Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas went to the United Nations Tuesday to protest President Donald Trump’s peace proposal for the Palestinians and Israel.In an impassioned 35-minute speech to a packed Security Council chamber, the Palestinian leader urged the international community to reject the Trump plan. “This plan, or any part in this plan, should not be considered as an international reference for negotiations,” Abbas said. “This is an Israeli-American preemptive plan in order to put an end to the question of Palestine.”The Palestinians have rejected the deal, which they see as heavily favored toward Israel and not giving them a sovereign, contiguous state with East Jerusalem as its capital.  Abbas said the U.S. can no longer be the sole Mideast mediator and called for an international conference that would revive the dormant Middle East Quartet made up of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.But despite his anger, he did not rule out negotiations with Israel based on previous internationally agreed parameters.“In this historic moment, I would like to extend my hand for peace again, before we waste this final opportunity, and I hope to find a real partner in Israel,” Abbas said.Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon speaks during a Security Council meeting at United Nations headquarters, Feb. 11, 2020.Israel’s U.N. envoy Danny Danon accused Abbas of paying “lip service” to peace talks, saying if he was serious about negotiating he would be in Jerusalem or Washington, not at the United Nations. He then called on Abbas to step down.“Let’s not beat around bush: progress toward peace will not be made as long as President Abbas remains in his position; this is the reality,” Danon said. “Only when he steps down, can Israel and the Palestinians move forward.”The U.S. ambassador, Kelly Craft, defended President Trump’s peace plan as “realistic and implementable” and said it is an “opening offer” and not set in stone.The U.S. plan is more than a path to Palestinian independence, it is a blueprint for the construction of a flourishing Palestinian state.”Other council members were not as certain. Several expressed concerns that internationally agreed parameters were being set aside and unilateral actions set in motion.
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BRUSSELS/WHITE HOUSE — U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper says dissolving the bilateral agreement with the Philippines that covers visiting U.S. military forces there “would be a move in the wrong direction.”Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte gave formal notice to the United States of his decision to scrap the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) late Monday after repeated threats to downgrade the two countries’ military alliance. The 1998 agreement provides legal permission for thousands of U.S. troops who rotate into the Philippines for dozens of military and humanitarian assistance exercises each year.”We just got the notification late last night. We have to digest it,” Esper told reporters on route to a NATO conference in Brussels.FILE – Defense Secretary Mark Esper speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, Dec. 20, 2019.The U.S. defense secretary said the move, set to take effect in 180 days, runs counter to bilateral efforts with the Philippines and collective efforts with regional allies to push China toward abiding by international norms in the region.”As we try to bolster our presence and compete with (China) in this era of great-power competition, I think it’s a move in the wrong direction, again for the long-standing relationship we’ve had with the Philippines, for their strategic location, for the ties between our peoples and our countries,” Esper said.A senior Trump administration official echoed Esper’s remarks.”We are disappointed by the decision of the government of the Philippines,” the official said in a statement Tuesday.”The United States shares a long history with the government and people of the Philippines and recognizes that regional and global security is best served through the strong partnership that is enabled by the Visiting Forces Agreement,” the official added. “We will continue to work with our Philippine government partners to strengthen this relationship in a way that benefits both our countries.”Duterte has indicated that he favors relations with China and Russia over ties with the U.S.  His spokesman said Tuesday the reason for terminating the VFA was to allow the Philippines military to be more independent.”I don’t think it’s necessarily tied to China. As you know, it’s tied to some other issues,” Esper told reporters. “So again, I’m going to take this one step at a time. I don’t get too excited about these things.”The move also comes after the top commander in Duterte’s war on drugs, former police chief Ronald dela Rosa, said his U.S. visa was rescinded following the detention of a senator critical of Duterte.U.S. credibility in the regionOne of the U.S.’s oldest allies walking away from a security pact would be a serious blow to U.S. credibility as a regional security provider, said Gregory Poling, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Poling noted that since coming to office, Duterte has said he wishes to distance the Philippines from the United States, end their long-standing alliance, and enter a strategic alignment with China.If the VFA termination is implemented, it would allow the Philippine president to “effectively undermine the credibility of the U.S. commitment to defend the Philippines, furthering his goal,” Poling said.The VFA termination would effectively do away with the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement between the U.S. and the Philippines and render the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the two countries largely hollow.The VFA is the “nuts and bolts of the Mutual Defense Treaty” and meant to help defend the Philippines against attacks, said Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst with the RAND 
Corporation.”By not having the ability for U.S. troops to move freely into the Philippines, to operate there and to move military equipment into the Philippines makes it much more difficult for the U.S. to make good on its obligations under the mutual defense treaty,” Grossman added.Analysts say without access to the Philippines, the U.S. will not be in a position to rapidly respond to threats from China in the South China Sea. They say it will also weaken U.S. counterterror and intelligence gathering in the region, and undermine the ability to protect freedom of the seas and contest Chinese coercion in the South China Sea.FILE – A U.S. fighter jet takes off from the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to patrol the international waters off the South China Sea, Aug. 6, 2019.Bargaining tacticThe notice to terminate the decades-old military pact with Washington may be a bargaining strategy from the Duterte administration.Malacañang spokesman Salvador Panelo told reporters during a press conference Tuesday that after the VFA termination notice, the U.S.-Philippines relations “remains warm” and that “hopefully, it would be warmer.””I’ve been noticing that those who’ve been criticizing the U.S. government policies have been given the preferential attention by the U.S. government,” Panelo said. “When they are being criticized, they tend to court you back.”The termination would take effect after 180 days, unless both sides agree to keep it. A lot can happen before it expires, said defense analyst Grossman, adding that he would not be surprised if Trump and Duterte would soon take steps to reconcile the matter.In a speech late Monday, the Philippine president said Trump had tried to save the agreement but that he had rejected it.”America is very rude. They are so rude,” he said.Trump has invited Duterte and other Association of South East Asian Nation leaders to attend the US-ASEAN summit to be held in Las Vegas this March. Duterte has said that he will not attend.Steve Miller contributed to this report.
 
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It could have been a scene taken from “The Thick of It,” the internationally acclaimed British comedy series satirizing the inner workings of the British government.The country’s top political reporters, collectively known as the Lobby, were summoned last week to No. 10 Downing Street for a special post-Brexit briefing, but once they had arrived, those considered hostile to Brexit or Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government were excluded.That provoked the fury of the entire Lobby with all reporters walking out in protest. Britain’s main national newspapers reacted in anger — with even pro-Johnson tabloid newspapers criticizing the rare upset of the well-established protocols of parliamentary reporting and the Conservative government’s seeming determination to pick and choose who receives briefings.“Information which should be available on the record, and of a type which was briefed freely in the past, is now being handed out as a favor to selected journalists in the expectation of favorable coverage,” said Adam Boulton, political editor of Sky News. “No. 10 is trying to control the media, and everyone in our democracy should be afraid,” he tweeted.Last week’s spat came just days after Cabinet ministers were told to boycott a flagship BBC morning radio news program, which has a reputation for criticizing government officials. The squabble is being seen as an opening skirmish in what’s likely to turn into a long-running Johnson campaign to try to refashion key British institutions in ways more favorable to the ruling Conservatives, also known as Tories.Dominic Cummings a British political strategist and special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson walks into 10 Downing Street in London, July 30, 2019. Prime Minister Johnson and his chief strategic adviser, Dominic Cummings, an iconoclast who’s been likened to Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s onetime firebrand counselor, appear determined to remake the BBC and the civil service, curb what they see as judicial overreach and political activism by judges, sidestep the so-called mainstream media and shake up Britain’s liberal-leaning universities.Not since Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, took on public institutions in the 1990s, lambasted reporters as “moaning minnies,” (Note: minny is a carp fish) and described her Cabinet ministers as lacking a backbone, has Britain’s so-called establishment been so nervous — and outraged.The wider war was declared by Cummings in his less than discreet blog last month when he complained about what he dubbed “The Blob,” a reference to the 1988 remake of a Hollywood science fiction movie of the same name in which an amorphous, amoeba-like organism devours everything in its path. Cummings’ “blob” is an eclectic mix of cautious bureaucrats, academics, the mainstream media, judges and the traditional mouthpieces of British business, the Confederation of British Industry, the CBI, and the Institute of Directors.FILE – The sun shines through a European Union flag hanging outside Parliament in London, Oct. 28, 2019.For Cummings and his boss they are reactionary forces, which are pro-European Union, liberal-leaning and far too politically correct — as well as lacking optimism about post-Brexit Britain and Downing Street’s upbeat vision of a “global Britain.”Recently, Cummings called for “weirdos and misfits” to apply for jobs in Downing Street and the government quarter of Whitehall, saying what the new Johnson government needs is “true cognitive diversity” and not “more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates.”Graduates from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have traditionally dominated the corridors of British power.The Johnson-led and Cummings-advised government is moving quickly to combat the blob. Ministers are talking about decriminalizing non-payment of television licenses, which partly fund the BBC. And they are considering a judicial shake-up which could see Britain’s Supreme Court disbanded. Judges could see more restrictions introduced to hedge in their discretionary powers when sentencing.FILE – A street cleaner clears fall leaves from the front of 10 Downing Street, London, Britain, Nov. 6, 2019.The Downing Street door is being slammed shut on the CBI and the Institute of Directors. None of their officials was invited this month to a keynote Johnson speech outlining his plans for post-Brexit Britain.And when it comes to the mainstream media, the government is copying the Trump White House by using social media sites — from Twitter to YouTube — to promote its governing narrative. On Brexit night, Johnson did not appear on any national television programs to welcome in a new era; instead Downing Street posted a broadcast straight to the internet.Johnson supporters say the British prime minister has no choice but to take on the blob. Allister Heath, editor of The Sunday Telegraph and a prominent Johnson cheerleader, says, “It’s now or never – Boris must beat the Blob or be suffocated by it.” He says the blob exists, “but no longer in small town America: its new home is Whitehall, and it has developed a predilection for gobbling up Tory politicians and advisers.”Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives for an EU summit in Brussels, Dec. 12, 2019. Others, though, see the Johnson game plan as having political affinity with the populist shake-up under way in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a champion of what he once dubbed “illiberal democracy,” has taken on his country’s public institutions and battled a not dissimilar cast of foes.Last month, Orban praised Johnson as one of the “the most courageous, the most dynamic” leaders and one of the most likely “to effect change.” A former Johnson aide and influential Conservative commentator, Tim Montgomerie, returned the compliment at two research group events in December and January in Budapest, Hungary, where he praised Orban for “interesting early thinking on the limits of liberalism” and compared the two populist leaders.He said, “Long-term trends in economics and culture” are “changing how people align themselves,” and predicted Johnson’s Britain and Orban’s Hungary would forge a “special relationship.”But not all Johnson supporters are as sanguine and fear the British prime minister may be over-reaching by taking on too many powerful institutions at once. Writing in the business daily City AM, Michael Hayman, a co-founder of Seven Hills, a London-based communication consultancy, warned, “Boris has a war to fight, and he’s going to need all the friends he can get.”
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Національний банк України встановив на 12 лютого курс 24 гривні 42 копійки за долар, це на 10 копійок менше за офіційний курс на 11 лютого.

