The Philippine President, Mr Joseph Estrada, is finding himself mentioned in the same breath as the US President, Mr Bill Clinton, rather a lot these days and for all the wrong reasons.
Unfortunately for the gaffeprone leader, the dominant topic of conversation in Manila these days is not his recent tough talk on the country's communist and Muslim rebels but a sex scandal which has had the local press frothing at the mouth for over a week.
The latest twist in the saga has seen a leader who often boasts of his past infidelities refusing to take a DNA test to determine paternity of a 17-year-old beauty queen who claims to be his daughter.
Mr Estrada, a former film star, has already acknowledged having at least 11 children with five different women but has dug in his heels over this latest case, saying it could open the floodgates to dozens of other claims. "I might run out of blood," he explained on his weekly radio programme.
Meanwhile, the extremely photogenic young Josephine Rose ("JR") Estrada has been plucked from obscurity to land on the front pages of every national newspaper, where she has spent the past week alternately posing in evening gowns, revealing her interest in civil engineering, and criticising her supposed father for upsetting her mother.
JR's mother, Ms Rose Dungca, claims she met the President - widely known by his nickname Erap - and became his lover for a year after he spotted her during the Miss Manila contest 18 years ago. When the scandal first broke, Erap at first denied ever having met Ms Dungca. Then he claimed they had indeed chatted, but said: "How could merely seeing each other bear that kind of fruit?"
Later, recoiling from the idea of a DNA test, he contended: "If she's my daughter, that's OK, because after all many women want to have my baby", but said it was up to JR and her mother to come up with the proof.
The women, decrying the President's "vulgar talk", have fired back, saying they have evidence of the intermittent financial support he has given throughout the girl's life, and that they regularly visited him at his office in past years.
While the President vacillates, his three legitimate children, Jude, Jinggoy and Jackie, have said they are willing to recognise JR as part of the family. Their mother and First Lady, Luisa "Loi" Ejercito, has typically maintained a dignified silence. She never comments on her husband's flings, and did not flinch on the memorable occasion when he joked, while presenting a prize to a young beauty queen, that he would have his wife shot.
Erap himself has drawn links with President Clinton and the sex scandals surrounding him in the past. When the storm over Monica Lewinsky first broke, he remarked: "He [Clinton] gets all the scandal, and I get all the sex." But now the tide may have turned. While most Filipinos regard infidelity as normal, if regrettable, Mr Estrada may find they are less forgiving if he fails to do the right thing by JR.
Many observers suggest his best move may actually be to agree to the DNA test. While the National Bureau of Investigation has had a DNA testing kit at its offices for almost a year, it has not yet been given the necessary chemicals, costing $2,000, and for now the funds are not forthcoming.
Mrs Imelda Marcos yesterday suffered her second major legal setback in three days when a court ordered her prosecution on charges involving concealment of bank accounts. The court, in a resolution, rejected her petition for the dismissal of the lawsuits and ordered a pre-trial hearing of the cases on March 15th and 16th.
State prosecutors have accused the wife of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos of setting up four foundations to conceal $350 million in Swiss bank accounts from 1978 to 1984. With interest, the deposits now amount to more than $500 million, officials say.
In a fifth case, she is accused of helping a company owned by a friend of her husband to obtain a government guarantee for a foreign loan of $25 million.
Mrs Marcos had asked for the charges to be dismissed, saying the period during which they could be filed had expired.
She also said she could no longer be charged with an offence involving the violation of a constitution that was abrogated after her husband was ousted in a popular revolt in 1986.
The anti-corruption court dismissed her petition, saying that her reasons were specious and repetitive of old arguments.