Speaking exclusively to Sky News, Queen Rania said the arrival of 1.4 million Syrian refugees into Jordan had caused "immense strain" to the country's economy.

"This crisis has had an impact on us for coming up to five years now," she said.

"We have had a wave of refugees coming into Jordan. To date we have 1.4 million Syrians in Jordan - 630,000 of them registered refugees.

"That's 20% of our population. To put that into context for you, it’s the equivalent of 12 million people coming to the UK, or 16 million going to Germany.

"It has really been an immense strain on our economy, on our public services, on our infrastructure, and it has really overwhelmed our capacity to cope with the issue."

Queen Rania said Europe must form a "consensus" on how to cope with the refugee crisis.

"What would be ideal is to seek a consensus in Europe - a holistic and cohesive policy towards dealing with the refugees," she said.

"That will encourage other nations in the world to also be part of the solution, and not to be silent bystanders to what is unfolding."

Greenville officers were following suspect Shannon Lamb when he pulled over, jumped out of his car and ran, police said.

The officers heard one gunshot and found Lamb with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The 45-year-old was pronounced dead in hospital.

Police said Lamb had earlier told authorities that he was "not going to jail".

Officers believe Lamb killed Delta State University history professor Dr Ethan Schmidt as well as the woman Lamb lived with on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, who has been identified as 41-year-old Amy Prentiss.

Dr Schmidt's body was found in his office on Monday morning, prompting a campus-wide lockdown.

SWAT teams were seen clearing buildings and police helicopters patrolled above the school in Cleveland, about 20 miles east of the Mississippi-Arkansas state line.

The lockdown was lifted on Monday night but no classes have been planned for Tuesday.

Instead, students, faculty and staff are invited to the campus to attend a vigil in the evening to honour the murdered professor, who was 39.

In a letter to party members, the country's vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said: "Everything points to the fact that we won't have 800,000 migrants as has been predicted by the Interior Ministry, but one million."

He also called for other EU nations to take their fair share of refugees, and warned a "common European effort" to tackle the crisis is badly needed.

With the Schengen system of border-free travel through much of the continent under increasing pressure, the European Commission is to outline plans to distribute 160,000 refugees across 22 EU member states over the next two years.

One of the officials, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Russian T-90 tanks and artillery have been seen at the airfield near the port city of Latakia, a stronghold of President Bashar al Assad. 

It comes following news last week that Russia has sent military hardware and troops to bolster Syria's embattled national forces.

The equipment said to have been deployed by Moscow included two tank landing ships and extra aircraft, along with a small number of naval infantry forces.

While the aim of the Russian military build-up remains unclear, a US official said last week that the purpose may be to help rebuild or defend the airfield.

Moscow has confirmed it has "experts" on the ground, but it has refused to give further details about its military presence in the country.

Damascus has denied Russian forces were involved in combat, but a Syrian official said the number of Russian "experts" had increased in the past year.

However, Syria's ambassador to Moscow has said talk of Russian troops on the ground is "a lie".

:: Refugee crisis: PM takes aim at Syria's Assad

Sky's Foreign Affairs editor Sam Kiley said: "This is consistent with a build-up of Russian forces in Syria.

"The Russians are staunch allies of the Damascus regime, but they have been helping to rebuild two significant airfields including this one outside Latakia.

"They are now defending them with these Russian-manned Russian tanks and there is also an infantry battalion of around 1,000 men that has been deployed in western Syria to defend the port of Tartus."

Last week David Cameron declared that "hard military force" was needed to reduce the number of refugees fleeing Syria.

Millions are fleeing the country "because Assad has butchered his own people and because ISIL [Islamic State] have in their own way butchered others," the Prime Minister told MPs.

"Assad has to go, ISIL has to go and some of that will require not just spending money, not just aid, not just diplomacy but will on occasion require hard military force," he added.

The Pentagon has now tracked 15 flights of Russian Antonov-124 "Condor" flights into Syria and has seen two more Russian ships offload military cargo - including half a dozen tanks - according to the latest intelligence, a defence official told Fox News.

WASHINGTON — One is a high school counselor. Two or three work in restaurants. Some can't find a job. Others have slipped into obscurity.

The Obama Eight, as they call themselves, don't fit into easy categories, except for this: They were all convicted of drug crimes, and they were among the first to have their sentences commuted by President Obama.

And as Obama prepares to issue even more commutations in the last months of his presidency — part of an aggressive attempt to use his pardon power to shorten long drug sentences — many of them say they feel the weight of criminal justice reform on their shoulders. If any one of them returns to prison, it could taint the clemency initiative and make it harder for other deserving inmates to be released, they say.

They've become leading voices for leniency, especially for drug crimes. Last year, many of them came to Washington to lobby members of Congress and meet with Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff, the Justice Department official whose job it is to make clemency recommendations to the president.

After nearly three years without commuting a single sentence, Obama has now issued 89 commutations as president. It's a record that still ranks as one of the "least merciful" in presidential history, said P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political scientist who blogs about the president's pardon power.

Of those 89, one died shortly after her release. 47 have yet to be released, while 21 were released Tuesday. The 46 sentences Obama commuted this month won't be completed until Nov. 10. (As recently as the Clinton administration, people whose sentences were commuted were released the same day.)