За даними Finance.ua, станом на 16:30 тренд на українському міжбанківському валютному ринку змінився, котирування зросли до 24 гривень 49–52 копійок за долар.

Як інформує сайт «Мінфін», у день проведення аукціону з розміщення ОВДП «НБУ купував долар по 24,42 гривні і цим майже повністю прибрав надлишок валюти на ринку». «За оцінками учасників ринку, (регулятор) купив близько 45–55 мільйонів доларів», – ідеться в повідомленні.

Національний банк України знизив облікову ставку на 2,5% – до 11% з 31 січня 2020 року. «Національний банк продовжує пом’якшення монетарної політики, щоб забезпечити інфляцію на рівні цілі 5% та підтримати стійке економічне зростання», – заявили в НБУ.

Наступне засідання правління Національного банку України з питань монетарної політики відбудеться 12 березня 

Облікова ставка є одним із інструментів, за допомогою якого Нацбанк встановлює для комерційних банків орієнтир щодо вартості кредитів і депозитів. Опосередковано цей параметр впливає і на функціонування валютного ринку, регулюючи приплив валюти від нерезидентів.
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Долар втратив ще 10 копійок, свідчать дані на сайті Національного банку України.

Довідкове значення курсу долара встановлене на рівні 24 гривень 42 копійок.

