Pawnshops Thrive, Draw Scrutiny over Interest Rates

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

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How We Spend Our Leisure Time

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 and politics • Behind America’s Different Perceptions of God Researchers who divided religion into four view of God say that’s a better indicator than denomination • Denomination Nation See where the largest religious groups live across the U.S. How We Live • America’s Leisure Time We have more free time than we did 40 years ago, but it doesn’t feel that way What We Buy • How We Spend and Why Experts say that as our population increases, we’re going to feel an even greater pressure to spend If life seems more rushed than ever, you might be surprised to learn that we Americans don’t have less leisure time than we did 40 years ago.

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CHE GUEVARA: The Guerrilla

By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world. Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage

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