What was going on when I was born?

The opening image of the Larry Brown era at Madison Square Garden was understated but poignant. As a short video tribute to Brown, the Knicks' new coach, played on the scoreboard last evening, he shifted awkwardly from side to side near the home team's bench. Brown, the Brooklyn native who came home to try to save the team he idolized as a youth, was nervous, unsure of what the evening would hold for his embryonic team. In a moment of extreme candor before tipoff, Brown admitted he was ''worried to death.''

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. has reliably favored big-business litigants as he has pushed the federal appeals court in Philadelphia in a conservative direction. His extensive paper trail of 15 years of opinions reveals a jurist deeply skeptical of claims against large corporations. A review of dozens of business cases in which Judge Alito has written majority or dissenting opinions or cast the decisive vote shows that, with few exceptions, he has sided with employers over employees in discrimination lawsuits and in favor of corporations over investors in securities fraud cases.

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.

AT the turn of the last century, a new phenomenon arose in America: the chain store. The most dominant chain was the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company -- A.& P. -- which by 1930 had become the country's fifth-largest corporation, with $1 billion in sales, and was ''opening stores at a rate unprecedented in the history of American retailing,'' according to Richard S. Tedlow, the author of ''New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America.'' The New York Times described A.& P. that year as ''the world's greatest retailing machine.'' Its president, John A. Hartford, attributed the company's success to its policy ''of immediately passing on reductions in wholesale commodity prices to the consumer,'' as The Times put it. Under Hartford, writes Mr. Tedlow, ''A.& P. had one dominant mission: to sell quality food at low prices.''

Harpriya Sidhu, 26, a recent dental school graduate from Weehawken, N.J., is a faithful luxury consumer. Ms. Sidhu buys only Gucci or Burberry purses, Tiffany jewelry and cosmetics from Chanel or Kiehl's. Estée Lauder was never a name that got her attention, because it is one of those brands ''that are so mainstream,'' she said. But on Wednesday, Ms. Sidhu's opinion of the 59-year-old label changed when she was at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and discovered a line of gold-cased bronzers and lipsticks called the Tom Ford Estée Lauder Collection. Ms. Sidhu bought four products. ''Tom Ford is a world-renowned designer,'' she said. ''These are collectors' items.''

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the head of the federal agency that oversees most government broadcasts to foreign countries, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, is the subject of an inquiry into accusations of misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees, officials involved in that examination said on Friday. Mr. Tomlinson was ousted from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on Thursday after its inspector general concluded an investigation that was critical of him. That examination looked at his efforts as chairman of the corporation to seek more conservative programs on public radio and television.

France's worst urban violence in a decade exploded for a ninth night on Friday as bands of youths roamed the immigrant-heavy, working-class suburbs of Paris, setting fire to dozens of cars and buildings while the government struggled over the violence and the underlying frustrations fueling it. The unrest, which has also spread to other parts of France with large North African and Arab populations, prompted the American and Russian governments to warn citizens visiting Paris to avoid its poor, outlying neighborhoods. France reduced train service to Charles de Gaulle Airport after two trains became targets of rioters earlier in the week.

It was Monday morning in one of the world's most dangerous cities, and already the traffic was causing a peculiar, decidedly nonmechanical sort of breakdown. ''We are suffering psychologically from this,'' said Bessam Abdel Khalid, a 24-year-old minivan driver, staring dully through the windshield at the crush of cars idling in a frustrated mass near Baghdad University.

President Bush's troubles trailed him to an international summit meeting here on Friday as anti-Bush protesters turned violent just blocks from the gathering site, and Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's fiery populist leader, rallied a soccer stadium filled with at least 25,000 people against the United States. Mr. Chávez, who has tried to use the summit meeting to stage a showdown with Mr. Bush, pronounced dead a free trade accord backed by Mr. Bush, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Left-wing groups throughout Latin America have long opposed the agreement, and some governments want more generous terms from Washington, so Mr. Bush had come here with hopes of jump-starting the stalled negotiations.

Mary Wittenberg's plan is to take a ceremonial 30-minute run at 4 a.m. Sunday, crossing the finish line for the New York City Marathon in Central Park in the quiet hour of possibility, before the world descends on the five boroughs and makes the race she is directing real. Call her superexcited, superstitious or just driven. She is not only the race director of the New York City Marathon, but Wittenberg is also, at her core, a runner.

IN a glorified garage of a storefront in the Bronx, the talk is pigeon. It's always pigeon. If you don't speak pigeon -- if you don't know your tippler from your dropper -- then hack a piece off that cheese pastry on the counter, sweep the feathers from an available chair, sit down and listen up. What you will hear, above the cooing trill of the cooped-up pigeons, is a language of love between men, between men and birds, between men and their fathers. You might make out an occasional phrase like ''Birmingham roller'' and ''Isabella tippler.'' You might even hear a complete sentence, such as: ''You can't get a flight onto a tippler, because you'll get a clinker.'' But it's all about love.

THE most recent championship banner hanging from the Madison Square Garden rafters tells the story of a franchise wanting: World Champions, 1972-1973. The New York Knicks have not figured out a way to win a championship in 32 seasons. This year the franchise has brought in Larry Brown, the N.B.A.'s ultimate teacher, to break what can now officially be upgraded from a drought to a jinx. After a bizarre summer of drama that took us from Detroit to the Hamptons to the Garden, Brown is part of a Knicks triangle offense with Isiah Thomas, the president for basketball operations, and Stephon Marbury, the iron-willed point guard.