The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 2

2 I NEWS The Guardian Thursday October 2 1997 Merger with US partner in jeopardy after surprise $30 billion counterbid WorldCom offer is biggest in American corporate history BT plan for global growth shattered Nicholas Bannister and Mark Tran In New York right team and motivating them. At a press conference in Manhattan yesterday, he said that WorldCom intended to be one of the global players in telecommunications, saying: "There will be a limited number of global players. With MCI, we will become more of a factor in the international market place." He claimed that the fit between BT and MCI would not work without sufficient local networks in place. WorldCom had those networks in place. He expected savings of $2.5 billion in the first year.

considering the issues it raises." MCI said it had received un unsolicited offer and that its board would meet in due. course "to review all the issues and From a standing start 14 years ago, WorldCom has been transformed into America's fourth largest long-distance carrier thanks to more than 40 takeovers and mergers. It is also the world's biggest Internet carrier. Mr Ebbers is a former science teacher and basketball coach who claims to know little about the intricacies of the telecoms business, relying more on creating the City concern over the price it was paying means BT will be hard put to match WorldCom's bid. The likelihood is that it will be forced either to withdraw from the contest, with a 750 million profit on its stake, or accept WorldCom's "cheeky" offer to become a junior partner.

Bernard Ebbers, WorldCom's president and chief executive, said his company had only been able to make its bid because BT had reduced its offer by 2 billion. BT refused to comment on the bid other than to say: "We have received the material made public today and are European countries but it failed to gain control of Hong Kong Telecom when merger talks with HKT's parent, London-based Cable Wireless, collapsed in May last year. BT, under pressure from its big investors, recently renegotiated a lower offer for MCI after the company announced unexpected losses in its local calls business. James Dodd, telecoms analyst at Kleinwort Benson, said: "It's a big blow to the individuals in BT who have, staked their personal commitment to MCI but in terms of generating value for shareholders, it's a very significant blessing." $36 billion merger of Swiss drug companies Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz. It tops BT's offer by $9 billion.

BT already owns 20 per cent of MCI and was in the process of buying the rest of the company for 10.2 billion. The MCI deal is critical to BT's strategy to become a global super-carrier, a policy devised by chairman Sir Iain Vallance and chief executive Sir Peter Bonfield. BT needs a big presence in the $200 billion-a-year US tele-coms market as well as a strong position in Europe and the Far East. The group has forged alliances in the main Ranking Name Country 1996 Revenue 1 NTT Japan $71.1 billion 2 United States' $58.2 billion 3 Deutsche Telekom Germany $40.6 billion 4 France Telocom France $28.9 billion British Telecom United Kingdom $24.5 billion i- GTE United Kingdom $21.3 billion telecom Italy $19-2 billion BellSouth United States $19.0 billion MCI United States $18.5 billion 10 Telefonica Spain $15:3 billion 30 WorldCom United States S5.6 billion I i i ii. Agent sues model was 'too stoned to who work' Shares soar, page 20 relationship.

I have lost a lot of money over this." Mr Flutie said that Ms Wesson had refused his offer of help and then left Company Management claiming she had financial problems. The next day she signed on with a rival agency, Marilyn Inc, based in New York. Carolyn Kramer, a spokeswoman for Marilyn Inc, which has now represented Ms Wesson for two weeks, said the model arrived in Milan yesterday and was preparing for the new season of shows. Although she declined to comment on the accusations of drug-taking, she said: "Amy is fine. She's been shortlisted for Versace, Prada, Jil Sander and Gucci among others.

"She's working for la crime de la crime of the campaigns. Calvin Klein, Italian Vogue and every show from London, to Rome, Milan, Paris and New York." Ms Kramer admitted Mr and they can't cope. They're earning $10,000 a day, imagine working in an environment like that. "People are in denial about the extent of the problem in the business. Amy is in denial and I am worried because we are talking about her life." Last June, after the death from a heroin overdose of Da-vide Sorrenti, a young photographer, President Bill Clinton attacked the fashion industry for glorifying heroin and using waif-like models with black smudged eyes to appeal to youngsters.