Свого пікового значення у 2020 році долар досяг 4 лютого, коли він коштував 25 гривень 8 копійок. Після цього він стабільно падає.
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Judges must resist the temptation to bend their rulings to personal racial, religious or partisan preferences and instead uphold the rule of law, even when that leads to unpopular decisions, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday.“Each time a judge sidesteps or manipulates the law to achieve his or her desired outcome, the rule of law suffers and is undermined and, eventually, compromised,” Thomas said in a keynote speech during the dedication of Georgia’s new judicial center in Atlanta.Thomas is a Georgia native, born in the Pin Point community near Savannah. It wasn’t long ago that courthouses like the one being dedicated Tuesday were segregated, he noted.Segregation endured, he said, not only because of prejudices and a lack of understanding, but also because of a “lack of courage among those who knew or should have known better, especially in the judicial branch of government.”Having the courage to uphold the rule of law may lead judges to decisions that aren’t popular at the time, Thomas said.“Our decisions should not be driven by a desire to be revered or lionized for reaching certain outcomes. We are not mass media icons,” he said. “We are judges, nothing more and nothing less.”The new Nathan Deal Judicial Center is named after the Georgia governor who served from 2011 to 2019 and pushed through broad reforms to the state’s criminal justice system.On hand for Tuesday’s dedication, Deal got choked up as he thanked all the people who helped make the building possible.The new judicial center houses the state’s two appellate courts — the Georgia Supreme Court and the Georgia Court of appeals. It is also slated to be home to the new statewide business court.
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Ukraine’s first and currently only television channel in the Crimean Tatar language says it is on the brink of shutting down operations due to lack of government funding.ATR hasn’t received $2 million that the government allocated for the channel in this year’s state budget, a statement by the channel said on Feb. 10.The channel said it received $610,000 on its account on Dec. 28, but couldn’t access the money because banks were closed that day so it had to return the money, as required by law.A portion of the $2 million that was allocated this year was transferred to ATR’s account, but the channel said the state treasury had blocked access to it.In response, ATR has launched a fundraising campaign and is broadcasting from an empty studio without presenters and guests.ATR is a part of a media holding that is majority-owned by Lenur Islyamov and initially stopped broadcasting in Crimea after the occupying Russian authorities refused to issue a broadcasting license after annexing the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.It resumed broadcasting on June 17, 2015, in Kyiv via satellite throughout Ukraine, including in Crimea, supported mostly with government money.Islyamov said in a statement that without the channel, Ukraine will never get back Crimea.”We know who our focus group is. We know it is the people who support us, those people who know about us, and those who want to return to Crimea with us,” he said. “Without us, we won’t be able to return to Crimea. We are the bridge that is being laid to Crimea.”Due to the financial shortfall, ATR has slashed 90 percent of its own programming, dismissed 45 percent of its staff, reduced news broadcasts, and stopped broadcasting live, Islyamov said.In addition to ATR, a children’s TV channel and a radio channel are part of the holding.Separately in January, Ukraine’s public broadcaster shut down international broadcasting and closed its Crimean Tatar-, Arabic-, and English-language departments. 
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Afghan officials say a suicide blast near a military academy in Kabul early Tuesday killed at least six people, including four soldiers.The bomber detonated explosives trapped to his body at a checkpoint near the entrance to the capital city’s Marshal Fahim Military Academy.Interior Ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said the blast injured at least 12 people, including both civilians and military personnel.There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack but the military academy has been the target of suicide bombings in the past by the Taliban insurgency and Islamic State militants.Tuesday’s violence came after around three months of a lull in such attacks in Kabul, mainly attributed to ongoing peace negotiations between the United States and the Taliban.A suicide car bombing in the Afghan capital last November had killed at least 12 people, including a foreign national working with the United Nations.  The turbulent months-long U.S.-Taliban dialogue being hosted by Qatar has appeared to bog down in recent days over Washington’s demands for the insurgent group to commit to a “significant and lasting” reduction in violence before a deal is signed to end the 18-year-old Afghan war, America’s longest.
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Germany’s closely watched impending decision on whether and to what extent to allow Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, to enter its next generation telecommunications infrastructure may yield a result as early as Tuesday, sources tell VOA.The decision “is imminent,” says Emily Haber, German ambassador to the United States, in answer to a question raised by VOA Monday afternoon concerning the German government’s stance with regard to Huawei.“Any decision we take will factor in the relevance of the trustworthiness of the provider,” Haber added.VOA has since learned from diplomatic sources that “imminent” could mean as early as Tuesday February 11th when German lawmakers convene in Berlin.Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, thinks Germany could end up following Britain’s precedence and reach a compromise solution “between Merkel’s permissive ‘few limits suggestion and the more restrictive line called for by many backbench MPs, led by Norbert Roettgen,” Kirkegaard told VOA.Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen as wanting to work with Beijing in order to secure German business interests in China, while Roettgen, also a member of the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and chairman of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, has made  no secret of his mistrust of Huawei.Roettgen pinned his tweet from November 23rd following a CDU vote in which he declared the unanimous vote a huge victory and an unambiguous declaration of where CDU stands on this issue.Unser #Initiativantrag zu #5G wurde beim #cdupt19 einstimmig beschlossen – ein Riesenerfolg! Die Debatte kommt in den #Bundestag. Klare Position der @CDU gegen Einfluss ausländischer Staaten in deutsche kritische Infrastruktur & für eine europäische Lösung! pic.twitter.com/W3uvLAxWJU— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) November 23, 2019CDU position “against foreign influence in critical German infrastructure” as well as its determination to find a European solution are “clear,” he tweeted, “next comes the parliamentary debate” which could take place Tuesday in Berlin, sources tell VOA.In Kirkegaard’s opinion, Germany could also impose a ceiling on Huawei’s market share and attempt to prevent the company from supplying “core network” components, a measure Britain has recently announced, in spite of Washington’s strong objection.He nonetheless points out that given the 5G technology’s largely “cloud”-based feature, it remains “technically unclear” how core and peripheral distinction could be meaningfully established.Should the German parliament vote Huawei out of Germany’s 5G telecommunications infrastructure, it would be a huge surprise to many, including Kirkegaard. Should it happen, it would constitute a “huge defeat for Merkel,” he says, even as Merkel’s party is thrown into turmoil as her designated successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced her decision to step down as chairman of the CDU on Monday.It remains to be seen whether the latest development within the CDU could affect the German parliament’s debate on Huawei.Speaking along with the German ambassador at an event hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Monday afternoon, Piotr Wilczek, Poland’s ambassador to the United States, said “there’s been a big effort” on the part of all EU countries “to provide Brussels with our positions” on the issue of Huawei.“Now we’re in the process of discussing this in more detail,” Wilczek said, in answer to VOA’s question on his country’s position with regard to Huawei. “Poland and I believe Romania are the only countries that have signed a declaration with the United States, stating just that we’ll be very careful in choosing providers and providers should be very reliable,” he added, without naming any company by name.“This is a very complicated issue … a difficult decision,” he says, “because it’s about the quality of services, of various providers; we know some of them are very much advanced, and some of them are not so much advanced but perhaps more reliable.”Earlier, Norbert Roettgen, the German lawmaker who has openly expressed his concerns about Huawei, stated that when it comes to which providers to be let in, “You don’t just need technical certainty, you need the suppliers to be politically trustworthy, too.” A bill that Roettgen helped draft requires that any company designated as “untrustworthy” be excluded “from both the core and peripheral networks.”Roettgen tweeted on February 8 that the United States and the EU “could team up to counter China’s 5G dominance.”  “We share the same security concerns and should cooperate to expand alternatives.”  He added that “but to do so, we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table.  Partners don’t threaten one another,” in a reference to tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump has said he would impose on a number of European imports, including on German automobiles.The #USA & EU could team up to counter #China’s #5G dominance. We share the same security concerns & should cooperate to expand 🇪🇺 alternatives. But to do so we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table. Partners don’t threaten one another. https://t.co/ZPvZFKWNYq— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) February 8, 2020Huawei has repeatedly denied that it is beholden to the Chinese government and its political demands. China’s top envoy to Berlin has made it clear that Beijing “will not stand idly by” should Germany’s decision on Huawei turns out to be unfavorable to Beijing. “If Germany were to make a decision that led to Huawei’s exclusion from the German market, there will be consequences,” Wu Ken is quoted as saying. Whichever way Germany decides, its decision likely will have significant impact on the other European Union countries. Political influence aside, the fact that Germany takes up about 30% of the EU’s 5G market is “enough for pan-EU operators to follow its lead,” according to the Peterson Institute’s Kirkegaard.
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A Belfast couple were on Tuesday set to become the first same-sex couple to get married in Northern Ireland after a change in the law.Robyn Peoples, 26, and Sharni Edwards, 27, were due to wed at 2:00 pm (1400 GMT) in Carrickfergus, near Belfast, after the new legislation came into effect on Monday.It followed campaigning by Amnesty International and partner organizations in the “Love Equality” campaign, which hailed the occasion “a landmark moment for equality in Northern Ireland.””We didn’t set out to make history — we just fell in love,” Edwards said ahead of the nuptials in a statement released by the campaign.”We are so grateful to the thousands of people who marched for our freedoms, to the Love Equality campaign who led the way, and the politicians who voted to change the law.”Without you, our wedding wouldn’t have been possible. We will be forever thankful.”Her soon-to-be wife Peoples added: “While this campaign ends with Sharni and I saying ‘I do,’ it started with people saying ‘no’ to inequality. By standing together, we’ve made history.”British MPs in London passed legislation last July, while Northern Ireland’s devolved government was suspended, to allow gay marriages and same-sex civil partnerships.The move, which brought the province into line with the rest of the UK, was opposed by a group of local lawmakers but they failed in a last-minute bid in October to block its implementation.London spent the intervening months drawing up new regulations to apply to the marriages and partnerships — with the first permitted to happen this week.In the meantime, Northern Ireland’s political parties also agreed to restart power-sharing in Belfast.Activists, British MPs including Northern Ireland Secretary of State Julian Smith, and others will celebrate the occasion at a parliamentary event in London later on Tuesday.Sara Canning, the partner of journalist Lyra McKee who was killed by dissident republicans in the Northern Irish city of Londonderry last year, helped to campaign for the change.”Of course, this historic moment is a little bittersweet. It had been our dream too. Lyra and I should have been an engaged couple now, planning our own wedding day,” she said in the statement.
 
