10 things you need to know today: February 6, 2020

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1. Trump acquitted in Senate impeachment trial
2. Buttigieg, Sanders nearly tied as more Iowa results come in
3. Coronavirus toll continues to rise rapidly in China
4. Romney becomes 1st senator to vote to oust president from same party
5. Trump State of the Union TV ratings tumble
6. Trump administration suspends Trusted Traveler programs for New Yorkers
7. Tesla shares plummet after stunning rally
8. 3 killed when airliner slides off runway in Turkey
9. Ailing Bernie Madoff requests early release from prison
10. Kirk Douglas dies at 103

published 6 February 2020

1. Trump acquitted in Senate impeachment trial

The Republican-controlled Senate on Wednesday acquitted President Trump on charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress. The vote on the abuse of power allegation was 48-52 essentially along party lines. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was the only Republican to join Democrats in voting guilty. The House-approved impeachment articles accused Trump of improperly withholding security aid to pressure Ukraine into investigating Democrats. The White House called the result of the impeachment trial a "full vindication," and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Democrats' case came "nowhere near justifying the first presidential removal in history." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the trial a "sham" and said Republicans "placed a giant asterisk" next to Trump's acquittal by refusing to call witnesses.

The Iowa Democratic Party released more caucus results late Wednesday, with former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg holding onto a narrow lead with 26.2 percent of the delegates as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pulled into a near tie with 26.1 percent. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was in third with 18.2 percent, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden with 15.8 percent and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) with 12.2 percent. Biden, who had been near the top in polls before Monday's caucuses launched the 2020 primary season, acknowledged that the result was a setback for his campaign. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it," he said. "We took a gut punch in Iowa."

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The death toll from China's coronavirus outbreak surged again on Thursday, rising by 73 to a total of 563 people. It was the third straight record one-day increase. There have been two deaths outside mainland China, one in the Philippines and the other in Hong Kong. Another 10 cases were confirmed on a quarantined cruise ship in the Japanese port of Yokohama, bringing the total cases on board to 20. Experts are intensifying a push to develop a vaccine for the flu-like virus. Drugmakers warned they still had a long way to go before finding an effective treatment, although a report of a possible "breakthrough" lifted financial markets that have been struggling against fears of an economic backlash from the outbreak.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Wednesday became the first American senator ever to vote for removing from office a president belonging to his own party. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said in an interview early Wednesday that Trump was "guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust," The New York Times reported. Romney said Trump's push for Ukraine to investigate Vice President Joe Biden, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was clearly political. "Attempting to corrupt an election to maintain power is about as egregious an assault on the Constitution as can be made," Romney said. Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted that Romney is "forever bitter" about losing his presidential bid and should be "expelled" from the GOP.

About 37.2 million people watched President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, the smallest live-TV audience for a presidential address to Congress since former President Barack Obama's final State of the Union in 2016, Nielsen said on Wednesday. Trump attracted his biggest TV audience for his address in 2017, when 47.7 million tuned in. He had 45.6 million viewers in 2018 and 46.8 million in 2019. Fox News had the biggest audience by far this year, with 11.5 million viewers, slightly more than last year. MSNBC, which is popular with liberals, dropped to last place among major channels in a sign that many Trump critics declined to watch.

The Trump administration will stop letting New York residents enroll in Global Entry and other Trusted Traveler programs in response to the "sanctuary city" policies, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said on Fox News late Wednesday. Wolf told host Tucker Carlson that he had sent a letter to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles saying that the state Driver's License Access and Privacy Act, known as the Green Light Law, has made it impossible for Homeland Security officials to properly vet applicants for the programs. The change appears to be the Trump administration's latest effort to retaliate against cities and other jurisdictions that have enacted "sanctuary" policies against cooperating with immigration officials.

Tesla shares dropped by 17 percent on Wednesday as analysts warned the stock was priced too high after a recent rally, and senior executives said the coronavirus outbreak in China would delay deliveries of its Model 3 electric cars from its Shanghai plant. Tesla remained up by 25 percent since it reported its second straight quarterly profit a week ago. Needham analyst Rajvindra Gill recommended selling Tesla, saying in a report that its price-to-earnings multiples had risen too high. Even after Wednesday's decline, Tesla's price-to-earnings ratio is higher than Amazon's, and more than double that of Apple. "We've never seen a stock rise that much that fast with such little regard to past fundamentals or track record," Gill wrote.

A Pegasus Airlines passenger plane slid off a runway and broke apart at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen airport, killing three people, Turkey's health minister, Fahrettin Koca, said Wednesday. Another 179 people were sent to hospitals. The plane, attempting to land in bad weather, reportedly went into a skid and fell about 100 feet over an empty road into a field. "According to the information we obtained, the plane ... drifted to the land as a result of the hard landing," Koca told the Anadolu news agency. Photos from the crash site show the low-cost carrier's Boeing 737-800 split into three pieces. The Associated Press reported that passengers "had to evacuate through cracks in the smashed plane."

Bernie Madoff, jailed for the largest Ponzi scheme in history, requested early release in a Wednesday court filing, telling the court he was dying of terminal kidney failure. The document said Madoff has less than 18 months to live. "Madoff does not dispute the severity of his crimes, nor does he seek to minimize the suffering of his victims," his lawyer, Brandon Sample, wrote. "Madoff humbly asks this court for a modicum of compassion." Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison in 2009 after being convicted of cheating thousands of investors out of $13 billion. "In light of the nature and circumstances of his offense, his release at this time would minimize the severity of his offense," Ken Hyle, Bureau of Prisons general counsel, wrote in denying an earlier release request in December.

Actor Kirk Douglas, a star of Hollywood's Golden Age, died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 103. Douglas starred in more than 80 movies, including Spartacus and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, before retiring from film in 2004. He was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award three times, and received an honorary Oscar in 1996. He played a boxer in 1949's Champion, the movie that propelled him to stardom, and in 1955 created his own film company, Bryna Productions. In a message posted online Wednesday afternoon, son Michael Douglas wrote, "To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the Golden Age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to."

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.