Sham

YBM Magnex International was a stock market sensation. Founded in 1994 by a Russian emigre scientist who lives in Bucks County, the magnet and bicycle manufacturer rose from an obscure penny stock to a multinational worth nearly $1 billion in less than four years. Its numbers astonished competitors and delighted stockholders. Net sales quadrupled from 1994 to March 1998, net income jumped ninefold, earnings rose by a factor of five, and the future looked just as promising.

Revenge is sweet. Just ask Tom Cruise and wife Nicole Kidman. They accepted a "substantial" settlement from London's Express Newspapers, which had accused Cruise of being gay and called his marriage a sham to cover up his alleged homosexuality. The amount of the settlement was undisclosed. But the sum was believed to be $167,000 for each of them plus legal costs of about $250,000. McBurger, McBeal? If Calista Flockhart, TV's Ally McBeal, wants people to stop accusing her of having an eating disorder, then why doesn't she eat more?

What a blunder. The House Judiciary Committee's release yesterday of President Clinton's videotaped grand-jury testimony was a mistake in two parts. First and foremost, it was an ugly lapse in fairness and bipartisan deliberation. Second, it was a tactical error of astonishing proportions by House Republicans. It's one thing to be angry and disheartened at President Clinton's repeated, reckless deceits in the Monica Lewinsky affair; to wonder how he can endure in light of them; to see resignation as the most honorable, healing denouement.

Qun Chen, 26, of Mayfair Street near Tabor Road, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Philadelphia yesterday for alleged involvement in a $5.4 million food stamp fraud. A Chinese national who is married to a U.S. citizen and who hopes to become a naturalized citizen, Chen allegedly operated two sham groceries, the Wyoming Variety Store, at Front and Wyoming, and the Tasker Grocery, on 13th Street near Tasker, through which the food stamps were redeemed over a four-year period, 1994-1997.

"They feel used. " That is how a European diplomat described the feelings of Cambodian voters, whom the international community hypocritically claimed to be helping toward democracy. Last week, results were announced for the second of Cambodia's "democratic" elections, held July 26. The incumbent, Hun Sen, an ex-member of the genocidal Khmer Rouge, won a majority in parliament. Reports indicate that ballot manipulations and voter intimidation were widespread. But a much-too-small contingent of international observers gave the elections its swift stamp of approval and went home.

A Common Pleas Court jury yesterday sentenced to death a Philadelphia man convicted in the 1989 shotgun murders of an aide to Mayor W. Wilson Goode and her boyfriend as they sat in a car in West Philadelphia. The jury deliberated about five hours before returning the death-penalty verdict against Richard Freeman, 63, in the Sept. 22, 1989, slaying of Mame Sham-sid-din, 46, a supervisor in the Mayor's Action Center at 5131 Chestnut St., and Dalton Johnson, 63, a retired federal worker.

As sure as the coming of shamrocks and green beer each March 17, your favorite music shop is now stocked to the gills with a new crop of albums celebrating Irish culture. This year, you might be suprised by the variety of the offerings. Sparked by crossover successes like Enya and the stage production of "Riverdance," with its contempo-folk score by Bill Whelan, many's the Irish artist who's getting away from the old-fashioned definition of Celtic music - the hearty fighting ditties like "The Wild Colonial Boy" and quaint ballads 'bout girls disguising themselves as cabin boys to ship off with their loved one. Spirit of Eden's debut album, "The Sun & the Moon & the Stars," starts out with traditional Celtic melody and instrumentation, but is transformed into a true world-music romp.

"The best lives are invented," observes an elderly Albert Dehousse (Jean-Louis Trintignant), reflecting on his years as a Resistance fighter, a French lieutenant colonel, a government minister and a complete and utter sham, in Jacques Audiard's fascinating A Self-Made Hero. The opening selection of the sixth annual Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, which gets underway tonight, Hero is a remarkable study of individual deceit and a nation's collective reckoning over its tortured role during World War II. Writer-director Audiard has created both a serious rumination about self-invention and a playful, provocative entertainment through documentary techniques (talking-head interviews with "witnesses")

The school board voted last night to approve the framework for Superintendent David Hornbeck's controversial teacher-accountability program, which gives cash rewards to schools where children do well and puts the squeeze on schools that don't. In a 6-1 vote, the board endorsed Hornbeck's plan to give schools that make the most improvement $1,500 per teacher and professional staffer and $500 per paraprofessional. Each school will then decide how the money is spent. Schools that fail to improve could suffer a variety of consequences - from closer scrutiny by district officials to the transfer of up to 75 percent of the school's staff.