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Using geotagged tweets, researchers were able to predict, within a few kilometers, where the first coronavirus case in the United Kingdom would appear.”When we saw the map for the first time, I can tell you that we were kind of shocked,” Donal Bisanzio, senior epidemiologist at A man wears a protective mask as he looks at his mobile phone, following the outbreak of the new coronavirus, in Hong Kong, China, Feb. 10, 2020.Are you ready?In addition, 10 Twitter users from Wuhan appeared in cities in the United States, including near Seattle, Los Angeles and Tucson, Arizona. All of those cities have reported coronavirus cases.Though the tweets and the coronavirus cases were separated by years, three-quarters of the posts came from within 15 kilometers of where a coronavirus patient later turned up. Travel patterns did not change much in that time, he said.Bisanzio cautioned that just because a traveler from Wuhan showed up in a city six years ago, “that doesn’t mean that you have high risk of getting the virus.””But, of course,” he added, “it also means, be careful. Are you sure that your country is ready?”For the past decade or so, researchers have been using mobile phone data to draw detailed maps of where and when people travel, whether it’s between countries or within cities. They’re generally not looking to track individual people. Rather, they aim to understand broad patterns and pathways of population movement.This information has helped scientists understand the spread of A man wearing a face mask checks his mobile phone while riding a subway in the morning after the extended Lunar New Year holiday caused by the coronavirus outbreak, in Beijing, Feb. 10, 2020.Surveillance stateResearchers are required to strip identifying information out of the data before they work with it, and the data is often a year or more old.In China, however, authorities are using mobile phone information as well as facial recognition software to monitor individual patients and suspected cases in real time, according to The Wall Street Journal. Officials tracked one infected person across the city of Nanjing minute by minute and published the details of the patient’s travels on social media to warn residents that they may have been infected if they crossed paths.”We’re at an interesting moment,” said Steve Feldstein, an expert on technology and repression at Boise State University and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.While China’s surveillance state is generally considered a tool of repression, “the same set of systems can provide a lot of useful, granular, real time information when it comes to the spread  of a very fast moving and unsettling epidemic,” he said.Liberty vs. healthIn the United States, experts say mobile phone data would likely be fair game for public health and law enforcement officials if the outbreak were to spread here.The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that officials need a really good reason to collect that data, given how sensitive it is.”You’re contemplating a potential deprivation of liberty” for the person whose data is being collected, said Sharon Bradford Franklin, policy director of the Open Technology Institute at New America, a policy research organization. “You could have your travel restricted, you could be under quarantine, which is a real deprivation of liberty, just like being locked up in jail.””A public health crisis, like this coronavirus seems to be, might provide the sufficient compelling public interest,” she added, but there would need to be strong limits on who could access the data and why, and limits on how long officials could hold onto it.”You might want to permit it, but only with justification and with robust safeguards,” Franklin said.
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Democratic presidential contenders are making a furious last minute push for votes ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.  Polls show Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders leading the field in New Hampshire followed by former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.  Battling for third place are Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and former vice president Joe Biden.  VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has a preview from Washington.
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Національний банк України встановив на 11 лютого офіційний курс 24 гривні 52 копійки за долар, це на 2 копійки менше за курс на 10 лютого.

