BRICS News

This Russian fighter jet is one of many SU-24s deployed at an air base in Latakia, Syria [Xinhua]
The Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday evening announced that its air force had successfully completed the first joint air raid with the Turkish air force against the Islamic State in Syria.
“Today, Russian and Turkish Air Forces are carrying out their first joint operation to target ISIL in the suburbs of the town of al-Bab in the Aleppo province,” Sergey Rudskoy, chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff, said.

Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told reporters at Davos that OPEC will monitor oil output and production to ensure that the agreement to curb output is met by all [Xinhua]
The commitment and execution of OPEC and non-OPEC members to curb output in line with an agreement last December is still holding strong, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said at Davos late Tuesday.
He praised Russia for being ahead of its scheduled reduction pledges.

Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years by a military court in 2013. She is now likely to be released on May 17, 2017 [Xinhua]
Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who divulged volumes of highly classified US intelligence material to world media in 2013, Tweeted his thanks to US President Barack Obama for commuting analyst Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence for leaking Iraq war data to Wikileaks.

File photo of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov [Xinhua]
Multilateralism and cooperation between states on different fronts is on the rise, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at his annual press conference in Moscow on Tuesday.
China and Russia, who enjoy excellent relations, have been key drivers in the rise of multilateralism, he added. They have been playing an “important and active role” in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS bloc, he said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Jurg Stahl, president of the National Council, and President of the Council of States Ivo Bischofberger, who are heads of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament, in Bern, ahead of his appearance at Davos [Xinhua]
Don’t pursue your own interests at the expense of others, Chinese President Xi Jinping told world leaders and delegates at the Davos World Economic Forum on Tuesday in staunch support of multilateralism and globalization.
Xi’s participation at Davos is the first such visit by a Chinese head of state.

Global economic growth will hit 3.4 per cent in 2017, the IMF said, but the world’s second-largest economy will grow by only 6.5 per cent in 2017 [Xinhua]
China’s fiscal stimulus has helped edge its GDP growth upward, the International Monetary Fund said on Monday, but India’s domestic consumption retreated in the face of demonetization and pushed economic growth down.

The city of Beijing has long been looking for ways to curb its vehicle-related smog [Xinhua}
China is planning to drastically raise the number of new-energy vehicles it produces in order to hit two million by 2020, said Industry and Information Technology Minister Miao Wei.
Speaking on the sidelines of a Beijing forum on Sunday, the minister said that by 2025, at least one in every five cars sold in China will be a new energy model.
This would quadruple the number the number of new-energy vehicles produced.

Trump hinted in an interview over the weekend that the One China policy could be renegotiated as part of trade talks [Xinhua]
China has warned the US that any tampering with the current decades-old policy on the status of Taiwan as a bargaining chip for a future trade deal would be a waste of time and is akin to “lifting a rock and dropping it on their own feet”.
Just four days ahead of his inauguration, China has delivered a strong message to US President-elect Donald Trump that the One China policy is non-negotiable.

According to a 2015 census, there are about 55 million Chinese living in poverty. The current Five-Year plan looks to alleviate
A number of Chinese provinces have highlighted poverty alleviation as central to the agenda of the plenary meetings of provincial lawmakers and political advisors.
According to official figures, there are 55 million people currently living in poverty.
Hunan province, for example, says it will repeat its fund allocation from 2016, which helped lift more than a million people out of poverty.

The Russian Finance Minister has warned that oil prices will slip unless OPEC and non-OPEC countries remain committed to output cuts agreed in December [Xinhua]
Russia’s economy is still largely dependent on the export of oil, Tatyana Golikova, Chairwoman of the Accounts Chamber – parliament’s financial control body for the Russian Federation, told local media on Friday.
Russia’s economy slumped since 2015 following European Union/US sanctions and the dramatic drop in oil prices in the past two years.