Former Mandela Fund Official Says Model Gave Him Diamonds

Alan Cowell

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A former director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund charity, Jeremy Ractliffe, confirmed on Friday that he received “three small uncut diamonds” from the supermodel Naomi Campbell the day after she attended a 1997 dinner given by Mr Mandela and attended by Charles Taylor, then the president of Liberia. Ms Campbell testified at Mr Taylor’s war crimes trial in the Hague on Thursday that after the dinner, two unidentified men gave her a pouch containing “very small, dirty-looking stones”, which she passed to Mr Ractliffe in the hope that they might be used to help the charity. The prosecution has accused Mr Taylor of trading in so-called blood diamonds, which are used to foment civil conflict – a charge he denies. In a statement, Mr Ractliffe said he worried that the gift would damage reputations and that it might be illegal, so he kept the diamonds and did not tell anyone until he recently turned them over to South African authorities. Mr Ractliffe is no longer the charity’s chief executive, but he is listed on its Web site as a trustee.

The International Herald Tribune, August 6, 2010

Task 2. Have a look at articles A – C below, and say what genre they are. What is the syntactical structure of their headlines? Translate them into Russian. A. Too many clichés, at the end of the day

At the end of the day, British newspapers are full of clichés

Stephen Brook

Shurely some mistake? A new study has found that British newspapers and websites, far from being the best written on the planet, are actually riddled with clichés.

The report, by the news and information company Factiva, found that “at the end of the day” was the most over-used cliché in newspapers and websites – clocking up an eye-watering 3,347 mentions between January and June.

Financial terms “in the red” and “in the black” were second and third in the survey, followed by “level playing field”, “time and again” and “wealth of experience”.

A quick glance shows that financial clichés dominate, as do clichéd references to time (six in the top 20). A wake up call (geddit?) to our business writers, perhaps?

The survey prompted an instant debate here at MediaGuardian towers. I think you can make a case for “in the black”, but I, erm, draw the line at phrases such as “rushed to the scene” – 310 uses in six months, since you ask.

Media clichés are somewhat under-represented, with no mention of “thinking outside the box”, “drilling down deep”, “the long tail” or even “the tipping point”.

Clichés have a shelf life and can outlive their usefulness: can you remember when “twin peaks”, “thousand points of light”, the “information super-highway” and “new world order” were repeated parrot-fashion by just about everybody? Equally, they can sit gathering dust in obscurity until they are picked up by a politician, public figure or TV show, and then become amazingly popular.

But however much we disdain them, there is a reason they catch on and it's not just journalistic laziness. They usually express things rather aptly and thus become the sort of phrase it’s hard to avoid using. Consistent use of language can sometimes help readers. Still, at the end of the day, as journalists we should try to avoid avoid being repetitive and this survey ought to give us plenty of pause for thought.

The Guardian, August 25, 2006

B. Social class affects white pupils’ exam results more than those of ethnic minorities – study

Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school

Jessica Shepherd

A child’s social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered. The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.

They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers’ grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31 % of white pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found. This gap between social classes – of 32 percentage points – is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.

For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.

The study – Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University tomorrow. It argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.

The researchers, from the Institute of Education and Queen Mary, both part of the University of London, also found that Chinese pupils from families in routine and manual jobs perform better than white pupils from managerial and professional backgrounds. They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.

Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.

“More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you’ve been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don’t necessarily believe that education is going to change that,” says the study.

The Guardian, September 3, 2010

C. Blair’s job was done by 1997: to numb Labour, and to enshrine Thatcherism

In Downing Street, Blair never fulfilled his early promise and let Brown in.

Now he can only emit a long wail of impotence

Simon Jenkins

Who said books are dead? Did he blog or tweet, video or iPad? No, Tony Blair wanted to get a message across, so he wrote a book. He smeared the black staff on trees, stitched it and made people go out and buy it. Good for him.

Blair’s mildly engaging stream of auto-eroticism shows him memoirising much as he ruled. He uses the first person singular a million times. He stages everything. He fixes on a theme and controls the narrative. The intention is to smother an Iraq apologia in endless quotables on Gordon Brown and his emotional idiocy and general hopelessness. It is cruel, but has worked a dream.

Blair was a politician of great talent, and a miserable prime minister. The service he did his country was considerable, but it was done by the time he took office in 1997. It was to anaesthetise the Labour party while he turned it into a vehicle to make him electable and his newly espoused Thatcherism irreversible, much as Attlee had made welfarism irreversible in 1945…

When the Social Democratic party was formed in 1981, an ambitious young Blair abused them as “middle-aged, middle-class erstwhile Labour”, with only “lingering social consciences [to] prevent them voting Tory.” When, a year later, Anthony Blair fought Beaconsfield, he was for CND, against Trident and for withdrawal from Europe…

By the end of the 80s, ambition had worked a wondrous change. Blair abandoned nuclear disarmament and subscribed to the EU. He did a U-turn on privatisation…

When he became leader, Blair’s self-styled “project” dared not speak its Thatcherite name, but it understood that success could lie only in capturing the middle ground, in the “electoral necessity of bourgeois ascendancy”…

The party was torn to shreds as Blair scored victory after victory against “old Labour.” He turned a 19th century movement into a 21st century presidential machine, puffed up with candyfloss vacuities such as “traditional values in a changed world.” Blair’s appetite for cliché was, and is, gargantuan…

Blair blames much of this failure on Brown, but the failure was Blair’s. He left Brown in charge, with his co-architect of madness, Ed Balls – who without apology now thinks himself equipped to run the country. Blair never had the guts to sack either of them. As a result, one of the brightest sparks to cross the political firmament since the war can emit only a long wail of impotence.

The Guardian, September 2, 2010

Task 3. Identify clichésin Text A. Task 4. Read Text B and write out:- special terms on the subject of the article;- abbreviations;- realia. Task 5. Read Text C and analyse the linguistic means used by its author to persuade the reader that T. Blair was not up to the job as Labour Prime Minister. Identify all clichés in the article.

Task 6. Watch Video 3 (Folder Unit 3) that features press review, fill in the grid asin Task 7, Unit 1.

Task 7. Read the newspaper extracts below and determine their genre. Translate Texts IV-VIII headlines into Russian.

I

An alliance led by the former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has won a landslide victory in elections aimed at restoring democracy to the country, an electoral official said today.

But even before the tally was complete, Hasina’s opponents launched allegations of irregularities and forgery, casting doubt over whether the election will end a cycle of unrest that has made the South Asian country virtually ungovernable. The party led by the former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia said it would make a formal comment on the result today.

II

The NHS has enjoyed the biggest increase in funds of all the public services, with spending up from £34 bn in 1997 to just over £94 bn in 2005. Staff numbers have risen, with more consultants, GPs and nurses. The number of people on waiting lists for operations has fallen since 1997. The drugs bill has risen 13 per cent, 118 new hospitals and 188 GP clinics have been opened or are being built.

III

The International Monetary Fund predicts the UK economy will grow by 2.9 per cent in 2005. The interest rate is 5.25 per cent. Total increase in taxation is £3,100 per household. Unemployment now at 1.7 million (2005), down from 2m in 1997. Government debt has fallen from to 44 per cent of GDP to 36 per cent of its disposable income. Total mortgage borrowing now is well over £1 trillion.

IV

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