Harris Barton , a former right tackle with the San Francisco 49ers, remembers the time Reggie White of the Philadelphia Eagles flattened him. It was Sept. 24, 1989, and for two downs, Barton had fended off White’s “rip and club” move of throwing opponents off balance and knocking them to the turf.

On the edge of Tiananmen Square, just across the street from Mao Zedong ’s tomb, He Yingying munches on a piece of chicken and gazes at the benign-looking figure beaming down at her.

As the dinner plates were cleared on a May night in Basel, Switzerland, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his fellow guests settled in for a challenging final course: saving the euro from extinction.

On Jan. 2, Jim Clark , a founder of such technology icons as Netscape Communications Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc. , was at home in Palm Beach, Florida, when he got an e-mail from an executive at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ’s private wealth management division. Goldman was offering Clark a chance to invest in the closely held social-networking company Facebook Inc. The deal -- through a fund overseen by Goldman Sachs Asset Management -- was being offered to other Goldman investors at the same time, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue.

Three years ago, when the world economy was in mortal danger, a series of coordinated and unprecedented measures brought it back from the brink. Today, the patient, still sickly, must endure the sight of doctors arguing over what to do next.

For 20 years, Don Brownstein taught philosophy at the University of Kansas. He specialized in metaphysics, which examines the character of reality itself. In a photo from his teaching days, he looks like a young Karl Marx , with a bushy black beard and unruly hair.

The solar panels on Tommy Clever’s house in Berlin generate enough electricity on sunny days to run his washing machine, vacuum cleaner and other appliances, with a bit left over to help power the region’s factories and offices.

On a warm October afternoon, a steel- framed concrete warehouse north of San Francisco is inundated with grapes. Forklifts bearing fruit from the nearby Russian River Valley deliver their loads to a slow-moving conveyor belt. Flanking both sides, winemaking interns pick out stems and sunburned grapes as they groove to hip-hop music thumping from loudspeakers.

Tanda Srinivas was lounging in the yard of his two-room house in the southern Indian village of Mondrai shortly after noon on Oct. 28 when his wife, Shobha, burst out of the door covered in flames and screaming for help.

Tianjin Pipe Corp.’s 850-acre campus is unlike any other steel factory in the world. Ostriches, spotted deer and peacocks roam the grounds amid willow trees, bamboo bridges and Chinese pavilions. The plant has its own light-rail stop and hotel.

Along the steel-gray Quinebaug River in eastern Connecticut, Duncan Broatch is tinkering with machinery that will keep one of his two hydroelectric plants cranking out clean energy. The U.S. needs Broatch’s Summit Hydropower Inc. and other green power providers to make a dent in the 35 percent of the country’s global-warming pollution that comes from burning fossil fuels to make electricity.

Victor Hugo Barragan saw sales plummet 40 percent in the first nine months of 2010 at his homemade-ice-cream shop in Guadalupe, Mexico . A grenade blast that injured 14 people in the town’s central square in October - - the first drug-trafficking attack on the general public ever in this Monterrey suburb -- made a bad year even worse.

In 1980, the U.S. economy was in the middle of a severe downturn, and jobs weren’t easy to find. So Lou Crandall , after earning a bachelor’s degree with a focus on economics from Cornell University, scattered resumes far and wide. One went to an employment agency looking for bilingual workers. Crandall had spent five years of his boyhood in Italy, where his father taught in an American school, and was fluent in Italian, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

As 1,100 managing directors from Barclays Capital descended on the Grosvenor House hotel near London’s Hyde Park in late September, they had more to celebrate than having successfully swallowed the North American unit of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. two years earlier. Their guy, Bob Diamond , the Massachusetts-born founder of Barclays Capital, had just been handed the top job at parent Barclays Plc in a sign of how he had transformed the 320-year-old British institution in his 14 years as investment bank chief, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Euan Nisbet , a University of London earth sciences professor who has traveled the world testing the air for greenhouse-gas pollution, makes his way to a rocky outcropping on the eastern coast of Hong Kong Island on a sunny November afternoon. He takes out a battery-operated pump connected to a thin tube and a plastic bag to capture traces of the wind.