My question is is this America is this where it is at?Armed

My question is, is this America, is this where it is at?"Armed with a network of cell phones and an Internet site, Indian activists are encouraging volunteers to join the "resisters", as they are known. Several Europeans - including at least one Briton - have reportedly joined the Navajo families.The roots of the dispute run back to 1882, 20 years after the US cavalry led by Kit Carson broke the Navajos with a bitter scorched-earth campaign, and eight years before the battle of Wounded Knee ended the Indian wars. US President Chester Arthur granted 2.4 million acres in northern Arizona to the Hopis and "other Indians". The Navajos became the dominant people on the land.In 1974 the US Congress finally passed legislation to divide the reservation between the two tribes. The Navajos got the lion's share, with 110,000 people living on 26,000 square miles today, as opposed to the Hopis' 10,000 members on 2,300 square miles. But in the last 20 years, more than 11,000 Navajos have been moved from Hopi land. While the US government paid more than $300m to buy new homes and relocate them, many families failed to adapt, it is said.

Allegedly, some lost their property because they failed to understand electricity bills and property taxes, others were given polluted land.The 1,200 Navajos who have hung on say the leases would put their lives under control of outsiders, and accuse the Hopis of being chiefly interested in vast coal deposits said to lie below their ranches. Some have hinted at armed resistance.The Navajo have a history as nomadic shepherds, and claim a spiritual relationship with the land Mother Earth, they say, can be owned by no one The Hopi are traditionally a more settled people. "Many people come around and tell us to go, but we say no," Alvin Clinton, a Navajo medicine man, told the Gallup Independent, a local newspaper "We stay here because this is our way of life.". Will it turn out to be United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's first big faux pas? At the weekend, she told President Bill Clinton that Mexico was doing enough against drugs to be "certified" as a US ally. Colombia, on the other hand, was not and should be sanctioned, she argued. The White House finally announced its annual version of the international narcotics Oscars and Wooden Spoons, appraising drug producing or trafficking countries for the past year in accordance with US law.As always, the US itself, the world's biggest consumer of illegal narcotics and a major marijuana producer, had not been nominated and therefore received neither reward nor scolding.The Colombian government was furious.

It threatened reprisals against US interests if economic sanctions against Colombia were introduced.Orlando Obregon, the Colombian labour minister, accused US government officials of being "so high on marijuana that they cannot see straight."Mexicans, far from expressing relief, slammed the whole process of "certification" as an unwarranted intrusion by the US in Mexican affairs.In short, for the first time, to both winners and losers alike, the annual "certification" process was unmasked as an anachronistic fiasco.Even straight-thinking Americans appeared to be in agreement that the US simply ended up looking stupid, and that Mrs Albright would have been better served by suggesting the abolition of the certification system. It is doubtful whether it will survive another year."A sham .. a bizarre display of illogic ... not credible, not transparent and not fair," said The Miami Herald, a close Latin America-watcher, in an editorial."The whole process reeks of high-handed, imperious injustice, unworthy of a nation - such as the United States - of strongly egalitarian traditions," said the Mexico City Times.Why did Mexico win Mrs Albright's favour? The fact that the Mexican peso had plunged in advance of the US decision was a major factor, most analysts agreed. The peso rallied after the country got a positive grade.Ensuing anti-US sentiment would have jeopardised Mr Clinton's planned visit to Mexico next month. In addition, the Mexican government had threatened to kick out American DEA agents if certification had been rejected.. Vice-President Al Gore has been sucked into the vortex of the great Democratic fundraising scandal, with a highly detailed report in yesterday's Washington Post that portrays him as the cold-blooded "solicitor-in-chief" of money to finance the party's 1996 election campaign. "Revolting" was the description by one donor of Mr Gore's modus operandi, after he had been pressured by the vice-president, who told him he had been given the job by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) of raising $2m (pounds 1.2m) in a single week.

"You're on my list," Mr Gore told his prey, who eventually came up with a cheque for $100,000. Another donor, whose business often involved dealings with the federal government, described the process as "like a shake-down" and "very awkward," coming as it did from a vice-president with unusual influence inside the Administration. In a third case, a Texas telecommunications firm was pressed into giving $100,000 to the Democrats, after help from the Administration in winning a $36m order from Mexico. Mr Gore personally called to thank its chief executive.In all, according to the Post, Mr Gore and his aides were directly involved in raising $40m of the $180m gathered by the(DNC) in 1995 and 1996 - most of it so-called "soft money", subject to no limits, which theoretically goes to help the party organisation, and not specific candidates.The allegations, coming after the fuss over overnights at the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, and announcement by the DNC that it was returning a further $1.5m of tainted donations, are a further embarrassment for the party, which this weekend also released a 1995 memo detailing how access to President Clinton, in the shape of trips on Air Force One, golf games, White House coffee sessions and the like should be parlayed into extra money for its coffers. But they are also a setback for the unconcealed political ambitions of Mr Gore.Despite his much-mocked attendance at a fundraiser at a Los Angeles Buddhist temple last April, Mr Gore has managed to project himself as clean-handed statesman while shameless money-grubbing ran amok around him. Mr Clinton might be tacky and loose-principled, the conventional wisdom ran - but not his vice-president, upright to the point of woodenness.That impression must now be revised. If the Post report's author - Bob Woodward of Watergate fame - is to be believed, Mr Gore was a money-raising bulldozer, extracting contributions with a heavyhandedness bordering on crudity.The legality or otherwise of what he did will technically hinge on whether as second- ranking figure in the executive branch, he mixed fundraising with government business.

Certainly no vice-president, Democrat or Republican, has ever played so extensive and frontal a role in his party's fundraising - and as Mr Gore limbers up for a White House run of his own in 2000, his prowess may prove a two-edged sword.If disgust at the way sordid fashion politics is financed in the US takes real hold, and if either Congress or an independent counsel take serious aim at the issue, then Mr Gore's coast-to-coast fundraising network could be less blessing than curse.For almost the first time in Washington's image wars, Mr Gore has come out a loser.. A train laden with nuclear waste is expected to begin the final leg of its journey today along railway lines flanked by 30,000 police officers and border guards, to a burial site in northern Germany ringed by an equal number of militant environmentalists. A violent confrontation between the two forces appears inevitable. Defying a ban on dem- onstrations along the tracks, protesters are bent on disrupting the most sensitive stage in the complex operation: the moment when the six highly radioactive containers are loaded on to trucks in the small town of Dannenberg to be transported by road to the Gorleben storage depot 12 miles away. Gorleben has been the focus of anti-nuclear protests for several years, but this year's battle will be costlier than previous ones. The biggest security sweep since the war, featuring riot police, helicopters, water canons and a tank, will cost taxpayers about DM100m (pounds 36m), adding a hefty premium to the already high price of atomic power.Gorleben is one of the few places in Germany where radio-active waste can be stored in the "medium term" - a few decades. Others have been vetoed by campaigners and plans for reprocessing plants scrapped.The train arriving this week will be carrying six containers - "castors" - of spent and reprocessed fuel, still heated to temperatures of several hundred degrees by the ongoing fission. Even the forces of law and order have not been convinced of official assurances that the castors are safe.