KATE Moss and Lily Cole may have made their first appearance on the catwalk at the age of 14, but future supermodels may have to wait until they turn 16 to hit the fashion circuit.

A new report commissioned by the fashion industry has recommended banning under-age models from London Fashion Week.

It also expressed concern at the way girls below the age of consent are “sexualised” and about the prevalence of eating disorders and drug abuse among models. The report calls for more protection for models, including health checks.

Outlining the panel’s interim findings, Baroness Kingsmill, who chairs the Model Health Inquiry, described the “dark side” of the modelling industry. “It seems that there has been a blind eye turned in the past. They look glamorous, they look gorgeous, they are OK. But they are not OK. They are ill, many of them,” she said.

Baroness Kingsmill said the inquiry had highlighted the need for greater protection for models. “The working conditions of models are pretty appalling. They are young and vulnerable and they have very short careers.

“There was strongly expressed concern that it is profoundly inappropriate that girls under 16 - under the age of consent - should be portrayed as adult women. The risk of sexualising these children was high and designers could risk charges of sexual exploitation.”

Rosalynd Ramage, at The Look Agency in Glasgow, said she agreed with the ban: “I think it’s right, especially if they are wearing clothes designed to be worn by a woman in her thirties.

“We don’t book girls under that age. All the models we have under 16 are booked as children. They do things like children’s magazines and things which are appropriate for their age.”

However, Kay Gannon, the co-director of Glasgow-based All Talent UK, said she felt it was fine for younger girls to take part in adult fashion shows, as long as they were well looked after and mature for their age.

“You love getting girls at 13 or 14 years old and keeping an eye on them. If you get it right, the chances are they are going to have a long-term career.”

Cathy Owen, operations manager for The Model Team, also in Glasgow, said banning under-16s from catwalk shows could create problems for the next generation of British supermodels.

“If you are limited to starting at 16 years old it could take years for them to build up enough experience and to get enough pictures in their ‘book’.” A MODEL AT 14 - AND BOTH SHE AND HER MOTHER ARE DELIGHTED

AS THE latest 14-year-old recruit to the Glasgow model agency All Talent UK, Jenna Stewart is not happy about a possible ban on girls her age taking to the catwalk. “I think people should be able to model from any age really,” she said.

Jenna, from Falkirk, thinks it would be a shame if she was not allowed to take part in catwalk shows before her 16th birthday - and her mother, Betty, agrees.

“I think if they are healthy enough and they are safe enough, then why not model at that age? They have got lovely figures at that age,” Mrs Stewart said.

She acts as chaperone for her daughter, and does not agree that modelling “sexualises” young girls.

“They are only showing the clothes off,” Mrs Stewart said. “If you look at what 14-year-old girls wear, it is very similar to what you see on the catwalk - just a cheaper, high-street version.”

Karen Reoch, of Glasgow, whose daughter Jennifer has been modelling clothes since the age of 12, agrees.

“It has given her a lot of confidence,” she said. “She got to travel and it was a lot of fun for her.”

Jennifer, who has just turned 18, said: “I think it depends on the maturity of the person. I felt I was ready to do that and it was a brilliant experience. My mum always chaperoned me on jobs. I never went alone.”

The model, who is with Glasgow agency the Model Team, said that, while she was always body conscious, she never allowed herself to become unhealthy.

“There is an awareness that you need to keep your body in shape. But I have never felt pressure to be skinny or to be a size zero,” she said. “I think the experience has made me more confident. I have never been in a situation where my confidence was dented and I have met a lot of nice people through it.

“To some extent, you look at people like Kate Moss and Lily Cole and you look up to them, but you have to be realistic. And when you think about some of the other things Kate Moss has been through, it is not so appealing. At the end of the day, school was the main priority for me when I was younger.”

Related topic

- «news.scotsman.com»
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1013

(10-12) 11:04 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) —

Several leading makers of knee and hip replacements revealed Friday they are under investigation for possibly breaking regulations on the sale of American products in foreign countries.

