March 19, 1993

A team of child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven Hospital here cleared Woody Allen of Mia Farrow's assertion that he sexually molested their 7-year-old daughter, Mr. Allen and his lawyer said today. The findings, presented to Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow at the hospital after a seven-month inquiry, were not made public. Ms. Farrow's lawyer, Eleanor B. Alter, did not specifically challenge the report, although she characterized it as inaccurate.

Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, ending more than two weeks of silence about reports linking him to the bombing of the World Trade Center, began a media offensive yesterday denying any involvement in the attack and condemning the media for reporting that he is a suspect in the case. In a somewhat bizarre twist, the sheik emerged on live television before millions of Americans, ending the mystery of his whereabouts since the bombing and speaking out on the arrest of several suspects who have been portrayed as his followers.

The advertisement spread across two pages of a Johannesburg newspaper pictures a bottle of pharmaceutical capsules and the announcement: "Now Legally Available." The product on sale is not a drug, but the Windows computer program from the Microsoft Corporation, the American producer of software that withdrew from South Africa in 1986 when an anti-apartheid boycott was gathering force. For years there was a gray market in Microsoft products, but now the company is back, with a small office and an ad campaign that transforms the long taboo into a marketing come-on.

A court-ordered financial review of the Towers Financial Corporation, whose chairman is among the prospective suitors for The New York Post, paints a bleak picture of the company's prospects and raises serious doubts that investors can recover the hundreds of millions of dollars they are owed. "Towers as presently constituted is not equipped to weather the storm which now engulfs it," said Jess Fardella, a former Federal prosecutor appointed as trustee for Towers's financial operations in the wake of a civil fraud suit filed last month against Towers and its chairman, Steven Hoffenberg, by the Securities and Exchange Commission. That suit accused Towers of fraudulently raising $415 million from nearly 3,000 investors across the country.

A German interest rate cut and the ensuing bond market rally in the United States drove stocks sharply higher yesterday, with heavy industries showing the most muscle. The Dow Jones industrial average shot to within about a point of a record before closing at 3,465.64, up 38.90 points, or 1.1 percent. The broader market averages also ran up, in moderate trading, as the best-known issues stood out.