"It's destructive, it's not beautiful, it is ugly," he said. "It is not about art, it's about life and death." Shortly afterwards the fashion designer Donna Karan issued a statement saying the industry needed to take responsibility for the images it was creating and "question if we're in any way participating or supporting a drug culture, however unconscious our role may be." Although the Duchess of Windsor coined fashion's underlying maxim that "one can never be too rich or too the latest vogue in heroin chic appeared in the mid-1990s, spearheaded by a new generation of young photographers impressed by the work of photo-journalists such as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Anxious to break away from the airbrushed artificiality of most fashion imagery, they began using super-thin models like Kate Moss who would often be pictured lying on seedy motel beds. It was high fashion in low-life settings and it sparked the trend for grunge fashion. "We must inform the public about how endemic the problem is," Mr Flutie said.

"We all have a responsibility here." Flutie's lawsuit was very bad publicity for the model, whom she referred to as a She added that Ms Wesson would be seeking legal advice on how to refute the claim. Ms Wesson is claiming her contract with Company was invalid. Asked if drugs were prevalent in the modelling business, Ms Kramer, whose agency also represents Helena Christiansen and Carla Bruni, replied: "It worries me The fashion industry must take responsibility for images it creates. We must question if we're in any way participating or supporting a drug culture, however unconsciously' Donna Karan (left) on a national level. I have friends in Wall Street where drugs are prominent right now.

Doctors are doing drugs, the fashion industry should not be singled out as the only business with a prevailing drug problem." But Mr Flutie, who has been working with the Council of Fashion Designers to draw up guidelines to help deal with the problem, said drugs, often taken to keep weight down, were rife. "Girls come into cities like New York or Paris or London igjffPjMpH '--A' flaaaaaaaaDaalaaaBaaBaaHaaHaaaaBafl RITISH Telecom's 1 ambitious plan to one of a handful of compa nies dominating the global communications industry in the 21st century was shattered yesterday when a relatively unknown American company made a $30 billion counterbid for BT's US partner. WorldCom's surprise offer for MCI is the largest in American corporate history and second only to the recent Supermodel Amy Wesson: 'She Borneo continued from page 1 neighbouring province of Central Kalimantan, where a dozen black dots indicate fires that have survived the rain. A colour-coded map in the middle of Mr Soeparno's operations centre is updated with the new information. Like the imam, Mr Soe-parno is praying for rain'.

"I'm a scientist but I'm also a Muslim. God is telling us we cannot go on like before." Just back from a crisis meeting with the provincial governor, he complains that different arms of the bureaucracy give different figures for the gravity of the catastrophe. The health department has put its pollution index as high as 1,800. The board of meteorology recorded only Passion Michael Billington The Invention Of Love Cortesloe WHY A Housman? Why should Tom Stoppard have chosen him as the subject of his new play, The Invention Of Love? Because it gives Stoppard the chance to meditate on scholarship and poetry, goodness and beauty, homo and hetero, Rus-kin and Pater. Housman and Wilde and a whole host of BHBK vflHaaaLaLaaaaaaaanLaaaaaaflBaaflaaaaaanlR aMaaaLaaWaaaLaaaaWILaaWMfflffMKaWB IflaiaaaaaaaBBaaBaBaaaaaaBaaaHHaBaaaBaKlB a a Joanna Coles In Now York THEY call it heroin chic: the images of thin white wasted teenagers spreadea-gled across the pages of Vogue, Elle, Arena and Marie Claire, which are used to sell high fashion to the young.

But there was nothing edifying or chic about the row which exploded in the international modelling world yesterday, as one of the industry's top agents declared that he was suing the blonde supermodel Amy Wesson for $4 million (2.5 million) because she was frequently too stoned to work. Michael Flutie, head of Company Management, who represented the model for 2V4 years, said he had spent the last six months terrified he would knock on Ms Wesson's door and find her lying alone and dead. "I was scared that I would go round to see why she hadn't turned up for a shoot and find her dead," he said. "I tried to get her into detox, I tried everything. But now it's time for tough love.

I am very concerned about her life." Mr Flutie said the problems started a year ago when editors began phoning him to complain that Ms Wesson who charges a day, was turning up incapa ble of working. "She was either exhausted and needing to sleep or completely stoned," he said; on one occasion she could barely stand up. As her behaviour became more erratic, Mr Flutie said he started taking the brunt. "On a typical bad day, she would be phoning me at midnight screaming at me that I hadn't told her about a shoot, or claiming that I had refused to give her boyfriend her phone number. "She would abuse and accuse my staff of things and we were having problems maintaining a professional The felling of a single large tree, says Mr Djuweng, destroys more than a dozen smaller trees, which are left on the forest floor when the loggers move on.

