| Sign of the Times: High-End Brooklyn Flea Market Readies for Debut
On April 6, a weekly Brooklyn flea market will kick off in Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, but the event is a far cry from your neighborhood stoop sale or the dusty, glorified junkyards that linger in Manhattan. For one thing the “Brooklyn Flea" is curated, said founder Jonathan Butler—until recently known only under his nom de plume Brownstoner. Mr. Butler and his partner Eric Demby, a former communications officer for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, handpicked about 200 up-and-coming designers as well as vintage clothing and antique vendors out of the 700 who expressed interest. You won't be able to find much junk there, but you will be able to buy hardwood tables hand-carved in Dumbo out of former bowling lanes; Belgian Waffles; and slinky silk tops—think Portobello Road by way of Brooklyn.
Just-before-deadline FDA drug approval leads to more safety problems, study says
WASHINGTON | Vioxx, Bextra, Rezulin, Baycol. Looking at drugs yanked off the market, Harvard researchers found a disturbing pattern:</p><p>Medicines approved right on deadline by the Food and Drug Administration are more likely to cause safety problems later than those cleared with more time to spare.</p><p>Congress set strict deadlines for the FDA to speed the arrival of new medications, but critics have long complained that the ticking clock spurred a dangerous rush to judgment.</p><p>The Harvard analysis of decades of drug approvals, which was published in today's <em>New England Journal of Medicine</em>, provides the first scientific evidence supporting some of those complaints.</p><p>The FDA challenged the findings with its own statistics.
Australia central bank head says market turmoil unsettling
Australia's top central banker today said turmoil in global financial markets had been "quite unsettling", but Australia's financial system was in good shape to deal with the fallout. Speaking to a financial markets conference, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Governor Glenn Stevens said that, while central banks were acting aggressively to stabilise markets, the international environment would remain challenging for some time to come. "We have seen a significant reappraisal of certain categories of risk and considerable financial turbulence in key international markets," said Stevens. "Economic prospects in the United States, in particular, have taken a significant turn for the worse," he added. "The extent of disengagement in some core markets, which hitherto had been thought to be extremely liquid and reliable, has been quite unsettling." Still, Stevens emphasised that the Australian banking system was weathering the storm well, with profitability very strong and little direct exposure to the US subprime problems.
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