Hotel Maids to Get Panic Buttons

We'll call them DSK buttons: Maids at two ritzy Manhattan hotels will soon carry panic buttons so they can alert others when they're in danger, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move comes after a second high-profile assault case, this one involving 74-year-old Egyptian business executive Mahmoud Abdel Salam Omar. He is being held on $25,000 bail and had to hand over his passport, notes AP. The Pierre hotel also has suspended the maid's supervisor for not immediately reporting the Omar incident, reports the New York Times.

"Let everybody in the world traveling to New York know that when they stay in a hotel room, the person cleaning that room is armed with a button that they can immediately press if you're stupid enough to get inappropriate," says the president of the New York Hotel & Motel Trades Council. The union hopes to make panic buttons mandatory at all hotels in the city. Click to read about Dominique Strauss-Kahn's likely legal strategy of blame-the-maid. (More panic button stories.)