From The Daily Telegraph

Havi Mond's journey to work would defeat most veterans of Connex or the M25. She wakes up in Zefat, northern Israel, travels for two hours to Tel Aviv, waits for three hours to go through security, flies to London, takes the train down to Brighton, where her grandparents live, and then goes to work as a model.

"Sometimes, when there is a red alert, it takes even longer, as security has to go through every bag, but I am used to it," she says.

She started making these epic journeys last August, imagining that, as a little-known model, she would not be much in demand. Within a week, she had landed her first shoot for Vogue - earning only £50, their standard fee - and she was launched. Already, she is widely talked of as the girl most likely to revive the supermodel phenomenon, and the nightmarish trip has turned into a fortnightly, sometimes weekly, routine.

By now, most girls would have thrown in their El Al boarding pass and settled in London, but Havi is in no rush. "I am a very home child," she says, sounding deceptively young for her 19 years. "I love living with my mummy and daddy, I love cooking and cleaning. So I am happy to travel, though sometimes it is a little boring."

Havi is a classic beauty with perfect skin and an other-worldly tranquillity. A host of magazines have already used her and, next month, she will begin advertising the French Connection summer collection. Calvin Klein wants to see her, as do scores of other top names.

She's young, she's fresh - and she is an Israeli whose orthodox Judaism makes her refuse work on Fridays and Saturdays, avoid non-kosher catering and turn down jobs that require her to wear anything that she, or her parents Peter and Pamela, consider "provocative". Cramping for a model's style, one might think, but apparently not. "It all adds to the intrigue," says Alisa Marks, French Connection's creative director.

We meet in the decadently ornate surroundings of Sketch, the latest wildly expensive London salon de the. Havi is not one of those models whose good looks you could miss if she were not dolled up and painted. She is dressed in combat trousers and a parka, but even the outer garb of a brussel sprout doesn't mask her beauty. Kate Winslet's recent photographic touch-up and slim-down made it seem as if anyone could be a model now, but Havi - 5ft 9in, eight stone and perfectly proportioned - has a considerable head start Read more (free regis. needed)

The French press is full of innuendo about the mental health condition of Heather Stewart-Whyte, a Gucci ex-model, mostly known for her frequent appearances in the Victoria's Secret catalogues in the nineties.

Heather, now 34, is divorced from French tennis star Yannick Noah, 42. A popular singer in France, Noah frequently appears in TV shows with their two children, Elijah, 6, and Jenaya, 5. Now Heather has asked a French court to stop her ex-husband from "using their young children for promotional purposes".

The court papers reveal a British court ruled three years ago the children should stay in the custody of their father. The British judge confirmed a similar French judgement on the same matter. Heather only got visitation rights. It is highly unusual for European courts to decide such young children would be better off with their father, and newspapers here come close to mention a drug addiction problem.

Noah told the newspaper Le Parisien that his ex-wife never used her visitation rights: "We have had no news of her for two years, and suddenly she's not happy with my conduct with our children".