An Afghan security officer inspects the site of a blast in Nangarhar province Welington Castillo Jersey , Afghanistan, Sept. 13, 2017. Six civilians were injured as a blast rocked Jalalabad city, the capital of eastern Nangarhar province, on Wednesday Tim Anderson Jersey , spokesman for the provincial government Attaullah Khogiani said. (XinhuaRahman Safi)
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RAMALLAH, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Ministry said Thursday that "pressure and bullying" by some world powers had caused the delay of a vote for its membership of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
The Palestinians submitted a request last year to become a member of the UNWTO with its vote slated this week. However, the Israeli media said that the UN body decided on Wednesday to postpone the vote to its future meetings in the next two years.
"Pressure and bullying were used by some world powers to influence the membership process in this phase," said the Palestinian statement Ron Santo Jersey , referring to the claims by the Israeli Foreign Ministry that the delayed vote was "a result of Israeli and U.S. pressure."
The statement also said that the Palestinians agreed to postpone the vote as a strategic move to maintain current momentum of international support and hoped to "build on it until the next session."
According to the statement, the Palestinian delegation has realized that the vote during this session held in China would not be successful, so it decided to postpone the vote after consultation with its supporters and friends.
The Palestinian ministry said that the efforts to join the UNWTO will continue, along with its "battle" to join other UN organizations.
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WASHINGTON, March 2 (Xinhua) -- A record drought that ravaged Syria from 2006 to 2010 was likely made worse by human-induced climate change and the drought contributed to the conflict in Syria that began in 2011, a study said Monday.
"We're not saying the drought caused the war," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory who co-authored the study.
"We're saying that added to all the other stressors Paul Konerko Jersey , it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human- driven drying of that region."
The recent drought affected the so-called Fertile Crescent, spanning parts of Turkey and much of Syria and Iraq, where temperatures have risen 1 to 1.2 degrees Centigrade and rainfall during the wet season has declined by 10 percent since 1900.
The region saw substantial droughts in the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s, but 2006-10 was easily the worst and longest since reliable recordkeeping began Ozzie Guillen Jersey , destroying agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria and driving up to 1.5 million people to flee from their farms to cities, where poverty and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011.
The new study showed that the century-long drying trend matches neatly with models of human-influenced global warming, and thus cannot be attributed to natural variability. And the unusual severity of the recent drought in Syria would have been highly unlikely without this trend.
The study linked droughts in the region to rising sea-level pressure in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, which also shows a long- term tread and could be attributed at least in part to manmade global warming.
The study's authors noted that Syria was made especially vulnerable by other factors, including sheer population growth from 4 million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years and government agricultural policies that encouraged water-intensive export crops like cotton.
In addition Nellie Fox Jersey , illegal drilling of irrigation wells dramatically depleted groundwater that might have provided reserves during dry years.
As a result, agricultural production, typically a quarter of the country's gross domestic product, plummeted by a third. In the hard-hit northeast, livestock herds were practically all obliterated; cereal prices doubled; and nutrition-related diseases among children saw dramatic increases.
"Rapid demographic change encourages instability Michael Jordan Jersey ," said the authors. "Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with preexisting acute vulnerability."
A growing body of research suggests that extreme weather, including high temperatures and droughts, increases the chances of violence, from individual attacks to full-scale wars.
But the new study Melky Cabrera Jersey , published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is believed to be the first to look at the relationship between extreme weather and a current war.
Iran flew a surveillance drone over a U.S. aircraft carrier and took "precise" photographs of it as part of an ongoing naval drill, state television reported Friday. An American official declined to comment on the claim.