The result is a man-made tinderbox. Also still ticking, though temporarily defused, is the ethnic and religious time bomb. Across the road from the mostly Christian group's ramshackle headquarters from where free masks are distributed, Muslim neighbours look on suspiciously from the porch of a small mosque. The Christians decline to offer them masks. The Muslims decline to ask for them.

Separated by only a few yards of pitted tarmac and united by fear for their health, they stay apart. palpable love about a poet fired by the idea of textual integrity who knew the value of Platonic love. Richard Eyre, in his last production as the National's director, serves the text with his usual exemplary loyalty. I also liked Anthony Ward's back-projections. And at the heart of the play lies the formidable pairing of John Wood and Paul Rhys as the dead and the living Housman.

John Carlisle, Benjamin Whitrow and Michael Bryant lend weight to a supporting cast In an evening that reminds us that Stoppard, for all his cerebral qualities, is at his best when he endorses private passion. was either exhausted and needing to sleep or completely stoned photograph: chris moore the apocalypse IF YOU'RE AT HOME ALL DAY, WE'LL BRING DOWN THE COST OF YOUR CONTENTS INSURANCE. chokes half this level, but either way, the figures still make Pontia-nak the world's most polluted city by far. Any reading over 300 is considered dangerous. Monday's lowest reading was over 700 the.

equivalent, some say, of three packets of cigarettes. "This is very dangerous to people's health but we don't know the real extent of the danger," Mr Soeparno says. With many residents unable to afford medical help, regional health officials say they have no way to gauge just how ill the population is or may become. Unlike the government in Malaysia, which has declared the portion of Borneo it rules disaster zone, the authorities in Jakarta have issued feud. Whether Christian or Muslim, everyone wants rain.

"If there is no rain this disaster can only get worse. Only heavy rains will end everyone's suffering," says Ste-panus Djuweng, head of IDRD, a group that combines lobbying for Dayak interests with a campaign against logging. The two are closely related. Most of Kalimantan's timber comes from remote forests inhabited by indigenous tribes. The logging companies blame the fires on slash-and-burn farming by the Dayaks, but it is logging that created the conditions for the inferno ravaging Kalimantan and the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Plantation owners also start fires to clear the land. General Accident You can get up to 10 off your contents insurance if someone's usually guarding the roost. Gall us today and you'll be in safe hands. in eye of only a "red alert" for their own territory despite far worse pollution and the fact that Indonesia is the source of smoke smudging the skies over six Asian states. Pontianak airport has been closed for weeks.

Charcoaled stumps dot the main road from the Malaysian border to the north. There is also evidence of the region's other curse a volatile hostility between Muslims and predominantly Christian indigenous tribes called Dayaks. A spasm of bloodletting earlier this year left houses torched and many dead. If any light can be found in the darkness that has engulfed south-east Asia it is that the smoke has, for now. smothered this explosive For my taste, it is crammed with too much detail.

He not only recaptures the young Housman's passion for his Oxford contemporary, Moses Jackson, but also the quips and quiddities of dons of the time. But the play really takes wing when the dead AEH confronts the young Housman. Stoppard always writes best when he writes from the heart; and here he gives the older man a deeply moving defence of classical scholarship. But also, as in the passage on the Alexandrian Library from Arcadia, Stoppard dwells on the lottery of literary survival and on the power of passion. For the other big theme that amid scholarship in juicy Stoppard OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK 'Applies to Home and Motor insurance only.

Written details on request, http:www.ga.co.ukgadirect runs through the play is that feeling is defined by intensity rather than vociferousness. Housman's passion for Jackson was internalised, uncon-summated and the oblique source of much of the poetry. But Stoppard's point is that it was just as real as Wilde's more flamboyant infatuation with Bosie. In that sense, the play is an unfashionable anti-Freudian work that hymns the validity of sexual repression and of a closeted love. What is intriguing is that it offers Stoppard at his best and worst.

The Latin learning is laid on with a trowel. At the same time, the jokes are very good and Stoppard writes with other subjects beside. Whatever the play may lack, it is certainly not raw material. In fact, the play is one of Stoppard's juiciest. Like Travesties it deals with the nature of memory, as the dead Housman looks back on his younger self, and with the coincidences of history.

Like Arcadia, it is also preoccupied with the quality of passion, the random nature of literary survival and the idea of life as route march leading inexorably to the grave. It is weighed down with too much scholarship, but it attempts to combine the pyrotechnic dazzle of early Stoppard with the later mellowness..