Trump is able to ‘look past’ criticisms of him, says Labour minister

 Pre-reading part

Task 1. Listening comprehension.

Task 2. Comment on the statements. Explain the meaning and say whether they are related to the content of the article.

a)      Drive the nail that will go. b) Impossible is nothing.

While-reading part

Task 1. Read the article and be ready to translate it.

Task 2.  Write out the words and phrases given in bold. Explain the meaning in English. Translate into Russian.

Task 3. Make up a dialogue/interview using new vocabulary.

Trump is able to ‘look past’ criticisms of him, says Labour minister

Pat McFadden say he thinks UK and US governments will ‘get on well’ despite past comments by senior Labour figures

Eleni Courea Political correspondent

Thu 7 Nov 2024 09.31 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com

Donald Trump is “capable of looking past” things people have said about him in the past, one of Keir Starmer’s closest allies has said. Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister, said he thought the new US and UK governments would “get on well” despite the history of senior Labour ministers criticising Trump.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said while he was a backbencher in 2018 that Trump was “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order”.

Wes Streeting, now the health secretary, previously called the president-elect an “odious, sad little man” and Ed Miliband, the environment secretary, called him a “racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper”.

Presented with some of these comments, McFadden told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If Donald Trump didn’t speak to people who have said things like that there’d be a lot of people he wouldn’t be speaking to.”

McFadden, who is a close ally of the prime minister, told LBC: “He’s capable of looking past these things. He’s looked past them before. “Even his biggest backer, Elon Musk, a few years ago was saying Donald Trump should hang up his hat and walk off into the sunset.

“His vice-president, who’s sitting alongside him in the White House for the next four years, mused once whether Trump was another Richard Nixon or America’s Hitler.”

He added: “I think there is a bigger point that we can miss in reading these things out is that the alliance and the friendship between the US and the UK is really deep and enduring, and I see it in government on a practical day-to-day basis on defence, security, intelligence, trade – on lots of fronts.” McFadden refused three times to say whether he believed Trump had neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan sympathies.

“The relationship between the UK and America is really important,” he said. “I think there’s another point that we shouldn’t miss here. Because of the timing of the two elections both being within a few months of one another we now know the character of the two governments on both sides of the Atlantic for the next four years.”

Starmer phoned Trump to congratulate him on his victory on Wednesday night. A Downing Street spokesperson said the prime minister “offered his hearty congratulations and said he looked forward to working closely with President-elect Trump across all areas of the special relationship”.

The two leaders “fondly recalled their meeting in September, and President-elect Trump’s close connections and affinity to the United Kingdom”, according to the spokesperson.

Starmer and Trump had a two-hour dinner in New York in September, which Lammy also attended. The foreign secretary has sought to build links with senior Republicans allied with Trump.

Trump and Starmer discussed the situation in the Middle East but there was no mention of Ukraine in the readout of their call.

The president-elected has said he wants to end the war in Ukraine quickly and criticised the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for not making more concessions to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

Post-reading part

Task 1. Divide the text of the article into logical parts. Make up questions to each logical part. Provide a summary sentence to each logical part.

Task 2. What is the main idea of the article?

Task 3. Does the author of the article sound objective or subjective?

Task 4. Write a rendering of the article. Mind the rules of a rendering writing.

Task 5. Learn the new vocabulary from the article be ready to write the dictation-translation.

Ireland is a ‘playground’ for Russian intelligence, says former army chief

 Ireland is a ‘playground’ for Russian intelligence, says former army chief

Lisa O'Carroll in Dublin

Mon 7 Oct 2024 13.50 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/07/ireland-is-a-playground-for-russian-intelligence-says-former-army-chief

Comment follows claim Kremlin recruited member of parliament to damage UK-Irish relations during Brexit talks

Ireland is a “playground” for Russian intelligence, a former deputy chief of an Irish army unit has said following claims that a member of parliament was recruited by the Kremlin to undermine Anglo-Irish relations during Brexit talks.

Cathal Berry, now a Teachta Dála (TD, member of the Irish parliament), said he had not been surprised by a report at the weekend that the unnamed politician had been recruited “as an agent of influence” in a honeytrap operation.

“If you are looking to affect a western country with extensive assets and a poor security culture then Ireland is ground zero,” Berry told the Irish Times. “Here the Russians get maximum impact for minimum effort. It is a playground for them.”

According to the report in the Irish Sunday Times, the aim of the operation was to build contact with loyalist paramilitaries at a time of sensitive discussions with the UK about whether there would be checks on the Irish border or not.

The reported mission ties in with wider hybrid warfare efforts identified by the EU which it says can involve anything from disinformation to suspected arson and antisemitic attacks.

“Russia has written the manual on hybrid operations, misinformation, disinformation, cyber-attacks, anything that’s deniable or that’s very difficult to attribute to them,” said Berry, a former second-in-command of the Irish Ranger Wing and now an independent TD for Kildare.

According to the newspaper, the Irish military and security services identified the potential agent, code-named Cobalt, but he remains in office. There is no apparent evidence of him having being paid or having passed information to the Russians. He has not been arrested or charged.

