September 18, 2002

Nigella Lawson lauds Tuscan cuisine; recalls travels in Tuscany; recipes; photos (L)

Tesco, Britain's biggest supermarket chain, reports first-half net profit rose 15 percent, to $360 million; company stock falls 5 percent; stock-price graph (S)

Analysts and shoppers blame lackluster August retail sales in part on merchants, citing lack of new fashion trends; overall retail sales were up 1 percent from 2001 level, while comparable-store sales for traditional back-to-school retailers were mostly down; sales table; photos (M)

Tyco International reports uncovering web of deception and personal enrichment that spread throughout its management ranks; details moves by former chief executive L Dennis Kozlowski that systematically created corporate culture of greed and excess; says he secretly gave 51 employees $56 million in bonuses, and $39 million more to pay taxes on bonuses, to offset loans from company, acting without board approval; itemizes tens of millions of dollars in his personal spending with company money; report is result of four-month probe by David Boies; many of employees who got loans that were later forgiven are still on payroll; table of some of items Kozlowski bought with Tyco money (M)

Footlights column; Phillips Collection opens exhibition of works by Pierre Bonnard; New York University Grey Art Gallery presents modern Iranian art, photographs and revolutionary posters of 1960's and 70's; photo; Woodstock Film Festival honors Tim Robbins (S)

Alcatel of France will cut 1,050 jobs, or two-thirds of work force at its optical components affiliate, Alcatel Optronics, as sales plunge (S)

J.P. Morgan Says Earnings For Quarter Will Be Weak J. P. Morgan said third-quarter earnings would be worse than expected because of bad loans to telecommunications companies and weak trading results. Stung by its relationship with Enron, losses on loans and its business in Argentina, the company has failed to meet expectations since the merger of J. P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan nearly two years ago. Losses on loans to companies, especially telecommunications and cable companies, are expected to rise to $1.4 billion in the third quarter, up sharply from $302 million in the previous quarter. Market Place. [Page C11.] California Crisis Tied to Companies Widespread power failures during California's energy crisis could have been avoided if five energy companies had not withheld electricity they were capable of producing, a study by regulators has found. [A22.]

Leaders of Japan and North Korea agree to begin normalizing relations after decades of bitter hostility; landmark summit meeting features astonishing North Korean admission that 11 Japanese were kidnapped in late 1970's; Kim Jong Il also asks Junichiro Koizumi, first Japanese prime minister to visit Pyongyang, to convey to Bush administration that 'door is open for dialogue,' and says he will observe open-ended moratorium on testing ballistic weapons; signals indicate secretive Communist regime is reaching out because it badly needs money and wants to break out of encirclement of hostile world; extraordinary admission also reveals that six of kidnapped Japanese have died and one is missing; Japan repeats apology made to South Korea for suffering during 35 years of colonial rule, and promises aid that could reach $8- to $10-billion; Kim says abductions, from coastal Japan or Europe, were by overzealous agents who wanted Japanese-language trainers for spies; parents of Megumi Yokata, who was 13 when she disappeared from school in 1977, are told she later married but has since died; photos (M)

Darlene Love and Freda Payne are prime examples of rhythm-and-blues singers who are considerably more complex than the sound of the vintage hit singles that typecast them vocally on the nostalgia hit parade. And in their exciting act, ''Love and Payne,'' which plays through Oct. 5 at Feinstein's at the Regency, both singers present three-dimensional musical personalities that their hits only hinted at. Ms. Love's whooping gospel shout, with its raw-silk vibrato, propelled several Phil Spector girl-group anthems of the early 1960's, and 40 years later, she projects the same blunt, sky's-the-limit optimism. But there's a softer, subtler side to Ms. Love, and it comes out in her version of the Dan Hill-Barry Mann ballad ''Sometimes When We Touch.'' Ms. Love takes a song that invites mawkish self-dramatization and tackles it head on, ripping away the mewling self-pity that traditionally accrues to its expression of fear of intimacy and replacing it with a directness that turns a confession of weakness into an assertion of strength.

Toshiba and NEC will jointly develop new generation of memory chips; focus on magnetic random access memory chips, which are expected to be much faster and more efficient than current types; chips use magnetic rather than electric elements to store data; IBM and Infineon Technologies have been working on such chips for almost two years (M)

Interview with Shuji Nakamura, now University of California professor, who is suing Nichia Chemical Industries in Japan for compensation for lucrative inventions he pursued over opposition from superiors and secretly patented in company's name; case points to striking differences in ways United States and Japan treat innovators and could spur bids by Japanese engineers and scientists to share in corporate rewards for their inventions, as inventors often do in US; photo (M)

SAB Miller says revenue and earnings for five months ended Aug 31 were up from year-earlier period; photo (S)