Billy Wright, 36, a former Ulster Volunteer Force prisoner, said that he intended to defy the "directive" from all three major loyalist paramilitary organisations to leave Northern Ireland by midnight on Saturday. A statement from the "Combined Loyalist Military Command" on Wednesday warned him that failure to leave would result in "summary justice". "One model I was working with collapsed in a heap during a shoot. We tried to get her to eat something but all she'd have was rice cakes."The leading agencies all deny knowingly hiring anorexics, or encouraging slimming to dangerously low weights. Ironically, two years ago Lucy had been two stone lighter; she was fighting anorexia and bulimia. "My cheeks were hollow, my eyes had sunk into my face and my skin was terrible, but then the agencies would have wanted me," she said.A leading fashion photographer told the magazine that "superwaifs" often faint because they are starving. people would say to me 'you're a big one aren't you'," she said.In a third case detailed in the October issue of Company magazine, 17- year-old Lucy Stanley, 5ft 8in and under 91/2 stone, was told by an agency to come back only after she had lost two stone. "Sticking to the statistics on my modelling card was becoming a real struggle I'd go to casting or shoots and ...

So I continued to starve myself." Six months later she was dangerously ill in hospital.Amy Davies, who worked for a top agency, allowed herself just 400 calories a day in order to maintain her 34-24-35 figure. I thought 'I can't be too thin if an agent thinks I'm good enough to be a model'. The only reason that thin girls look so unusual at the moment is because there are so many fat people."Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. "For the past year my family and friends had been telling me I looked awful and needed medical help .. It was so confusing.

Lynda Thompson, 18-years-old, 5ft 9in and weighing in at just 61/2 stone, was in the first throes of anorexia when she was stopped by a scout for a leading agency and asked if she wanted to be a model."She said I had a perfect figure and walked beautifully, so I was just right for the catwalk," Ms Thompson said. The line that divides teenagers with a physique envied by millions of women from that of the anorexic is increasingly blurred, despite agencies' protests that they employ only healthy girls with normal appetites who are thin because they exercise a lot. Jo Fonseca, director of Models 1, said: "Models have to be slim I can think of nothing worse than being fat. A concave chest, pin-thin arms, and jutting hip bones can propel a teenager to catwalk stardom - or straight into hospital with a feeding tube down her nose. Model agencies are once again in the dock amid claims that an eating disorder is an advantage for young girls hungry for the fame and fortune that life as a clothes horse can bring. It struck an iceberg just before midnight and sank two hours later, disappearing beneath the waves at 2am.It had been speeding through the ice field, hoping to win the Blue Ribband award for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. It remains to this day the most famous of nautical disasters.