The opposition TD Richard Boyd Barrett has called for action by the authorities. “I think anybody who has been corrupted by any external power rather than serving the interests of ordinary people has a serious case to answer,” he said.

The politician was said to have been recruited by Sergey Prokopiev, who worked in the embassy in Dublin from 2019-22, and was expelled two years ago after allegations he was an undeclared intelligence officer.

On Sunday the taoiseach, Simon Harris, said he would not comment on matters of security but noted that Ireland was “not immune” to Russian attempts to influence public discourse.

“It shouldn’t come as any surprise to any of us that Russia seeks to influence public opinion, seeks to distort public opinion and is active in relation to that across the world and that Ireland is not immune from that,” he said. “We’ve also seen a very significant increase in that level of activity since the brutal invasion by Russia of Ukraine.”

Asked whether he knew who the alleged agent was, Harris said he could not comment on security matters but that he was “satisfied that our gardai and our intelligence services working internationally with counterparts take this issue very, very seriously”.

The Russian embassy said on Monday it had “always believed that there is no sense or value in commenting” on what it described as “the primitive anti-Russian concoctions” in the Sunday Times.

Russia’s presence in Ireland has previously been the subject of concern, with planning permission to quadruple the size of the Russian embassy overturned by the government in 2020 due to concern over the new complex’s purpose.

At the time, Berry said the proposed complex, which would have included a subterranean network of 20 storage rooms, 10 power plant rooms and 13 toilets, looked more like a “nerve centre” for Russian intelligence.

Pre-reading part

Task 1. Paraphrase the statements. Do you agree or disagree? Why (not)?        How is the statement related to the headline of the article?

A friend to all is a friend to none.

If you throw mud enough, some of it will stick.

While-reading part

Task 1. Read the article and be ready to translate it.

Task 2.  Write out the words and phrases given in bold. Explain the meaning in English. Translate into Russian.

Task 3. Make up a dialogue/interview using new vocabulary.

Post-reading part

Task 1. Divide the text of the article into logical parts. Make up questions to each logical part.

Task 2. Be ready to discuss in the classroom with your groupmates:

A) Think what word will serve as a key word of the article. Find synonyms in the text of the article. Which sphere do they come from?

B) What was the correspondent’s intention to tell the public about? Does he sound objective or subjective?

C) What is the main idea/problem raised?

Task 3. Give a summary of the article.

Task 4. Write a rendering of the article. Mind the rules of a rendering writing.

Task 5. Learn the new vocabulary from the article be ready to write the dictation-translation.

 

how to pronounce Kate Chopin

https://www.swisseduc.ch/english/readinglist/chopin_kate/

Afghan women sing in defiance of Taliban laws silencing their voices

 Afghan women sing in defiance of Taliban laws silencing their voices

Ashifa Kassam and agencies

Sun 1 Sep 2024 15.52 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/afghan-women-sing-in-defiance-of-taliban-laws-silencing-their-voices

Women push back at law stating they must not sing or read aloud in public by posting videos of themselves singing. Afghan women, both inside and outside the country, have posted videos of themselves singing in protest against the Taliban’s laws banning women’s voices in public.

Late last month the Taliban published new restrictions aimed, it said, at combating vice and promoting virtue. The 35-article document, which includes a raft of draconian laws, deems women’s voices to be potential instruments of vice and stipulates that women must not sing or read aloud in public, nor let their voices carry beyond the walls of their homes.

As rights campaigners reacted with horror, Afghan women began pushing back. Across the country, women began uploading videos of themselves singing, in defiance of the Taliban’s systematic efforts to erase women from the public sphere.

“No command, system or man can close the mouth of an Afghan woman,” one 23-year-old said after posting her own video. The 39-second video showed her singing outdoors. The song she sang had been carefully chosen for its lyrics, which spoke of protest and strength. “I am not that weak willow that trembles in every wind,” she sang. “I am from Afghanistan.”

In another video, reportedly recorded in Kabul, a woman is shown singing while dressed from head to toe in black. “You have silenced my voice for the foreseeable future,” she sang, her face concealed by a long veil. “You have imprisoned me in my home for the crime of being a woman.”

Other videos showed women in Afghanistan singing alone or in small groups, using hashtags such as “#My voice is not forbidden” and “#No to Taliban” as they raised their voices against what UN officials have described as a “gender-based apartheid”.

Others around the world soon joined in. “We do not go to the field with a gun, but our voice, our image,” said Hoda Khamosh, an Afghan woman living in Norway. She posted her own video in a bid to show “that we women are not just a few individuals who can be erased”, she said.

The new laws also force women to wear thick clothes that completely cover their bodies – including their faces – while in public, and bans them from looking directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.

Those who fail to comply with the restrictions can be detained and punished in a manner deemed appropriate by Taliban officials. On Tuesday, the UN high commissioner for human rights called for the law to be repealed, describing it as “utterly intolerable”.

The new law cements policies that seek to completely erase women’s presence in public, “effectively attempting to render them into faceless, voiceless shadows”, said a spokesperson, Ravina Shamdasani.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, they have steadily eroded women’s rights. Women and girls have been blocked from attending secondary school, banned from nearly all forms of paid employment, and barred from public parks and gyms. Earlier this year, the Taliban also announced that they would resume the practice of stoning women to death for adultery.

