Mike Jackson is leading a new kind of Indian war, this time in the courts. He's fighting to preserve ancient sites like the religious circles, burial grounds and mountaintops across the West that Indians hold sacred
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Mike Jackson, leader of the Quechan Indians, looked out past his tribe's casino and the modern sprawl of Yuma and pointed to the sandy flatlands and the rust-colored Gila mountain range shimmering in the distance.

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Former US marine Brian Steidle doesn't seem the type to break ranks. But when he returned from a peacekeeping mission to Sudan, he found he couldn't stay quiet about the horrors he had witnessed
By Dan Glaister
If you saw Brian Steidle on the street in Los Angeles, you wouldn't give him a second glance. Dressed the day we meet in the city's Venice district in regulation T-shirt, shades and cargos, he looks much like all the other gym-fit, cropped-haired young men loafing about somewhere between college and middle age. Which is precisely his strength.

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Sites like Super Deluxe and Funny or Die (which is run by Will Ferrell) have the clout to make the Web not just a place to post clips but also a career option, for established comedians as well as for unknowns
by PETER KEEPNEWS
Midway through the recently concluded Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, her first as vice president for programming, Maureen Taran was talking with a veteran stand-up comic who wondered, with evident envy, why so many young sketch groups were generating so much industry interest and how he could get that kind of attention.

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Contrary to orthodox theory, the arrival of Western goods in China represented the first wave of globalization and was embraced enthusiastically
By BRADLEY WINTERTON
During the 1930s some Western authors sought to depict China as untouched by the modern world, a place of pagodas, silks and temple bells that was uniquely hostile to change. If they mentioned foreign products they presented them as tawdry goods imposed by unscrupulous foreigners anxious to make large profits out of a gullible populace.

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David Peace's 'Tokyo Year Zero' is the first of a trilogy of crime novels that promises to address the creation of modern Japan, starting with the horrors of war
by Tim Adams
David Peace first went to Japan 13 years ago, in his mid-twenties, to teach English as a foreign language, and stayed. You could argue that the prose of the novels he has written compulsively since - seven fat books published in the past eight years - has been heavily influenced by his original day job. Peace uses truncated subject, verb, object sentences in repetitive rhythms to establish the claustrophobia of extreme states of mind. Sometimes, his paragraphs read like a basic English primer: "I haggle. To eat. I barter. To work. I threaten. To eat. I bully. To work. I buy three eggs and some vegetables," he writes here, typically.

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FICTION

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