За даними Finance.ua, станом на 16:15 котирування просіли ще нижче – до 24 гривень 45,5–48,5 копійки за долар.

Як інформує сайт «Мінфін», найактивніша частина торгів минула за приблизної рівноваги попиту і пропозиції. Про участь у торгах НБУ експерти не повідомляють.

Національний банк України знизив облікову ставку на 2,5% – до 11% з 31 січня 2020 року. «Національний банк продовжує пом’якшення монетарної політики, щоб забезпечити інфляцію на рівні цілі 5% та підтримати стійке економічне зростання», – заявили в НБУ.

Наступне засідання правління Національного банку України з питань монетарної політики відбудеться 12 березня 

Облікова ставка є одним із інструментів, за допомогою якого Нацбанк встановлює для комерційних банків орієнтир щодо вартості кредитів і депозитів. Опосередковано цей параметр впливає і на функціонування валютного ринку, регулюючи приплив валюти від нерезидентів.
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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders formally requested the Iowa Democratic Party recount some of the state’s results from last week’s caucus, citing 28 precincts where the campaign believes he was shorted delegates.“While a recanvass is just the first step in the process and we don’t expect it to change the current calculations, it is a necessary part of making sure Iowans can trust the final results of the caucus,” Bernie 2020 Senior Advisor Jeff Weaver said.Sanders narrowly lost to rival Pete Buttigieg in the Feb. 3 nominating contest, which took days to settle after a technical meltdown led to delays in determining the winner.
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