People: Supermodels bare all for nothing

THE anti-fur lobby has embarked on a back-to-basics campaign. Instead of spraying people with paint, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), a US-based group, is concentrating on the bare facts.

At the weekend five fashion supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, revealed all for the cause. Wearing nothing but a banner reading 'We'd rather go naked than wear fur', the five posed in Paris for Peta. Campbell, Tatiana Patitz, Emma Sjolberg, Heather Stewart-Whyte and Fabienne Terwinghe, gave their services free. The ad will appear on billboards across the world.

Another star motivated by charity is Luciano Pavarotti, who has agreed to give a benefit performance in March in aid of Manila's street children. The event unaccountably coincides with the 66th birthday of Fidel Ramos, the President of the Philippines. Mr Ramos, who is waging a Majorite moral crusade, was surely unaware that the committee organising the concert would be chaired by socialite Rose-Marie Arenas, who has been romantically linked to the President. Manila's political class planned to turn out in force, paying up to 25,000 pesos ( pounds 620) for a ticket.

There is, however, a snag. A senator has suggested that Mr Ramos should arrest on the spot any government official who turns up at the concert, on the grounds that attendance would constitute 'ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption in times of calamity'.

'I agree it's going to be extravagant. It's going to be expensive,' Mr Ramos said when asked about Senator Blas Ople's suggestion. But he said the organisers had since clarified that ticket sales would benefit charity.

Senator Ople will be watching from the cheap seats, costing a modest 3,500 pesos each, or about one- fifth of his monthly salary.

The Ecuadorean manicurist Lorena Bobbitt has received strong support from her compatriots. Women's groups in Quito are threatening to castrate 100 Americans if Bobbitt, on trial in the United States, is convicted of malicious wounding for cutting off her husband's penis.

A group of women in Naranjal, near Lorena Bobbitt's birthplace of Bucay, said they were organising to support her. 'I would have done the same,' a young woman told the Guayaquil daily El Universo.

Men interviewed in Naranjal disapproved, but seemed to be adjusting. 'I can't come home drunk anymore,' one said. 'I sleep on my stomach,' a second confessed.

The man who gave his name to a rifle, Mikhail Kalashnikov, dropped in on America's biggest gun show in Dallas last week. The 74-year-old designer developed the AK-47 just after the Second World War and it became a favourite of old Eastern bloc armies, terrorist groups and lately US drug gangs.

Mr Kalashnikov has recently designed a semi-automatic hunting version of the AK-47 and a Dallas weapons dealer is seeking approval to import the weapon.

(Photograph omitted)