Stryker Corp., Zimmer Holdings Inc. and Medtronic Inc. each said the Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting an informal investigation into possible company violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which outlaws bribing foreign officials to obtain or retain business. The SEC has brought civil charges under the act against a number of companies in recent years.

All three firms said they would cooperate with the probe and do not believe they broke the law.

Stryker and Zimmer both specialize in replacement implants for the knees, hips and other joints. Medtronic makes spinal implants to reduce pain and restore movement of the back and neck.

Last month Biomet Orthopedics Inc., Johnson and Johnson’s Depuy Orthopedics, Smith & Nephew Inc. and Zimmer Holdings Inc. agreed to pay $310 to settle charges that they gave U.S. doctors kickbacks to boost product sales. Stryker was not charged in the case because it cooperated with Department of Justice investigators early in the investigation. All five companies will be monitored by the federal government through early 2009.

Zimmer spokesman Brad Bishop said the company does not believe the investigation into foreign sales practices is connected to the Department of Justice case.

A Stryker spokeswoman declined to comment on the nature of the probe.

Shares of Zimmer Holdings fell $1.52 Friday to $83.10 in afternoon trading. Shares of Stryker Corp. rose 77 cents to $73.90. Medtronic Inc. shares fell 6 cents to $56.40.

Three years ago, plenty of folks considered Patrick Killelea to be a loony tune raving about real estate Armageddon.

While most Americans - and especially people in the Bay Area - swore by the gospel that investing in real estate was a sure road to riches, Killelea, a disenchanted house hunter, peddled a heretical counterview: The housing market was a gigantic bubble ready to burst. Through his blog, Reality Parser («www.patrick.net»), he expressed his view that home prices were grotesquely overinflated.

He practiced what he preached, refusing to buy a house. Instead he and his wife rent a Menlo Park bungalow for themselves and their two children. Today, the housing market has indeed slumped, giving his views some credence.

“Nobody calls me crazy now,” Killelea said. “I haven’t changed; it was just a matter of waiting for the fundamentals to catch up.”

Killelea’s blog attracts 14,000 readers a day, drawn to his sardonic take on the market and numerous links to news articles that bear out his premise. His site ranks high in Google searches of “housing market” or “housing crash.”

The site exemplifies a new real estate Web genre: “bubble bloggers.”

There are scores of bubble bloggers who passionately believe the housing market is so out of whack that it is destined to collapse. What Matt Drudge is to political gossip, housing bubble bloggers are to real estate doom and gloom. They range from acerbic to inflammatory but definitely don’t mince words. They rail against the real estate industry, sometimes spin conspiracy theories, and lately indulge in schadenfreude about the housing downturn. Bubble bloggers say they inject a healthy dose of skepticism to counterbalance excessive cheerleading from real estate industry professionals.

“Bubble bloggers weren’t taken seriously until six months ago, and now everyone’s taking them seriously, which is fantastic,” said Brad Inman, founder and publisher of Inman News, a wide-ranging real estate Web site. “They really served a purpose when they were a voice in the wilderness.”

But many real estate agents are less enthusiastic.

“I laugh at bubble bloggers,” said Matt Lanning, a Realtor with Zephyr Real Estate in San Francisco, whose sfhomeblog.com takes a considerably more upbeat view of the market. “I don’t claim the world is always going to be stable, but there is no way the San Francisco market will collapse. It’s a lot like the sensational journalism we’re seeing with subprime mortgages which are far less of an issue than the media is making them out to be.”

As for Killelea, Lanning said: “He has not been right about anything. Most of what he does is scour the Internet looking for anything to back up his position as someone who is forecasting the coming apocalypse of the real estate market.”

Killelea’s rhetoric can be strident, but in person, he is low-key and pleasant. With alert blue eyes behind wire-rim glasses and close-cropped reddish hair and mustache, the 42-year-old seems like an ordinary Silicon Valley tech guy - which, in fact, is his day job.