The other 20 are free. The Obama Eight have been out the longest, most of them a little more than a year.

In many ways, the challenges they face are not unlike anyone else released from prison after a long sentence. Finding a job, reuniting with relatives, getting a driver's license and adjusting to the speed of an Internet-driven world that barely existed when they were sent away.

WASHINGTON — In a sign of its resilience, the Islamic State appears to have recruited new fighters to offset 15,000 militants killed in a U.S.-led airstrike campaign approaching its first anniversary, U.S. military and intelligence estimates show.

More than 5,500 airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria that began Aug. 8, 2014, have forced the extremist organization to disperse its fighters into smaller groups, making them less of a threat to seize large chunks of territory, according to the military estimates. Despite the lethal strikes, the group continues to attract new recruits and replace leaders, highlighting the difficulty of fighting a movement that draws support from Muslims around the world.

A year ago, the CIA said it believed the Islamic State had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria. The estimate remains the same this year, according to a U.S. intelligence official, who asked not to be named since he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

The U.S.-led coalition confirmed the 15,000 casualty number but would not discuss it publicly. The deaths are tracked as part of daily battle damage assessments and coalition efforts to avoid civilian casualties. Aerial surveillance is used to assess the impact of airstrikes, including enemy casualties.

One reason the military does not trumpet enemy death estimates is lingering embarrassment from the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon announced daily enemy death figures as a sign of military progress. Yet those counts proved to be exaggerated and U.S. troops ultimately withdrew from Vietnam, having failed to defeat the army of communist North Vietnam.

In the current conflict, the U.S. military has warned that casualty numbers are a poor measure of progress in the conflict. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told American servicemembers in Iraq this month that battling the Islamic State will last for years and will involve countering its brutal ideology in addition to battlefield showdowns.

Commanders said the daily air campaign, combined with successes on the ground by Iraqi and Kurdish forces, have weakened the militant organization and reversed the increasing strength it once enjoyed. “The tide of momentum has begun to creep against them,” said Brigadier James Learmont, a British coalition official in Baghdad.

When Islamic State militants swept through Iraq last year, capturing the country’s second-largest city of Mosul in June, they appeared invincible. Now “there is a sense of paranoia that is starting to creep into their rank and file,” Learmont said, adding there is evidence militants are being assassinated if they attempt to desert.

Military analysts disagree about the wisdom of withholding casualty counts. “If that was a good measure we would have won the Vietnam War,” said Andrew Krepinevich, an analyst at the Center for Budgetary Assessments. “Body counts didn’t work. They don’t show any signs of running out of people.”

But others say it is at least one measure of progress. “The magnitude of that number is pretty damn big,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who served as deputy Air Force chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “It does have an enormous psychological impact” on the enemy.

Aircraft debris found off the coast of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean appears to belong to the same type of plane as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished more than a year ago, a U.S. official told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters at the United Nations that he sent a team to identify the wreckage.

Malaysia is heading up the investigation with the help of Boeing, the National Transportation Safety Board, French authorities and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in a statement.

"In the event that the wreckage is identified as being from MH370 ... it would be consistent with other analysis and modelling that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern Indian Ocean," he said in the statement.

French aviation experts will examine an aircraft wing tip — possibly a flap — and other debris to determine whether it came from the Boeing 777-200ER, which disappeared after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing with 239 people aboard. No trace of the plane has been found despite months of aerial and sea searches over thousands of square miles of the southern Indian Ocean.

Truss, who has overseen the search in the ocean 1,000 miles west of Perth, said Malaysia is examining the debris with help from Boeing and crash investigators from France, the United States and Australia.

"The debris is being examined by experts to determine its origin," Truss said. "In the event that the wreckage is identified as being from MH 370 on La Reunion Island, it would be consistent with other analysis and modeling that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern Indian Ocean."

"Any new evidence will be used to further inform and refine ongoing search efforts," Truss added.

Investigators have a "high degree of confidence" that a photo of the debris shows a wing component unique to the Boeing 777, said the official, who was not identified.

The Senate confirmed Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday after a brief dispute between Pentagon leaders and the chamber's leading critic of military sexual assault policy.

The spat between Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and military officials had nothing to do with Dunford's credentials but instead centered on data of sexual assaults at large military bases, information she has been seeking for years.

She stalled the confirmation process for about two days until Defense Secretary Ash Carter offered assurances to her Wednesday morning that the information would be made available soon.

Dunford, who has served as commandant of the Marine Corps for the last year, was confirmed without opposition just a few hours later.

He received near universal praise from senators after he was tapped for the post, and most of the criticism at his confirmation hearing focused not on him but the White House's national security strategy.

Dunford served as commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan from February 2013 to August 2014, and previously commanded the 5th Marine Regiment during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

His career ascent has been rapid, going from a one-star general to four stars in about three years. He'll take over the top military spot in September, when Gen. Martin Dempsey is slated to retire.

The Senate vote comes amid a slate of confirmations in the waning days of the summer session.

Earlier this week, Air Force Gen. Paul Selva was confirmed as the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Darren McDew to replace him as the new head ofU.S. Transportation Command.