Уряд України затвердив перелік доріг, які планують відновити у 2020 році. Про це повідомляє міністр інфраструктури України Владислав Криклій.

«З Дорожнього фонду буде спрямовано 31 млрд 528 млн гривень. Заплановано відновити 1 345 км доріг державного значення та 3 711 пог. метрів мостів», – зазначив міністр.

Він додав, що крім доріг державного значення, планують відновити дороги місцевого та територіального значення.

«Наша ціль – відремонтувати 4000 кілометрів доріг за 2020 рік», – написав Криклій у «Фейсбуці».

 
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На українському міжбанківському валютному ринку котирування в головній парі балансують на межі близько 24 гривень за долар. Зранку торги відбувалися нижче цього рівня, в другій половині дня, після того, як Національний банк України викупив значну частину пропозиції американської валюти, котирування зросли понад 24 гривні за долар.

Станом на 13:40, за даними Finance.ua, котирування склали 24 гривні 2,5–4 копійки за долар.

«Торги по долару перед обідом змінили тренд через скуповування валюти Нацбанком. Схоже регулятор все-таки «перестарався». Зараз попит почав перевищувати пропозицію», – відзначають фахівці сайту «Мінфін».

Крім Нацбанку, на курсоутворення 15 січня впливали нерезиденти, які розраховувалися за придбані напередодні ОВДП і для цього продавали долари.

Регулятор опівдні відбив ранкові тенденції на ринку, встановивши довідкове значення курсу 23 гривні 97 копійок за долар. Це на шість копійок менше за офіційний курс на 15 січня.

Національний банк України з 13 грудня 2019 року встановив облікову ставку на рівні 13,5%, знизивши її одразу на 2%. Також регулятор збільшив обсяг щоденного викупу валюти на міжбанку до 50 мільйонів доларів з попереднього рівня 30 мільйонів доларів.