Pre-reading part

Task 1. Paraphrase the statements. Do you agree or disagree? Why (not)? How is the statement related to the headline of the article?

The only man who can tell a woman where to stop is a bus conductor.

Task 2. Scan the article and make a list of glossary words from the words and phrases given in bold and provide Russian equivalents in written form.

While-reading part

Task 2. Read the article and be ready to translate it.

Task 3. Find in the text of the article sentences containing new vocabulary and explain the meaning in English. Make up sentences of your own using the new vocabulary.

Task 4. Make up a dialogue/interview using the new vocabulary.

Post-reading part

Task 5. Divide the text of the article into logical parts. Make up questions to each logical part to ask your groupmates in class.

Task 6. Be ready to discuss in the classroom with your group mates:

А) What was the correspondent’s intention to tell the general public about?

B) What is the main idea/problem raised?

Task 7. Give a summary of the article.

Task 8. Write a rendering of the article. Mind the rules of a rendering writing.

Task 9. Learn the new vocabulary from the article be ready to write the dictation-translation.

 

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Alfred Hitchcock's definition of happiness

 https://youtu.be/14dOICbwSIs?si=LHaYtlKs8fIjy6aH

Police continue to arrest pro-Palestine student protesters across the US

 

Police continue to arrest pro-Palestine student protesters across the US

www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/02

More than 1,600 people have been arrested at 30 schools, most recently at UCLA and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire

Police arrested dozens of pro-Palestine demonstrators on college campuses across the US on Wednesday night into Thursday morning.

Dozens of students were arrested at the University of California, Los Angeles, as police cleared a fortified encampment. At least 90 students were arrested at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

More were arrested at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Buffalo in New York. In Oregon, police moved into the school’s library, which has been occupied by demonstrators since Monday.

The protests are part of a movement to force schools to divest from businesses that support the war in Gaza, and reflect how the war has become a major flashpoint in US politics. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began a campaign to dismantle Hamas, the Gaza health ministry has said. More people in Gaza have been thrust into near starvation, as Israel has limited food aid to the area.

On 7 October, Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostages in an attack on Israel. Since the campaign again Hamas began, the US has provided substantial military support to Israel, including most recently in a $15bn aid package.

Student protests have grown across the country since an encampment sprung up at Columbia University in New York in mid-April. In many cases, police and universities have responded with force to demonstrations that threaten to continue into commencement season. Hundreds have been arrested in the weeks since the protests began.

California highway patrol officers detained dozens of protesters at UCLA on Thursday morning after a 24-hour standoff, CNN reported, after university authorities apparently told police the fortified encampment was an “unlawful assembly”.

California police tore down plywood and pallets that protesters used to reinforce their encampment, and also reportedly used stun grenades, also know as flash-bangs, to try to disperse the crowd and zip-tied detained protesters. By early morning, police had “full control” of the encampment area, according to one witness.

The night before, counter-protesters attacked the encampment, but police did little to stop the violence, a scene that has since prompted criticism of police and university authorities.

“The community needs to feel the police are protecting them, not enabling others to harm them,” Rebecca Husaini, chief of staff for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said in a news conference on the Los Angeles campus on Wednesday.

At Dartmouth, where an encampment had only recently sprung up, a professor said the university responded with “full force”, and posted a video of a white-haired colleague being grabbed and dragged away by police.

“In the hour or so it was allowed to exist, this was the model of a peaceful, inclusive protest,” Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth College, told the Washington Post. “They obstructed nothing; disrupted nothing; menaced nobody; and neither used nor displayed hate speech.”

The chaotic scenes at UCLA came after New York police burst into a building occupied by anti-war protesters at Columbia University on Tuesday night, breaking up a demonstration that had paralyzed the school.

By Wednesday, a scrum had also broken out at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after police with shields removed all but one tent and shoved protesters. Four officers were injured, including a state trooper who was hit in the head with a skateboard, authorities said. Four were charged with battering law enforcement.

Protests began at Columbia on 17 April. An Associated Press tally counted at least 38 times since 18 April when arrests were made at campus protests across the US. More than 1,600 people have been arrested at 30 schools.

In one rare example of authorities de-escalating protests, Brown University in Rhode Island agreed to a divestment vote in October – apparently the first US college to agree to such a demand.

Authorities have also made arrests and cleared protest encampments at City College, Fordham University and Stony Brook College in New York; Portland State in Oregon; Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona; Tulane University in New Orleans; and the University of Texas, Dallas.

Student protests have also sprung up in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Lesson 1

Task 1. Read the article, write out the words in bold and translate them into Russian.

Task 2. Consult the dictionary and be ready to explain the meaning of the words in bold.

Task 3. Make up your own sentences with the words in bold (at home).

Task 4. Make up dialogues using the words given in bold (in class).

Lesson 2.

Task 5. Think over and divide the text of the article into logical parts.

Task 6. Make up and write a question to each logical part.

Task 7. Be ready to render the article.

Task 8. Learn by heart the words in bold and be ready for a dictation translation.