This is the typical day of a relatively typical soul in today's diversified world. I wake up to the sound of my Japanese clock radio, put on a T shirt sent me by an uncle in Nigeria and walk out into the street, past German cars, to my office. Around me are English-language students from Korea, Switzerland and Argentina -- all on this Spanish-named road in this Mediterranean-style town. On TV, I find, the news is in Mandarin; today's baseball ...

Breaking America's dependence on foreign energy supplies and suppliers who often don't like the U.S. is a driving force behind the search for alternative fuels. That includes electric cars, which wheezing Detroit has finally realized it needs to produce. But at Detroit's International Auto Show this month, the excitement surrounding the Big Three's announcements that they're shifting from gasoline to voltage has been tempered by another realization: most of the lithium used to make the batteries for ...

Special Report: America By the Numbers Who We Are •A Demographic Snapshot of America The country continues to grow, with help from immigration •The Very Unnatural Naturalization Process A TIME editor describes what it's like to become an American citizen •America's Long Debate on Immigration A historian describes how our attitudes have and haven't changed Where We Live •A Geographic Breakdown Compared with other developing countries, the nation is still just a vast prairie What We Believe • How We View God Your view of God may shape your morals ...

It must be a difficult task to assemble an action-adventure fantasy, especially for this summer of superhero-origin movies, with Thor and X-Men already in theaters and Captain America following in July. Difficult, that is, unless the writers abandon originality and build their script with elements from other movies — all other movies. Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg, the concocters of Green Lantern, had 70 years of the DC comic-book character to use as ...

MOST Americans know the first Americans only by cliché. There is the 19th century image, caught in bronze and in lithograph, of the defeated warrior, head drooping forward so that his feathers nearly mingle with his pony's mane. The bow of his shoulders and the slump of his body evoke his loss of pride, of green and fertile lands, of earth's most favored continent. Then there is a recent image, often seen through air-conditioned automobile windows. Grinning shyly, the fat ...

After her husband left her, Jennifer Santana lost her job. When she was evicted from her apartment, Santana, 37, held her family together by living with a friend and then in her van. But as the nights grew cold in early December, she stood huddled with her three children in front of the Orange County cold-weather shelter in Santa Ana, Calif. "There were long lines of men and women, and the people were laying out mats on ...

With banks reluctant to loosen purse strings and credit-card companies aggressively slashing credit lines, a growing number of consumers are turning to the once murky world of pawnshops for quick cash. "Loans are up 20% to 25%," estimates David Crume, president of the National Pawnbrokers Association. The trade group's executive director, Dana Meineke, says the weak economy and turmoil in the credit markets are expanding the customer base. "We're seeing some new faces," says Daniel ...

Carlos Martn Bar believes that his brother Ignacio knew he was about to be killed. The night before his murder Nov. 16, 1989, the 46-year-old Jesuit priest called his parents in Spain from his home on the campus of the University of Central America in El Salvador. On the phone, he tried to calm his father's concerns about his safety with a joke about being surrounded by the military and therefore well-protected. But, as it turns out, ...

Special Report: America By the Numbers Who We Are •A Demographic Snapshot of America The country continues to grow, with help from immigration •The Very Unnatural Naturalization Process A TIME editor describes what it's like to become an American citizen •America's Long Debate on Immigration A historian describes how our attitudes have and haven't changed Where We Live •A Geographic Breakdown Compared with other developing countries, the nation is still just a vast prairie What We Believe • How We View God Your view of God may shape your morals ...

Thunder of the low, distant variety shook movie theaters, and lightning bolts pulsed out from 3-D screens, as Thor earned $66 million at North American theaters to win the year's first full May weekend, according to early studio estimates. The latest in Marvel Studios' master plan to make a blockbuster film out of every character who has appeared in the company's comic books over the past 50 years, Thor easily trounced the weekend's two romantic comedies, Jumping ...