 
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The United States and China are due to sign an initial trade deal Wednesday to resolve some of the issues at the heart of an economic standoff that has persisted between the world’s two largest economies for the past 18 months.U.S. President Donald Trump is hosting Chinese Vice Premier Liu He for a signing ceremony at the White House.The sides agreed to what they are calling the Phase 1 agreement in mid-December.It calls for China to boost its purchases of U.S. goods, halt the practice of forcing foreign companies to transfer technology, and to not manipulate its currency in order to makes its exports cheaper.The United States has already removed its designation of China as a currency manipulator, and under the trade deal it is halting plans to add new tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods, while cutting in half tariffs on about $110 billion of Chinese products.U.S. tariffs will remain in place on about $360 billion of imports from China.The agreement also does not address China’s subsidies to state-owned companies, an issue likely to be discussed in the next phase of trade talks.Additional negotiations are not expected anytime soon.”I think both sides are reasonably happy with this compromise even though it doesn’t really tackle the core issues,” Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told VOA.He said the deal amounts to a “modest win-win for both sides” with China gaining a reprieve from the trade war that has harmed its economic growth and the Trump administration getting to set aside a major issue until after his re-election campaign.”From President Trump’s perspective, it gives him a victory of sorts,” Alden said.  “His strongest card in November is the U.S. economy. He doesn’t want to do anything to upset the stock markets, so a period of kind of calm on the U.S.-China front also serves the administration’s interests at this point.”
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The killing by the United States of Iran’s most powerful general has increased tensions between the two countries and raised concerns of all-out war. It was a key topic in Tuesday’s Democratic debate in Des Moines, Iowa.  Questions over the killing of Gen. Qassem Suleimani quickly led to a broader conversation about the president’s ability to take unilateral military action. Unless an imminent threat required a quick response, all six Democratic candidates pledged to seek congressional approval. But, not all candidates agreed over the removal of troops in the region.Here’s what the candidates had to say:Former Vice President Joe Biden:His response to U.S. President Trump’s decision to kill  Iranian Soleimani without first going to Congress:”I ran the first time as a 29-year-old kid against the war in Vietnam on the grounds that the only way to take a nation to war is with the informed consent of the American people.”  “We’re in a situation where our allies in Europe are making a comparison between the United States and Iran , saying both ought to stand down, making a moral equivalence.”  “We have lost our standing in the region. We have lost the support of our allies.”    Sen. Amy Klobuchar:Klobuchar said U.S. President Donald Trump’s  move in the killing of Soleimani was to blame Iran for “starting to enrich uranium again.” She said he is “taking us pell mell toward another war.”  “We just found out today that four Republicans are joining Democrats to go to him and say you must have an authorization of military force if you’re going to go to war with Iran.  That is so important because we have a situation where he got us out of the Iranian nuclear agreement I worked on for a significant period of time.”Responding to a question on foreign policy, Klobuchar said she would leave some U.S. combat troops in Iraq, but qualified her answer, saying, “I would leave some troops there, but not in the level that Donald Trump is taking us right now.” She added that, if elected, she would keep a small number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, performing counterterrorism and training duties.    Sen.  Bernie Sanders:  On the recent events in Iran:”… right now, what I fear very much is we have a president who is lying again and could drag us into a war that is even worse than the war in Iraq.” He added, “We have got to undo what Trump did, bring that coalition together and make sure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.”Sanders agreed that  Trump’s decision to not inform Congress on killing Soleimani was wrong:”We cannot keep acting unilaterally, as you know, the nuclear deal with Iran was worked on with a number of our allies,” he said. “The American people are sick and tired of endless wars.”    Tom Steyer:The billionaire hedge fund manager and environmentalist said Trump “obviously has no strategy” in dealing with Iran and agreed with Biden that it would take the efforts of an international coalition to rein in its nuclear ambitions.Senator Elizabeth Warren:Sen. Warren of Massachusetts said she would move to bring thousands of U.S. troops home from the Middle East:  “We have to stop this mindset that the answer” to the world’s trouble spots is to send U.S. troops overseas. Asked whether she would leave some combat troops in the Middle East, she replied: “No, we have to get them out.”Pete Buttigieg:The former South Bend, Indiana Mayor tied Trump’s decision to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal with the stand-off following the drone strike that killed Soleimani, saying the move “set off the chain of events that we’re now dealing with as it escalates even closer to the brink of outright war.”When asked about the role of the U.S. Congress in authorizing war, Buttigieg said there should be a three-year sunset on such authorizations, a frequent campaign trail talking point.”If our troops can summon the courage to go overseas in harm’s way, then we have to make sure that congress has the courage to take tough up or down votes,” he said.
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Six U.S. Democratic presidential candidates traded barbs with each other in a tense debate late Tuesday, attempting to make the case to voters in the farm state of Iowa that they alone have the political fortitude and skill to take on Republican President Donald Trump in the November national election.With heightened world tensions between the U.S. and Iran, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, quickly attacked the foreign policy credentials of the party’s national front-runner for the presidential nomination, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sanders derided Biden’s 2002 vote authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq on what proved to be erroneous American intelligence that deposed dictator Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, while Sanders opposed the the 2003 invasion.
He said Biden voted for the “worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country.”
Biden, who for years has said his Iraq vote was a mistake, countered that while he had erred, as former U.S. President Barack Obama’s second in command, he worked to bring home more than 150,000 U.S. troops once stationed in Iraq and to end the conflict.Democratic presidential candidates stand on stage during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by CNN and the Des Moines Register in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 14, 2020.Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said that she, as a candidate early in her political career, also opposed the Iraq invasion, while accusing Trump of “taking us pell-mell toward another war,” in the current conflict over the U.S. leader’s changing rationale for ordering a drone strike that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.
A key challenger to both Biden and Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a one-time Harvard law professor, and others said they would move to bring thousands of U.S. troops home from the Middle East, at odds with Trump’s recent dispatch of more forces to the region. Warren said, “We have to stop this mindset that the answer” to world’s trouble spots is to send U.S. troops overseas. Asked whether she would leave some combat troops in the Middle East, she replied: “No, we have to get them out.”
Sanders said, “The American people are sick and tired of endless wars.”
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the only war-time veteran on the debate stage, said he could best serve as the country’s commander in chief, because “the lessons of the past are personal to me.” Wealthy environmentalist Tom Steyer contended that Trump “obviously has no strategy” in dealing with Iran and agreed with Biden that it would take the efforts of an international coalition to rein in its nuclear ambitions.
Tuesday’s debate stage had the fewest number of candidates since the face-to-face encounters began last June. It was also the first with all white contenders, after black, Latino and Asian candidates have either dropped out of the race for lack of voter support and campaign money or failed to qualify for the debate stage.
It was the seventh debate, but the last before Democrats in rural Iowa in the U.S. heartland cast the first votes in the party’s months-long nomination process, at night-time caucuses less than three weeks from now, on Feb. 3.
