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Looks at a publication from Forest City Ratner called "The Brooklyn Standard." How Forest City Ratner is the company promoting the development of an arena project in downtown Brooklyn; Comments from Patti Hagan of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition and Joseph DePlasco of Forest City Ratner; How the Forest City Ratner newspaper is really and advertisement for the proposed arena.

THERE was a time when pilots gained fame by breaking various records using Floyd Bennett Field on the eastern edge of Brooklyn for takeoffs and landings. Now, dozens of immigrants from Pakistan have drawn attention for different kinds of aviation records: the most kites downed, and the kite fighter with the best handling skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BORN in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and raised in Cambria Heights, Queens, where he lives today, Kurt Boone is a writer at heart and a messenger by trade. For 13 years, Mr. Boone, 49, has delivered his packages not by bicycle but the old-fashioned way -- by foot and by subway. And with the help of Fastback Creative Books, a company with offices in the Flatiron district, he has self-published his poetry and essays. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Describes the production of the puppet show "Ziegfeld Minuscule Follies" at the International Toy Theater Festival at Saint Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York City.

Reports on the launching of the line of wallpaper designed by Brooklyn, New York-based textile artist, Wook Kim. Designs of the wallpaper; Prices of the products.

The article reports that Ashraf Eshra of Brooklyn, New York City, has still not received the insurance money for his house that got damaged in a tornado on August 8, 2007. He states that despite the money being made available by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, most of the Brooklyn-based families including his family have not been able to receive the insurance claim as the paper work involved is too lengthy.

The article offers information on Mickey Boardman, editorial director of "Paper Magazine." It says that Boardman's job is to discover the things that people discard and overlooked. It states that he moved to New York City two years after he graduated from Purdue University in 1989. It also mentions that he'd rather live in a small space than migrate to all the luxuries that Brooklyn, New York City has to offer.

