President Clinton, having survived scandal and impeachment proceedings, is among 118 nominees for the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel sources said yesterday.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, Pope John Paul II, US Balkans peace negotiator Mr Richard Holbrooke, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, relief agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Salvation Army are nominees for the century's last Nobel award.
Jordan's late King Hussein was also nominated for his efforts for Middle East peace but is ineligible under rules disqualifying posthumous awards.
"The number of nominees so far is 118 - 85 individuals and 33 organisations," Mr Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute, said.
The secretive five-member committee is due to hold a first meeting on February 26th to consider the list. It plans to whittle down nominees to a short-list, appoint academics to investigate their achievements and announce a winner in mid-October.
Mr Lundestad said nominations for the award, named after the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, were still arriving after a formal January 31st deadline.
"But I don't think we will reach last year's record [number of nominees] of 139," he said. "Even so, this is still a fairly high number and it indicates continued strong interest in the prize. We cannot expect a new record every year.
"We have a very wide geographical distribution of the nominations with a possible weakness for Africa." The last African winners were South African President Nelson Mandela and his predecessor Mr F.W. de Klerk in 1993.
Mr Lundestad declined to identify any of the nominees for the prize, first awarded in 1901.
But Nobel sources said Mr Clinton, recipient of several past nominations, was again on the list.
Last year's prize, worth 7.6 million Swedish crowns (£678,000), went to the Northern Irish Catholic leaders, Mr John Hume and Protestant leader, Mr David Trimble.
President Cliton and his Mexican counterpart Ernesto Zedillo yesterday witnessed the signing of nine accords on issues ranging from anti-drug efforts to co-operation on tuberculosis control.
Earlier in the day, the presidents held two hours of talks on a wide range of bilateral questions that included trade, drug trafficking and immigration.
The two sides also announced that the US Eximbank would raise its line of credit to Mexico by 20 per cent to $2 billion annually for the next two years. Members of the Mexican and US cabinets signed the documents in the courtyard of the hacienda where the bilateral talks were held, near the city of Merida on the Yucatan Peninsula.
In addition to agreements to step up the fight against the drugs trade and address violence along the common border, the two sides also signed an agreement to liberalise air transportation within the US-Mexican market and another to co-operate in controlling the spread of tuberculosis.
Mr Clinton also announced an additional $1.22 million to support Mexican efforts to improve fire management and provide alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture and logging practices.
Mr Clinton said his wife, Hillary, would make "a terrific senator" is she decided to run in the 2000 electoral race. "I think she would be terrific in the Senate but that is a decision she will have to make and she has not had adequate time to talk to the people who think she should do this, much less to people who think that perhaps she should not," Mr Clinton told reporters.