Contests in other states are just ahead on the political calendar. But Iowa, even though its predominantly white 3 million population is at odds with the increasingly racially diverse U.S. demographics, draws out-sized national attention because it is first in the once-every-four-years presidential sweepstakes.
Warren and Sanders sparred sharply over a private conversation they had more than a year ago in which Warren claims that Sanders questioned whether a woman can defeat Trump to become the first female U.S. president.Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., left, speaks to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right as former Vice President Joe Biden watches Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020, during a Democratic presidential primary debate.Sanders denied making the remark and said no one believes a woman can’t win, noting that Democrat Hillary Clinton out-polled Trump by nearly 3 million votes in 2016, while losing the vote in the country’s state-by-state electoral college system of electing presidents.
When she was asked what she thought when Sanders told her a woman couldn’t defeat Trump in 2020, Warren responded: “I disagreed.”
Warren said that the male candidates on the debate stage had collectively lost 10 elections during their lifetimes, while the two women, herself and Klobuchar, are undefeated.
Trump’s incumbent status means Republicans are sure to nominate him to seek a second four-year term in the White House.  But the Democratic race is highly unsettled.
Biden, now in his third race for the party’s presidential nomination, leads national polls of Democratic voters, but possibly trails his Democratic opponents in Iowa and some other states. Should he falter early in the nominating process, that could dent his key campaign argument that according to national polls he stands the best chance of defeating Trump.
Last weekend’s Iowa Poll indicates Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has surged to a narrow lead, with 20% support of those who say they will attend a caucus in three weeks. Warren, a progressive representing Massachusetts, is second at 17%, ahead of Buttigieg, who has fashioned himself as a political centrist, at 16%, and Biden, a left-of-center politician through nearly five decades in Washington, at 15%. But more than half of those polled said they could still decide to support a candidate other than the one they now prefer or have yet to make up their mind.
A separate Monmouth University poll showed a similar close contest among the four leaders, but with Biden ahead followed by Sanders, Buttigieg and Warren.
Klobuchar and Steyer both trail the four leaders in the pre-election Iowa polling, but qualified for the debate stage by meeting the polling and fundraising standards set by the national Democratic Party. Other Democratic candidates remain in a crowded field of presidential aspirants, but are not campaigning in Iowa, did not make the cut for the debate or have dropped out, including Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey who left the race on Monday.
Trump has taken note of Sanders’s recent ascent in opinion polls, saying in a Twitter comment over the weekend, “Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!”Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2020
For months Trump had focused singularly on Biden, with occasional barbs against Warren and Buttigieg, as his mostly likely 2020 opponent, to the extent that his concern about Biden is at the center of the impeachment case against Trump. The president’s impeachment trial in the Senate trial is likely to start next Tuesday, only the third such impeachment trial in two and a half centuries of American history.
Trump is accused of trying to benefit himself politically by pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a late July phone call to launch an investigation of Biden, his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company and a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to undermine Trump’s campaign. His requests came at the same time he was temporarily withholding $391 million in military aid Kyiv wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Trump eventually released the money in September without Zelenskiy launching the Biden investigations. That is proof, Republicans say, that Trump had not engaged in a reciprocal quid pro quo deal, the military aid in exchange for the Biden investigations.
Three of the leading Democratic challengers — Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar — could be directly affected by Trump’s impeachment trial since they will be among the 100 members of the Senate, effectively sitting as jurors, deciding Trump’s fate. That will keep them in Washington six days a week while the trial is going on, and importantly for them, off the campaign trail in Iowa to meet voters.
With a Republican majority in the Senate, Trump is all but assured of being acquitted and allowed to remain in office to face voters in November. But a full-blown trial, if witnesses are called to testify as Democrats and some Republicans want, could infuse unexpected new information about Trump and perhaps Biden into the last weeks of the Iowa contest.
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The National Security Agency has discovered a major security flaw in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and tipped off the company so that it can fix it.Microsoft made a software patch to fix it available Tuesday and credited the agency as the flaw’s discoverer.The company said it has not seen any evidence that hackers have used the technique discovered by the NSA.”Customers who have already applied the update, or have automatic updates enabled, are already protected,” said Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, in a statement.Priscilla Moriuchi, who retired from the NSA in 2017 after running its East Asia and Pacific operations, said this is a good example of the “constructive role” that the NSA can play in improving global information security. Moriuchi, now an analyst at the U.S. cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said it’s likely a reflection of changes made in 2017 to how the U.S. determines whether to disclose a major vulnerability or exploit it for intelligence purposes.The revamping of what’s known as the “Vulnerability Equities Process” put more emphasis on disclosing unpatched vulnerabilities whenever possible to protect core internet systems and the U.S. economy and general public.Those changes happened after a group calling itself “Shadow Brokers” released a trove of high-level hacking tools stolen from the NSA.
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Gambia’s longtime dictator Yahya Jammeh, who fled into exile three years ago after an election loss, has announced plans to return to the West African nation where human rights activists say he ordered the killings of political opponents during his rule.The deputy spokesman for Jammeh’s political party released several audio recordings to the media over the weekend featuring conversations between Jammeh and a top party official.”I am coming back. They said they drove me out of the country. Apart from Allah, nobody can take me out of The Gambia,” Jammeh is heard saying. The recordings could not be independently verified and it was not clear when they had been made.His two-decade-long rule was marked by arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, according to rights activists. Along with political opponents, Jammeh also targeted journalists and members of the gay community.The GambiaWhile he has not been charged in Gambia with a crime, witnesses have testified before an ongoing Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission, some saying they had carried out summary executions at his direction.Authorities also have suggested Jammeh could face economic crimes for pillaging state coffers before he fled into exile in Equatorial Guinea in January 2017. He stole an estimated $1 billion during his rule, according to The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.Equatorial Guinea, led by the same president for more than 40 years, is unlikely to ever extradite Jammeh.It’s unclear what measures Gambian authorities would take if Jammeh voluntarily returned home.Do Sannoh, an adviser to Gambian President Adama Barrow, said Sunday he was unaware of any ongoing negotiations over Jammeh’s possible return. But he said the former leader would be welcome to appear before the commission that has been investigating alleged abuses during his rule.”He is a citizen. He has every right to stay in his hometown and go and answer to the law,” he said.Calls for arrestThe audio recordings prompted outcry from the Gambia Center for Victims of Human Rights Violations, which said the government should arrest Jammeh if he sets foot in the country.”Former President Yahya Jammeh’s rule in The Gambia was a tyrannical and brutal dictatorship,” said Sheriff Kijera, the center’s chairman. “He is a fugitive from justice and a subject of serious allegations of human rights violations.”Kijera added: “If former president Jammeh is authorized to return to The Gambia without being arrested, charged and prosecuted for his crimes or transferred to another state for him to face justice, it would be a big failure on the part of the government of The Gambia to uphold its duty to the people of Gambia, as well as its international obligation to provide an effective remedy to victims.”
 
