PRESIDENT CLINTON'S false testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky will cost him $90,000 (pounds 56,000) a federal judge ruled yesterday, imposing the first ever court penalty on an incumbent president. But the sum is considerably less than the $500,000 claimed as costs by lawyers for Paula Jones, the plaintiff in the case.

MAY I add a note to Jonathan Williams's obituary of James Broughton [3 June]? writes Tom Ingram.

AN INVESTIGATION was underway last night after nine people died and more than 80 were injured when an American Airlines plane skidded off the runway at Little Rock airport in Arkansas in a storm, hit a lighting tower, caught fire and broke into pieces. The plane, carrying 139 passengers and six crew, ended up in a backwater of the Arkansas river. The captain, one of the airline's most experienced pilots, was among the dead.

PUNTERS YESTERDAY latched on to the Chester Cup winner Rainbow High to make a successful step up to Group One company next month. Coral cut the Barry Hills-trained colt's price for the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot from 14-1 to 10-1 after substantial support.

Firearms

IN ANOTHER month, parents and teachers across America might have had cause to relax. It would have been a full year since the last fatal shooting in an American school, when on 21 May 1998, a 15-year-old boy burst into a high school in Springfield, Oregon, and firedinto a class, killing two students.

BILL CLINTON was back in legal trouble yesterday after a ruling by an Arkansas judge that he was guilty of contempt for his testimony in the sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

A NEW shadow fell across Bill Clinton's future yesterday when a judge in Arkansas found him in contempt of court for his testimony in the sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones. The ruling could make Mr Clinton liable for Ms Jones's mountainous legal costs and lead to his being banned from practising law in his home state.

A WOMAN involved in the Whitewater case broke four years of silence yesterday to say that President Bill Clinton told the truth about the scandal.

IN ANOTHER footnote to the Monica Lewinsky affair, it was confirmed yesterday that Paula Jones and her husband, Steve, have separated. Ms Jones, who brought the sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton that ultimately triggered his impeachment by exposing his dalliance with Ms Lewinsky, has moved from the California home she shared with her husband, to a house she bought recently near her mother's home in Arkansas.

THE TROMBONIST Richard Boone had a voluble way of jazz singing. One always thought one understood the words, but didn't quite.

HIGHLY DAMAGING allegations concerning President Bill Clinton's past finally appeared in America's mainstream media yesterday, after months in the shadowy realms of the Internet.

JUST WHEN it might have seemed that the President's political travails were over, he may now be facing a further legal ordeal.

WHILE THE White House sex scandal has vanished from the Washington map almost as rapidly as it arrived 13 months ago, some of the associated allegations - the use of dirty tricks against troublesome women, for instance - have lingered.