Killelea does contract programming work but said he can take off months at a time from his $100-an-hour software gigs because he took his savings from renting instead of buying, invested in the stock market and did quite well. His last job ended in March and he’s just thinking about looking for a new one.

He would love to work on the blog full time but it brings in only about $1,000 a month.

That revenue comes laden with irony. The blog carries Google ads, which use an automated scan of site content to place ad links, so most ads on Patrick.net feature a selection of mortgage brokers, real estate agents, home builders and “get rich quick in real estate” schemes.

“The sheer joy is that all the people I think caused the problem” advertise on the site, he said. “I can not only complain about them; I can take their money while I’m doing it. They would probably be horrified to know their ad is on my page. ”

Killelea spends several hours a day working on the blog: writing entries, responding to every e-mail he receives, reading about 100 news links his readers send in daily, and picking 10 to 20 to post under the banner “Housing Crash News.”

Some headlines he linked to on Monday: “We’re in deep doodoo,” “Worldwide bubble troubles,” “The new money pit: Housing bust gets worse” and “Bernanke has snookered us all.”

Why doesn’t he include news and views from other perspectives?

“I have no pressure to be balanced, and I’m not balanced,” he said.

Some of his predictions are so far out there that they seem unlikely to come true. For instance, he thinks Bay Area houses won’t be worth buying until the median price is cut in half, to about $300,000.

Could that really happen?

“I have faith,” he said, putting his hand over his heart, only half mockingly.

Killelea didn’t set out to become an apostle of housing pessimism. He says he just applied the same analytic skills he uses in programming to the housing market after his first brush with house hunting.

In 1999, he and his wife tried to buy a house in Berkeley at the height of both the dot-com bubble and housing mania.

“It all felt rigged,” he said. “Everything was set up to get me to overbid and not do an inspection; basically throw caution to the wind. It just felt really wrong. I felt like a sheep among wolves.”

After being consistently outbid, the couple decided to rent instead. They found a charming Menlo Park two-bedroom on a tree-lined street for $2,700 a month. After a couple of years when the rental market softened, they asked for a rent reduction and now pay $2,350. “I would be paying out and losing about three times as much” to own the equivalent house, he said. “In some big urban areas like Manhattan and the Bay Area, it may never be cheaper to own” than rent.

After the dot-com bubble burst, Killelea assumed prices would return to normal - but instead they continued to soar as the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates.

“I got out there and started looking at things and realized people were bidding even higher than before,” he said. “It was pretty clear so many people were getting in so far over their heads that this was going to end in tears for a lot of people.”

He started his blog three years ago and soon found a receptive audience.

“It became a full-blown obsession, not just for me but for other people, too,” he said.

Indeed, the blog draws a dedicated group of readers and participants, many of them also renters-by-choice.

“I begin every morning with it,” said Peter Christiansen of South San Francisco, who first came across the blog in 2004. “For me, it’s become the only source of information on the housing market. I don’t need anything else. It’s the best source of informed participants I’ve ever participated in on the Web; people really seem to know what they’re talking about.”

Like many of the site’s participants, Christiansen eschews buying real estate. Instead, the mental health counselor owns a mobile home on a rented site.

Patrick.net creates a sense of community, Christiansen said. “We are people I would describe as value investors,” he said. “The one thing that probably holds all of us together on Patrick is that we’re mostly people who are really suspicious of bubbles.”

Killelea has set up one practical proposal to cut out the middleman in real estate through his site. He calls it Real Estate Dating Service, a place where home buyers can post what they’re looking for - price, size, location - and sellers can scan the listings and contact buyers directly. About 730 buyers have signed up, but he hasn’t tracked whether any sales have occurred as a result.

Every once in a while his two worlds - programming and blogging - collide. Time was, Killelea was best known as the author of “Web Performance Tuning,” a geeky manual that helped him get jobs. Now his fame as a bubble blogger has spread - not always to his advantage.

