February 14, 2002

Foreign exchange traders say John M Rusnak, currency trader who lost $750 million at Allfirst Financial, subsidiary of Allied Irish Banks, was so successful in counterfeiting proof of bogus trades that his bank was frantically trying to verify six-month-old trades day before suspected fraud was made public; Rusnak also had agreements with Bank of America and Citibank that essentially allowed him to use their names when making trades; agreements may have helped Rusnak conceal his activities; these and other practices begin to give some idea of how hard he may have worked to conceal what he was doing from his bank and other traders in currency market; Rusnak is under investigation by FBI; photo (M)

Efforts of pop singer Wi

Joyce Purnick column on bewildered reaction around New York City Hall to Mayor Michael R Bloomberg's budget candor; notes he avoids tricks traditionally used to disguise cuts (M)

American officials say Abu Zubaydah, elusive Palestinian who travels world using false passports and multiple aliases, is new chief of operations of Al Qaeda and is now believed to be organizing remnants of terrorist network to carry out new attacks against US and its allies; he has been linked directly to planning of Sept 11 strikes in US, and also to plans for wave of terror attacks in Europe last year that were thwarted by arrest of several other plotters; American investigators say he is trying to activate so-called sleeper cells of Al Qaeda for new strikes; say they are eager to apprehend him because he knows identities of thousands of terrorist recruits who passed through Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan, and are now in their home countries, or elsewhere, waiting for instructions; photo (M)

An Effort to Tighten Rules In Wake of Enron's Collapse Regulators, legislators and the chief accounting rule maker proposed changes in the way companies do business and report their finances, including closing the loophole that Enron used to hide hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and inflate its profits. The board that sets accounting rules and the Securities and Exchange Commission indicated that they intended to move far more rapidly than they have in the past. [Page A1.]