Need help with a sentence
The Council pledged to continue following developments in order to organize as efficiently as possible its efforts in combating terrorism, reaffirmed the importance of its resolutions and statements on terrorism, and stressed the need for implementing them.

1）What does "continue following developments" exactly mean? Cuz in my mother tongue,
"following development" is not quite something that can be "continued"

2)in order to
"...organize as efficiently as possible its efforts in combating terrorism,
reaffirmed the importance of its resolutions and statements on terrorism,
and stressed the need for implementing them."

Are these three parts parallel ? I mean, are these the three thing the Council need to achieve?
If so, why put -ed at the end of the two verbs reaffirm(ed) &stress(ed) but not the first one "organize"??

Thanks a lot

Question

Need help with a sentence
The Council pledged to continue following developments in order to organize as efficiently as possible its efforts in combating terrorism, reaffirmed the importance of its resolutions and statements on terrorism, and stressed the need for implementing them.

1）What does "continue following developments" exactly mean? Cuz in my mother tongue, 
"following development" is not quite something that can be "continued"

2)in order to
"...organize as efficiently as possible its efforts in combating terrorism, 
reaffirmed the importance of its resolutions and statements on terrorism, 
and stressed the need for implementing them."

Are these three parts parallel ? I mean, are these the three thing the Council need to achieve?
If so, why put -ed at the end of the two verbs reaffirm(ed) &stress(ed) but not the first one "organize"??

Thanks a lot

Answer

'continue following developments' means 'keep checking on the changes being made'. 
The last two parts are past tense because the council pledged, it reaffirmed and it stressed. They did all of these things in the past (even if they are decisions about what they will do in the future).

Answer

The Council did three things:

1) PLEDGED to continue following developments to/in order to (为了) organize its efforts in combating terrorism.
2) REAFFIRMED the importance of its resolutions.
3) STRESSED the need for implementing these resolutions.
Do you understand this way?
希望我能帮助你！

Answer

Thanks for the answer Jessica. I am trying to translate the piece in Chinese LoL I kinda went with ur reading of the sentence at the first sight...But then I realized this could be a bit tricky. ^-^

Thanks for all the answers!

Cheer~

Answer

Jessica, your explanation is wonderful regarding the first question. But in teh second part you say they council PLEDGED to do three things, and I think it is not exact. The council pledged to continue following developments... (one thing), and that's all it pledged to. After, it reaffirmed something and, finally, it stressed the need for something. What do you think? :))

Answer

1)  as things evolve we will follow them for example, changes are occuring that lead to global warming, in order to know the full extent of the issue though, we need to see what happens next. Climate models give us an idea of where we are headed but often the data we put into those models are educated guesses. If it turns out that artic snow is melting faster than we though, well we need to reevaluate our original assessment because our model was based on inaccurate data, so in this case it could mean we watch what a country is doing over time so we continue to follow developments vs things happened we watched them and while things may or may not continue to happen we are no longer watching.

2) So someone stood up and pledged to do these 3 things. So I'm guessing these were three things that came up in a meeting and while they may refer to the future, the person telling the story is using the past tense because the person pledged or said to do these things in an earlier time than the person describing what happened is writing/telling the story.