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The European Union rolled out a massive, trillion-dollar investment plan Tuesday to deliver on promises to make Europe the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050.The EU would designate one-quarter of its budget to fighting climate change over the next decade. The trillion-dollar price tag would come from a mix of EU and national government funds, as well as investment from the private sector.  It targets the EU’s ambitious goal of ensuring greenhouse emissions reach net zero in 30 years. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who late last year announced that goal — a plan she calls the “Green Deal” — says the investments are for the climate, as well as EU citizens. “It will be invested in the huge transition ahead of us, which consists of upskilling people in new jobs, clean technologies, green financing, new procedures,” she said.FILE – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks during a media conference after an extraordinary meeting of the EU college of commissioners at EU headquarters in Brussels, Jan. 8, 2020.The plan prioritizes investment to help coal-dependent countries like Poland transition to green energy. Poland is the only EU member that has not yet signed onto the Green Deal, which would support scientists, businesses and other players in the energy transition. Some of the financing is seed money aimed at triggering much bigger investment.  States that want to qualify for funding must present proposals on low-emission projects as part of how they plan to restructure their economies to be climate friendlier.  The European commissioner for budget and administration, Johannes Hahn, detailed the investment plan at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.  “We have no time to waste if we want to deliver results for the citizens,” Hahn said. “Or, again in a nutshell, we provide climate cash in order to avoid a climate crash.”A recent poll shows Europeans fear climate change more than terrorism or losing their jobs.   Still, some EU lawmakers suggest details of the green investment plan are too sketchy. Others believe it should link the funds to deadlines for phasing out coal.  The European Investment Bank, which is mobilizing the chunk of money, announced last year it would end financing for all fossil fuel projects by the end of 2020, and align future financing goals with the Paris climate agreement.  EU lawmakers are expected to hold a non-binding vote Wednesday on the Green Deal. Von der Leyen aims to have climate legislation adopted by March.
 
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