September 5, 2001

Two months after telling investors there would be no top-level management changes, Marconi, Britain's battered telephone equipment maker, said today that both its chairman and chief executive had quit, and that it would eliminate 2,000 more jobs, half of them in the United States. It also reported an operating loss of $329 million in the quarter ended June 30. The sudden departure of the chairman, Sir Roger Hurn, and the chief executive, Lord Simpson, capped one of the most spectacular corporate debacles of recent years. Created in 1999 from the General Electric Company of Britain, which is not related to the company of that name based in the United States, Marconi went on an acquisition spree. It spent some $8 billion, much of it in America, to transform itself from a military contractor into a telecommunications company -- just in time for last year's collapse of technology-related businesses.

New York City Board of Elections, which runs one of nation's most trouble-plagued voting systems, is scrambling to try to avoid disaster in unusually close and crowded primary elections on Sept 11; board rejects proposal by four main Democratic candidates for mayor to change some of its rules for Democratic primaries in ways that might have reduced potential for disputes over questionable ballots; board also temporarily reverses earlier decision to remove voting machines from nursing homes; photo (M)

Second article in series, Tracks in Cyberspace, on concerns over online privacy arising from use by companies of 'cookie' data files to track Web users and their activities; even though technologies for monitoring and analyzing their activities have grown more powerful, most consumers still do not know where to start in protecting privacy on line; many who want to reject cookies find task daunting as expertise needed to deploy cookie-control features in most Internet browsers is beyond their abilities, and even when users set computers to reject cookies, many Web sites cease to function properly without them; problem of security is complicated by Americans' ambivalent attitudes toward privacy; while majority favors privacy protections, it still does not know what cookies are even after more than three years of public debate in news media and Congress; photos; diagram (L)

Jill Hazen writes My Job column on her career as plastic surgeon; photo (M)

Article discusses crowded Democratic promary campaign for New York City Council seat in 7th District of Manhattan; photo; map (M)