No relief for Thai bar girls

Relief efforts undertaken in Thailand after the tsunami are neglecting sex workers or ‘bar girls’, who are the mainstay of the country’s sex tourism, alleges Empower Foundation, a 20-year-old Thai NGO. It says immediately after the tsunami, many sex workers threw themselves into the rescue effort, and since many speak English, they helped officials communicate with tourists stranded in the country. But when it came to giving aid, sex workers, who do not fall under the country’s labour law since prostitution is criminalised, were left in the lurch. “Sex workers especially have been invisible in the whole of the recovery and considering how much tourism money they bring in they should have been given some consideration,” says Empower coordinator Liz Hilton, adding that about 200,000 sex workers operate in Thailand’s tourist hotspots.

Class action

Six senior women employees working with Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the investment banking arm of the German insurance giant, Allianz, are suing the firm for over 830 million euro for alleged sexual discrimination. They had filed a class action suit on behalf of 500 women in a New York court. They claimed that women are prevented from bagging the top posts in the company and getting the same pay as their male colleagues. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of sexual discrimination cases in Wall Street in recent years that have led to settlements worth millions of dollars.

Up in smoke

What is the best possible way to quit smoking? Subject yourself to its extreme form, like taking deep puffs every six seconds until your throat burns! This is called rapid smoking, which, according to Dr Hayden McRobbie, research fellow at University of Auckland, can be effective in smoking cessation treatment. In a Channel 4 programme called Cold Turkey recently, McRobbie showed how women should quit smoking. He made model Sophie Anderton and socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson go through rapid smoking so that they could associate smoking not with relaxation but with disease and death.

Midwife crisis

A study conducted by an NGO called Matrika says that about one million dais (midwives) are currently working across the country and they attend to almost 90 per cent of childbirths in rural areas. But dais ? most of them are poor women belonging to lower castes ? are increasingly becoming marginalised, thanks to modern medical practices. The organisation is currently conducting a research on their rituals and skills that are scientific in many ways and trying to give the dying breed of midwives their due recognition.

Model MOSS

The much-maligned Kate Moss is back in business with a bang. Moss’s first calling card since the cocaine furore is a glossy, light-saturated campaign for the reality-resistant label Roberto Cavalli (pic right). Shot by loyal Moss collaborators, the fashionable duo Mert and Marcus, on Moss’s old stamping ground of Ibiza ? days after she emerged from the Meadows Clinic in Arizona ? the Cavalli campaign is the antithesis of candid camera work. Far from being alone and vulnerable, Moss bestrides the landscape like a particularly well-groomed Boadicea. Well, you just can’t put a good model down, can you?

The Times, London

Overheard: Brides are spending more money than ever on traditional white wedding dresses despite the decline in the number of marriages, a survey in UK says. The amount spent has grown by 18 per cent over the past five years to reach a record ?112 million.