November 9, 1999

British Airways PLC chief executive Robert J Ayling dismisses skeptics who have assailed company's dismal financial performance and have questioned his unusual plan to reverse it by reducing market share of his airline, Europe's largest; company reports its fiscal second-quarter earnings fell 86 percent; earnings totaled 30 million pounds, or $48.6 million, down from 216 million pounds a year earlier; six-month earnings fell 37.2 percent to 218 million pounds, and company is expected to report annual loss this fiscal year for first time since airline was privatized in 1987; Ayling is putting his own, somewhat diminished, reputation on line as he tries to remake airline; he is reducing its overall passenger capacity by 12 percent in effort to weed out low-cost fares, and cater more to first- and business-class passengers who pay fares that are higher and push profit margins up; photo (M)

Uta Hagen, who played Martha in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962, discusses decision to take up role again in staged reading on Broadway; reading will benefit HB Playwrights Foundation, which she created with her husband, Herbert Berghof, and celebrate her 80th birthday; photos (M)

Growing body of artifacts and skeletons is forcing archaeologists to abandon ruling theory of how the Americas were peopled; ruling theory, called Clovis, holds that big-game hunters trekked out of Siberia sometime before 11,500 years ago, crossed land bridge into Alaska and eventually reached all the way to southern tip of South America; new evidence suggests that people may have arrived thousands to tens of thousands of years sooner, that they came in many waves of migration and by a number of routes, and that their ancestry may not have been only Asian; finds primarily responsible for new thinking are remains of pre-Clovis camp at Monte Verde in Chile and skull and bones of Kennewick Man found in Washington State, which are possibly as old as 9,300 years and which bear little physical resemblance to later American Indians; photos; map (L)

Microsoft stock fell $1.625 a share yesterday, to $90, but ended the day higher than the $87 a share reached in after-hours trading on Friday. That was the day a federal judge found that the government had proved that the company had a monopoly and had used it to stifle competition. Investors seem to have decided that even the harshest of all possible remedies for Microsoft -- a breakup of the software giant -- would not be a disaster for the company or the stock market.

Profile of filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant on location at Helmingham Hall in Stowmarket, England, where they are at work on their 43d collaboration, an adaptation of Henry James's The Golden Bowl; photos (M)