“Once a guy called me in for a job interview just to berate me,” he said. “I don’t do this language called Ruby that he wanted, so I said, ‘Why did you bring me here?’ He said, ‘I want to talk to you about your Web site.’ He complained about how he had overpaid for a house in Palo Alto and couldn’t get out of it. It was not a civil conversation.” Online resources

Other bubble blogs:

thehousingbubbleblog.com

«bubblemeter.blogspot.com»

piggington.com

«paper-money.blogspot.com»

housingbubblebust.com

«housingpanic.blogspot.com»

housingdoom.com

«drhousingbubble.blogspot.com»

housebubble.com Blogger’s glossary

Real estate industry-speak takes on a new meaning at Patrick.net, where blog participants tout the virtues of renting over buying and sarcasm is prized. Here are some of the most frequently used terms, along with Patrick Killelea’s translations. For a complete list, go to links.sfgate.com/ZXC.

Homedebtor (recent home buyer): Perpetual debtor/serf who will probably never own the home outright, thanks to cyclical refinancing (used to fund conspicuous consumption) and property taxes.

Serial refinancer: A homedebtor who is as addicted to mortgage refinancing as a street addict is to crack. This type of homedebtor typically refinances several times a year, almost always for the purpose of “liberating” more equity gains to purchase such life essentials as European vacations, plasma TVs, humvees, and bling.

Loanowner: Another synonym for homedebtor, that more accurately describes what (such a person) really “owns.”

Jealous bitter renter/JBR: Originally a term used by housing bulls to disparage bearish non-homedebtors. Has since been co-opted by bears and is now used ironically. Technical definition: Someone who pays a homedebtor for the right to live in his home, at a huge discount and with no downside risk of falling property prices, rising property taxes or maintenance nightmares.

Jealous bitter owner/JBO: Basically, a homedebtor who must now watch as his/her home is dropping in value, even while their option-ARM rate ratchets up and negative equity swells. Soon-to-be a foreclosure statistic. Views happy, solvent care-free renters with growing bitterness and envy.

Sheeple/Sheople: Derogatory term for the vast, clueless, herd-following mass of homedebtors, who are unaware of the bubble’s existence.

Alligator: Refers to any unsuccessful investment that “eats” far more income than it generates, such as a neg-am financed Florida condo purchased anytime in the last two to three years.

McAlbatross: Synonym for alligator (see definition) as well as a play on McMansion. Homedebtors who are owned by their McAlbatross and cannot sell them for enough to cover mortgage, (home equity lines of credit), back taxes, etc. can be described as living “under house arrest.”

Accidental landlord: A (flipper) who cannot sell his flip house for enough to cover the existing mortgage, so finds himself in the position of becoming an unintentional landlord. This type of landlord is easy to spot: He usually has simultaneous “for rent” and “for sale” listings on Craigslist for the same house. Accidental landlords are typically easy to bargain with, as they are usually underwater and cash-starved, which gives the renter plenty of leverage. However, renting from them also carries greater risk: If they sell the place, or the place goes into foreclosure, the new owner may not honor the prior rental agreement.

Stated-Outcome (Liar-Loan): A loan where the lender inflates the buyer’s income to whatever level is needed to “qualify” them for the loan amount.

Viable: Any mortgage capable of generating a commission for a mortgage broker.

MEW (mortgage equity withdrawal): Any form of additional debt/leverage on top of your original mortgage, using your house as collateral. Typically refers to cash-out refinancing, (home equity lines of credit) and home equity loans (second mortgages). Designed to bury homedebtors even deeper and further fuel spending on frivolous bling and other nonessential consumption.

Real estate appraiser: A person who lies for a fee.

Unemployed real estate appraiser: A person who refuses to lie for a fee.

CHUMPS (cunning hard-eyed ultra-savvy market professionals): Acronym to lampoon the bulls’ argument that most recent buyers who used exotic loan products are market-savvy professionals who fully understand the downside risks and are financially prepared for them.

Buyer-user: Industry term for someone who buys a home to actually (gasp) live in it. An increasingly rare and endangered species in California.

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.