Riyadh is hosting the next Arab League summit in May, where most states hope to restore Syria's membership after it was suspended in 2011, the Arab League's Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Tuesday. Saudi Arabia's foreign minister acknowledged that there is a growing consensus among Arab countries that dialogue with Damascus is necessary. The region's top parliamentarians agreed in a Baghdad summit last month to work toward ending Syria's political isolation. Tunisia's president recently said he hopes to reestablish ties with Syria, while the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt met with Assad in Damascus for the first time since 2011. Washington's key allies began restoring or bolstering diplomatic ties with the Syrian government. Before the tragedy, the United Arab Emirates had already reestablished ties with Damascus, while Syria had been increasing its contacts with Turkey, a main backer of the opposition.Īfter the disaster, formerly hostile Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia delivered aid to government-held Syria, along with Assad's traditional backers Russia and Iran. International sympathy following the quake appears to have sped up the regional rapprochement that had been brewing for years. Still, the quake and recent rapprochement between regional powerhouses Iran and Saudi Arabia, who since 2011 have supported rival groups in Syria's conflict, may be a turning point in Damascus' political fortunes.Īssad appears poised to make a political comeback in the Arab world, more than a decade after the 22-member Arab League suspended Syria's membership over his brutal crackdown on protesters and later on civilians during the war. The Red Cross' global chief recently said that rebuilding infrastructure ought to be a priority. International medical and humanitarian agencies fear dangerous outbreaks of diseases because the country's battered water and sanitation systems were further damaged by the quake. However, entire cities, towns and villages remain in ruins, while the conflict has caused lasting damage to the country's electric, transportation and health systems. These include a section of the centuries-old market in the northern city of Aleppo and some historic mosques in Aleppo and the central city of Homs. Since the balance of power shifted in Assad's favor over the past few years, the government has rebuilt small parts of the country with the help of its allies. It estimated some $226 billion in losses - including economic and physical damage - during the first four years of the war in 2016, about four times Syria's 2010 gross domestic product. The World Bank estimated in an initial post-earthquake assessment that the disaster had caused $5.1 billion worth of physical damage across both government- and rebel-held Syria. 6, earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria, killing more than 50,000 people, including about 6,000 in Syria, exacerbated the destruction caused by Syria's 12-year conflict which has killed nearly half a million people. Oil-rich Gulf Arab countries have been stepping up efforts to normalize ties with the Assad government, but analysts say the ongoing political paralysis is likely holding them back from pumping billions of dollars for reconstruction into Syria. That will of course be a story for another day, but in this article, it's all about raw gaming performance of existing games.BEIRUT - The recent deadly earthquake in Turkey and Syria which caused billions of dollars in damage has boosted the prospects of Syria's once widely shunned president return to the Arab fold, but appears unlikely to jump-start large-scale reconstruction in the war-ravaged country.Īs Syria's conflict enters its 13th year Wednesday, President Bashar Assad's government still refuses to make concessions to his domestic opponents, rejecting long-standing demands by the United States and its allies as a political solution remains elusive. Although these new cards do have the advantage of DirectX 10 support and dedicated video processors, going by these scores, we aren't sure if these are real advantages or only good on paper. Meanwhile, some of the entry level cards were not much better than integrated graphics, registering single digit frame rates in Quake 4, which itself is not that demanding by current standards. We also saw the GeForce 7950 GT and Radeon X1950 PRO outperforming the GeForce 8600 GTS. The mid-range GeForce 8 and Radeon HD cards in particular, have not been very convincing and in Quake 4, we saw the Radeon HD 2600 XT losing out to the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT while the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT fared even worse. As prices plunge to the lowest for these cards, they can be very attractive, short-term solutions. Like in many of our previous benchmarks, Quake 4 showed that the older cards still have what it takes to compete against the new generation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |