The Senate acquits Donald Trump, Democrats move on from Iowa, Clearview AI wants to expand worldwide
THE BIG STORY
Donald Trump has been acquitted of both articles of impeachment
The president will not be removed from office, after the Senate voted to clear him of both impeachment charges he was facing.
Trump was found not guilty of abuse of power on a 52–48 vote and not guilty of obstruction of Congress on a 53–47 vote.
The votes were mostly across party lines — Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to join Democrats in voting to remove Trump from office over the abuse of power charge. Romney joined the rest of the Senate's 52 Republicans in voting against the obstruction of Congress charge.
Romney's vote is politically awkward for Senate Republicans — Democrats can now advertise there was a bipartisan vote to remove Trump from office.
Trump's initial response to the vote was to tweet a video of a fake Time magazine cover suggesting he will be president forever.
Impeachment Today
If the glove is expertly tailored and you have receipts for the purchase of the glove, you must acquit. And thus it ends, not with a bang — but with a near party-line vote to acquit Trump on both charges. Listen and subscribe. STAYING ON TOP OF THIS Two Iowa caucus stories you need to know
Confusion still reigns after an app error led to chaos in the counting of the Iowa caucus numbers.
With 97% of the precincts reporting, Sen. Bernie Sanders holds a slim lead in raw votes, and Pete Buttigieg is ahead of Sanders in state delegate equivalents. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is third by both metrics.
First story: Sanders' Iowa surge is settling into a surreal anticlimax. What happens after your year of hard work turns into a moment of uncertainty? Ruby Cramer reports on the quiet mix of exhaustion and resolve for the sort-of-victorious Sanders campaign after the anticlimactic Iowa results.
Second story: Joe Biden made the argument he's the one who can win. What happens after he blew it in Iowa? Biden is in fourth, far behind the leading candidates. He is now going on into an unpredictable period after spending a year as the frontrunner who could consistently survive attacks or slipups.
SNAPSHOTS Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now fingerprinting immigrants as young as 14 years old. A new directive allows the agency to collect fingerprints from immigrants 14 and older who are in immigration shelters. The agency says it's for their safety.
Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas has died at 103. The star of Spartacus and father of Michael Douglas was the last of Hollywood's Golden Age of leading men. Read our obituary of a legend.
A model said Harvey Weinstein trapped her in a hotel bathroom and masturbated while groping her breast. Lauren Marie Young is the last accuser to testify against Weinstein, signaling the prosecution's case against him may soon be coming to an end.
Barnes and Noble scrapped a plan to put "diverse" faces on the cover of classic books after backlash. A publishing initiative to celebrate Black History Month by putting cartoon black and brown protagonists on the covers of classics novels written by white people has been scrapped after backlash that called it literary blackface.
 EXPANDING AROUND THE WORLD Clearview AI wants to sell its facial recognition software
It may have had bad press and generated controversy, but Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that claims to have a database of more than 3 billion photos scraped from websites and social media, is looking to grow around the world.
A document obtained via a public records request reveals that Clearview has been touting a "rapid international expansion" to prospective clients using a map that highlights how it either has expanded, or plans to expand, to at least 22 more countries, some of which have committed human rights abuses.
Facebook told us that it sent multiple letters to Clearview AI to request information about what the startup was doing. In those letters, Facebook, which owns Instagram, asked that Clearview cease and desist from using any data, images, or media from its social networking sites.
There are currently no federal laws that restrict facial recognition or scraping biometric data from the internet.
BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE A woman with a rare disability said she was afraid to post sexy photos. Then she began reading the comments.
21-year-old Nila Morton, who lives in Greenville, South Carolina, was born with a rare physical condition, and she's receiving floods of comments from strangers hyping her up after she nervously posted ~sexier~ photos online.
Morton got dressed up for going out, and decided to post the photos. She figured she could just go to bed right after, "just in case it backfired," she told us, laughing.
By the time she woke up, her tweet was already going viral. It's currently been retweeted over 36,000 times and liked over half a million times. Mostly, Morton has been reading floods of extremely supportive comments from people on Twitter.
I hope you get a chance to be of service to a friend today, Elamin BuzzFeed, Inc.
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