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Australia has already twice rejected US appeals to resettle the Uighurs.

Palau has retained close ties with the United States since independence in 1994 when it signed a Free Compact of Association with the US. It relies heavily on the US for aid and defence.

Specifically, the senators ask Obama to encourage the Arab League to end its boycott of Israel and establish normal trade, tourism and athletic relations with the country, as well as hold diplomatic talks with Israeli officials. The letter also asks the Arab League to end its boycott of Israel and to cease propaganda campaigns that “demonize” the country. “Such gestures would send a powerful signal that Arab nations are committed to the peace process and could help usher in a new era of peace and security in the Middle East,” the letter reads.

Berlin's city government has banned sausage sellers and souvenir stalls from the area, hoping to preserve the decorum of a site that symbolizes the nation's history of division and unification like few others. But there's not much it can do about street performers, who don't require official permits to pose for tourists.

Kavi Chongkittavorn, a columnist and editor at The Nation, an English-language newspaper, said that despite the numbers in the streets, Mr. Thaksin’s challenge was fading in strength.

Mr. Thaksin, a former telecommunications billionaire, was convicted last year on charges asserting he had abused his power. He left the country before his conviction — he was sentenced to two years in jail — and now lives in exile, principally in Dubai.Mr. Thaksin faces other charges in Thailand, and the courts have frozen an estimated $2 billion in his and his family’s assets. But he insists that he wants to return to Thailand — and to Thai politics.

The protests were reminiscent of the political paralysis that gripped Thailand last year. Those demonstrations, which were sometimes violent, forced the previous government to abandon Government House, paralyzed the workings of the administration and eventually shut down Bangkok’s two major airports. The protests were led by the “yellow shirts” of the People’s Alliance for Democracy.

The protests ended in December when — with the airports blockaded, tourism crippled and the economy at a virtual standstill — the Constitutional Court found the governing party guilty of election fraud. The court ruling led eventually to Mr. Abhisit’s selection as prime minister by Parliament in December.

The dismal state of the Thai economy has been another cause of anger among protesters. Just this week the World Bank revised its growth prospects downward: The bank now expects a 2.7 percent decline in Thailand’s gross domestic product in 2009, the country’s first contraction in more than a decade.

He characterizes Greece's banking sector as being "basically sound" and "in considerably better condition" than those in other EU countries and in the United States. He notes that Greece was the first EU country to provide a government guarantee for personal savings up to a total of €100,000.

now the European Commission has instigated disciplinary proceedings, because Athens has exceeded the euro zone budget deficit limit of 3 percent for the third time in a row. The results of audits carried out by Brussels look very different from the information in Livadas's glossy brochures. In EU statistics, Greek government debt is listed as amounting to 94 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Italy is the only other euro zone country which has a higher level of government debt. Greece also has the lowest credit rating of all the euro zone countries. It has to finance its government debt under terms which are worse than for any other euro zone country, with the exception of Malta.

Educated young people from the middle class have little prospect of finding employment, despite being well qualified, and are forced to take casual jobs to make ends meet. As a result, many young Greeks are forced to live with their parents until they are well past the age of 30. The anger of the "€700 generation" -- as the young people are known -- over their situation exploded last December in weeks of rioting throughout the country.

Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the Bank of Greece, the nation's central bank, warned his countrymen against "self-satisfaction" and spoke of a looming danger of national bankruptcy. And Greece has still to feel the full effects of the global recession.

"The negative factors you see here are all leftovers from the past," says one EU diplomat, adding that most of them are homegrown. Economic experts are anxiously waiting to see what's going to happen this summer. They fear there could be a decline in the tourism sector, one of the most important pillars of growth in the Greek economy, accounting for 17 percent of gross domestic product. The volume of tourist bookings from the United States is reported to have dropped by up to 50 percent. The number of British vacationers, some 3 million annually in the past, alongside 2.3 million Germans, is expected to shrink by up to 30 percent.

The situation of banks that invested in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans is uncertain. Greek financial institutions invested billions of euros in bank takeovers or in setting up their own branches in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Given that the value of the national currencies in some of those countries has fallen dramatically, what were originally seen as attractive investments in developing economies could well turn out to be huge losses.

That's what the crisis looks like in Greece. "Nobody wants to see it, but everybody is afraid of it," says Kalliope Amyg, a young political scientist. "The country is dancing on a volcano."