1. THE SCANDAL ... before which all others pale: 1998 dawned with wild allegations about the plump intern and the plumper--and older, and married--President. The year was consumed with salacious details of the affair between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton and the constellation of characters sucked--some willingly--into the vortex of their, er, passion. As the year ends, most Americans now consider the witch hunt even more scandalous than the President's lurid peccadilloes.

2. CROOKED COPS Belgian police burned the tattered remains of their reputation. In April, alleged pedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux overpowered a guard and escaped for three hours. Later, two gendarmes suffocated a Nigerian asylum-seeker they were trying to deport.

3. LOVE AND WARSHIPS French headlines were devoted to the relationship between former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas and his mistress Christine Deviers-Joncourt, for whom he allegedly helped land a $130,000-a-year lobbyist position with the state-owned Elf oil company. Worse, Dumas is suspected of getting a cut of the $9 million commission Elf paid Deviers-Joncourt to help promote the 1991 sale of six French warships to Taiwan.

4. OH, BROTHER If Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah felt poorer for losing his title as "World's Richest Man" to Bill Gates, he must have felt destitute after learning that brother Prince Jefri had supposedly funneled funds from the state investment agency to his own, money-losing consortium of companies.

5. EGG-STAINED WRETCHES America's media had a tough year. New Republic hotshot Stephen Glass was axed for fabricating many of his features, while the Boston Globe fired two columnists for similarly egregious fiction-writing. And CNN and TIME face lawsuits over a broadcast and article--both later retracted--that accused the U.S. military of using sarin nerve gas during the Vietnam War.

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R E L A T E D
S T O R I E S :

YEAR IN REVIEW There was more than just Monica CINEMA Nothing could touch Saving Private Ryan BOOKS Tom Wolfe returned as the novelist in full SPORTS France's World Cup of joy brimmed over

PEOPLE Seinfeld's sayonara was much ado about nothing SCANDALS No prizes for guessing The Big One BUSINESS A noble winner--and a pair of Nobel losers ENVIRONMENT Saving Suriname ... and the swordfish