She fell outside her doctor’s office after her checkup, losing her balance when she stepped off the pavement onto the grass. There’s nothing unusual about an 84-year-old woman falling. And if it had to happen, it’s hard to imagine a better place — other than an emergency room — for it to occur.

Imagine that your bank had paid more than $1.1 billion to make two legal cases go away in the past couple of months. And fessed up to losing credit-card data for up to 1.2 million customers. You might think twice about doing business with it.

GlaxoSmithKline might have thought it was immune. The drug maker recently played bystander as several Research Triangle Park neighbors took a licking.

The name never has been quite accurate. Nonrevenue sports — the ones at colleges and universities that aren’t football and men’s basketball — usually have generated some money, just not very much.

Some might think, after nine years as a risk analyst and hedge-fund manager, Jayant Khadilkar would want a job with a little more precision to it. Something so he wouldn’t always feel like he was milking a white cow in a blizzard. Engineering, maybe, or plumbing.

So what’s the true value of having corporate headquarters in a city? Is it worth the effort and incentives to recruit new ones? Nucor provides a reference point.

For Phil Sanger, it’s not enough to engineer better products for hurt or handicapped people. The director of Western Carolina University’s Center for Adaptive Devices hopes he can help create jobs. So far, the center’s five students and five professors have built four products.

Naomi Travers will tell you she’s a daddy’s girl. As an only child, she spent a lot of time with both parents. But she gets her analytical bent from her father, who was a weapons specialist in the U.S. Secret Service in Washington, D.C. He’s the one who imbued her with a passion for jazz, reading and sports.

Where are rites of spring in Raleigh. Every other year when the General Assembly convenes for its long session, the Senate passes a bill outlawing video poker and sends it to the House. And waits. And waits.

The community-college system paid CCbenefits Inc. $264,750 to study the economic impact community colleges have on their students and the state.

Hospital administrators concede their billing system is sick. But they don’t think the way to treat it is by a trial lawyer administering the legal equivalent of an eyes-wide-open colonoscopy

When Joe Gorga was growing up in Paterson, N.J., his father managed a plant that supplied fabric to clothing makers in New York City’s garment district. The boy started work there at 13, sweeping floors.

New Bern-based Hatteras Yachts began with a frustrated fisherman, an experimental powerboat and a dare. Forty-six years later, it employs about 1,000 people.