, what happened.

"You know when you think something's gonna be funny, and you say it, and then you absolutely panic about it?" Bettany said. "Which is what I did, because fans started guessing who it might be, and they were guessing people like Benedict Cumberbatch or Patrick Stewart, and I was thinking, 'God, that's a good idea!' And they're gonna be so disappointed when they find out it's me."

Then again, could it be that it's actually this interview that's a fake-out? Michael Strahan wondered whether "you could be trolling us right now" with the admission, and when he asked Bettany if the finale truly does have a surprise cameo, he wouldn't say. But fans perhaps shouldn't get their hopes up, and when asked recently whether Bettany was joking, WandaVision director Matt Shakman told HuffPost, "I'm gonna let Paul Bettany answer that question. He dug himself this hole. He can get out of it." Brendan Morrow