After three years of producing pickles both classic and around the bend, like chipotle carrots and maple-bourbon bread-and-butter, Shamus Jones of Brooklyn Brine has turned part of his little factory in Gowanus into a retail shop, wide open to the street. The cool, briny pickle-barrel bouquet gives the sidewalk in front a whiff of the seashore. Inside the premises you'll find a rough oak counter, whiskey barrels filled with fermenting cabbage and garlic scapes, and shelves lined with neatly packed jars of cucumbers, ramps, squash, beets and other vegetables. Their aromatic marinades depend on Hudson Valley cider vinegar, but not on preservatives like sodium benzoate. Back beyond all this is the small team that does the heavy lifting, including applying the simple brown paper labels to the jars by hand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An admitted hit man for the Mafia recalled a ride he took with his boss through the streets of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. ''He pointed out a car. He pointed out a house. And he gave me a little piece of paper with a license plate on it,'' the hit man, Dino Calabro, testified on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A federal district judge in Brooklyn has asked the United States attorney's office there to review whether to pursue criminal contempt charges against a lawyer who revealed in court papers in 2010 the identity of a businessman who had pleaded guilty in an organized-crime case and cooperated with the government. After asking whether federal prosecutors would bring charges against the lawyer, the judge, Brian M. Cogan, said in a hearing on Monday, ''There is a possibility that if the government declines I may appoint someone'' to investigate, apparently referring to a private lawyer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saraghina -- with its handwritten menu, its battered summer-share furniture, its greenmarket ingredients and its cap-wearing fashion-world owner -- has managed to become exactly what it wanted to become when it opened two summers ago: a cool, hassle-free, inexpensive neighborhood restaurant. The neighborhood in this case -- Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn -- is not exactly a Mecca for restaurants (although there is a fairly new wine bar across the street from Saraghina, at Halsey Street and Lewis Avenue, and a Southern soul food joint a few blocks away). On Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, the rambling dining rooms are filled with Williamsburgers and other L-train-riding arrivistes. But on a quiet Monday, you are likely to find a local family -- like the Kernizans -- at a casual early dinner. IN THE SEATS Kathleen Kernizan, 41, a self-described ''paper pusher'' for a well-known but ''unnamable corporate entity'' (around the dinner table, she plays the role of mom); Marcel Kernizan, the precocious, tie-wearing 7-year-old man of the meal; and Kristene Kernizan, who is 5 and would like everyone to know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It may be better to give than to receive -- but there's nothing worse than ripping off colorful wrapping paper to reveal some gym socks, the oh-so-obviously regifted scented candles or a CD box set of any kind. It can be enough to make one wish for a lump of coal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Studio, as it's called, is a rectangular room with a gray floor and a silver-tin ceiling. It is one of those anonymous places in Brooklyn -- on an industrial block in Sunset Park -- where dances are built and then delivered to a theater. For ''Sugar doesn't live here,'' seen on Friday night, the choreographer Stacy Grossfield stays put. Before her intimate dance begins, the room is already alive: two figures and two sculptures share the narrow stage. A woman in a black dress, bobbed wig and high heels (Ms. Grossfield) sits with her back to us. Her legs are open wide and the delicate musculature of her back is exposed, showing almost imperceptible movements as she writes private thoughts on a piece of paper hidden from view. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This morning I decide to try a little experiment: I opened up my iPad, clicked on the little Wired icon and purchased the magazine's latest digital issue. After I agreed to fork over $4, it began downloading. For the next phase of the experiment, I grabbed my car keys, left my apartment and drove about 12 blocks to a local magazine store in Brooklyn, where I also purchased the latest issue of Wired magazine, this time in print. I didn't run any red lights, or speed, or park illegally during my shopping expedition. Yet when I returned home with the glossy paper product in hand, the digital iPad version still hadn't finished downloading to my iPad. Anybody who reads Wired would call this an Epic Fail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN Victoria Robinson, a lifelong product of Manhattan's Upper East Side, announced that she and her partner, Nicole Eisenman, were planning to buy a house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, her mother couldn't have been more dismayed. ''Remember how your mother reacted to the idea of our moving to Brooklyn?'' Ms. Eisenman said one recent evening as she and Ms. Robinson sat facing each other in the living room of their cozy century-old house on Powers Street. ''She asked if we'd need her to bring us milk, or maybe toilet paper. In her opinion, we were heading to the wild frontier.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ON a blistering afternoon last June, outside a Polish social club in Greenpoint, men in heavy wool tuxedos, with slicked-back hair and pencil-thin mustaches, were blotting their brows. They looked like overheated figures from a Peter Arno drawing. Nearby were some very slender young women in spangly, ankle-length dresses. A couple were wearing feathered headdresses; others had their hair in paper curlers. But because this was Brooklyn, where people wear weird getups all the time, nobody paid them any attention. A few blocks away, on a lot once intended for a condo complex, a 300-foot long old-fashioned seaside boardwalk had miraculously arisen, not just a facade, but a collection of clubs, restaurants, a photo studio, salt-water taffy joints, even a place where for 25 cents you could have peered at premature babies. Except that the incubators were empty. So were the shops. The only sound came from a couple of squawking seagulls, doubtless disappointed by the absence of litter or garbage. At the end of the boardwalk a sandy, unpopulated beach baked in the sun, but where the ocean should have been, there was, instead, a wall of metal shipping containers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Books have been born all over Brooklyn's Fort Greene. Richard Wright labored over ''Native Son'' here while sitting on a hill in Fort Greene Park; a bench there now bears his name. He lived nearby, as did Marianne Moore, and several contemporary writers have roots in the neighborhood, including Colson Whitehead, Jhumpa Lahiri and Nelson George. For a tour of this literary hub (or to take the free workshops the New York Writers Coalition holds here to help people find their inner author), hop the subway to DeKalb Avenue or a nearby station. Bring pen and paper, in case the muse strikes. NOON If you emerge from the DeKalb subway stop, stroll toward Fort Greene Park, where the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, a memorial to Revolutionary War dead, stretches into the sky. Head toward the Walt Whitman branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, 93 St. Edwards Street, (718) 935-0244. In the early 1900s, the building was a resource for the families of workers at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard, at the time even having a special children's entrance. The library offers a modest selection of books on the borough -- check out Allen Abel's 1995 ''Flatbush Odyssey: A Journey Through the Heart of Brooklyn'' -- and plenty of thrillers by Dean Koontz and Mary Higgins Clark. Swing by for a book discussion, and be sure to ask a librarian for a good local reading spot. A favorite is Two Steps Down, a restaurant at 240 DeKalb Avenue, (718) 399-2020. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The police said three plastic bags containing the skeletal remains of various body parts were found in Brooklyn. The bags, two of which enclosed suitcases containing the remains, were found Sunday on a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Target opened in 2004 at the Atlantic Terminal Mall in Brooklyn, this Minnesota-based superstore, trying to fit in, threw an invite-only party where a D.J. and local celebrities (including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Lizzie Grubman) mingled among two floors of Gatorade, kitchen appliances and reasonably priced consumer goods. But making Target cool is not easy, and inviting Sandra Bernhard to host was asking for trouble. According to a write-up in The Brooklyn Paper, when she started telling customers about designer burkas for sale, one store spokeswoman remarked, ''She's not exactly on the Target message.'' Target has not attracted the controversy of the nearby Atlantic Yards project, which plans to add a stadium and a new skyline of towers to downtown Brooklyn. But for some locals it's part of the out-of-scale corporate sheen that threatens the spirit of their leafy borough. Anxiety about this development is stylishly illustrated in ''Behind the Bullseye,'' an intimate Target polemic that looks like one of Reverend Billy's nightmares staged by Robert Wilson on a budget. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As usual, Thu Tran was trying to do two things at once. In the living room of her apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, its floor littered with glittery scraps of paper, she was supervising two friends who were decorating balloons and beach balls to be tossed to the crowd at a D.J. show the following night. Meanwhile in the kitchen she was adding ingredients to the crepes she was cooking for herself and her guests. Customarily, Ms. Tran said, she calls the dish her ''thousand-layer crepe.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Waver Brickhouse, gray-haired and soft-spoken, has come undone twice during the nation's housing crisis. In 2005, she fell behind on her mortgage payments and turned to a so-called rescue firm, which, court papers allege, tricked her into signing away the deed to her Brooklyn home. She says the company, Home Savers Consulting, secretly sold her home, with the help of a mortgage from IndyMac Federal Bank, and ran up huge new debts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Just about eight years ago, Patricia Worthy signed the papers for the first mortgage of her life, getting the customary dizzy spell as she looked at the line that listed, all in one place, 360 monthly payments of principal and interest. She signed. So did 690 other families in her development, in the New Lots section of Brooklyn. All of them were buying homes for the first time; all were people of modest or moderate means. They were moving into a neighborhood that had been a forsaken stretch of abandoned buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ever -- at Brooklyn Ascend Charter School, nothing in Keisha Sykes's second-grade classroom was left to chance. Not the way students were to greet their teacher (with eye contact, a firm handshake and an audible, ''Good morning, Ms. Sykes!''), and not the way they were to leave their desks (by slipping out on the right side, then pushing in their chairs quietly, always using both hands). Even the number of paper towels and liquid soap squirts one should use in the bathroom was specified, by way of a sing-songy chant: ''One, two is enough for you.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JOE LONG, the owner of Birdell's, a venerable independent record store on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has supplied three generations of music lovers with 45s, 78s, 33s, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs and the occasional dollop of fatherly advice. Mr. Long, or, as some people know him, Mr. Birdell, began working at the store in 1957 and bought it from the original owner 10 years later. As black music has evolved, from blues and rock 'n' roll in the '50s to soul and funk in the '60s and '70s to hip-hop in the '80s and beyond, so has the store. The back room is still crammed with hundreds of 45s in their decaying paper sleeves, but not for long. Mr. Long, who is 70, is planning to sell his entire vinyl inventory to a British collector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A LITTLE more than two months ago, when Robert Clark found many of his possessions pushed out into the cold Brooklyn night along with those of 200 of his neighbors because the building they all lived or worked in was declared a fire hazard as a result of a broken sprinkler system and an ad hoc matzo factory in the basement, they might have assumed the worst was over. Mr. Clark, a photographer for National Geographic, and his wife, Lai Ling Jew, who does public relations for nonprofit groups, only worked in the building, at 475 Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg. So they moved some of their papers, equipment and other possessions into their apartment, which was across the street. They also took in some of their newly homeless neighbors until the situation could be sorted out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the Mr. B diaper bags sold by artist Toland Grinnell. Grinnell and his wife received many designer diaper bags as gifts and decided they did not work. His thoughts on the pricing of the bags is discussed. Grinnell's exhibition of trunks, "Pied-a-Terre," at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York is mentioned.

Features the high-end custom wallpaper designed and produced by Amy Mills in her art studio in Brooklyn, New York City.

Examines how the Brooklyn Democratic Party, the largest such county organization in the United States, has been beset by corruption scandals and weakened influence. A corruption inquiry that ensnared the party's chairman, Assemblyman Clarence Norman, Jr.; Indictments against him and Jeffery C. Feldman, the party's executive director; Allegations that they tried to strong-arm judicial candidates into hiring consultants favored by the party; Assemblyman Roger L. Green, who pleaded guilty to stealing from the New York State Legislature by submitting papers listing false travel expenses.