The Rebel Dressed in Tweed

The 83-year-old former shopkeeper Elisabeth Winkfield, was summoned to appear before magistrates, having (1) …. She walked out of the courtroom on Thursday to be greeted by a crowd of placard-waving supporters – and by the time Friday’s Daily Mail arrived in newsagents’, she was well on the way to becoming a national hero.

“The rebel dressed in tweed,” as the Mail’s front-page headline anointed her, seemed almost too good to be true. She was as different from the aggressive tax protesters as it was possible to imagine; she had never claimed benefits; she had never been in trouble with the law.

“The begin with,” says Mark Clough, a reporter for the Western Morning News, who had been following the story, “I thought she was (2) …. But now it seems possible that Miss Winkfield was coming from a very different angle.”

The Devon Pensioners Action Forum had been promoting the case of elderly people unable to (3) …. Many, including Winkfield, agreed they would not (4) … beyond the rate of inflation, but few had been summoned to appear in court before her. “I think they are just picking people at random,” says Venson, the 79-year-old who runs the group.

This does not, however, appear the main reason for Winkfield’s protest – and certainly not the main reason why it was catapulted to national prominence. The 83-year-old is an active member of another organization, the rightwing UK independence party (UKIP), which is staunchly opposed to British membership of the European Union. It was at a UKIP meeting that she had heard about how some council tax revenue is spent on EU-level regional assemblies, motivating her to decide to (5) ….

“She argues that her council is guilty of making illegal payments to the SW Regional Assembly and a SW Brussels office, for which it has no mandate, and that council tax should be only for local services,” reads a UKIP press release.

(From ‘The Guardian’, abridged)

 

Read the following articles and present them in reported speech.

A.

No Time like the Present

(From Burma by Malcolm Beith)

Time stands still for no man. Time takes its toll. During my visit to Burma’s Shan state, the heart of the infamous Golden Triangle, I think of these commonplace English expressions – partly because none of the clocks tell the correct time here.

Perhaps there’s good reason. Burma is half an hour behind Thailand. But the town of Mongla, on the Chinese border, ticks on Chinese time – an hour ahead of Thailand. If you traverse a mere 200 kilometers, south to north you will zigzag between three time zones. Why should you even bother with precise timekeeping?

In Burma it is hard to know what year it is, let alone what time it is. The country is stuck in 1962, when it invented its own brand of socialism – as if the Burmese stopped walking with the rest of the world.

Strolling around the market in Kengtung, I was struck to find a copy of Newsweek from Aug.9, 1999. A cover story that week – a piece I had reported on as a London intern – was on the solar eclipse of the century. Quite apt. If anyone has experienced a total eclipse, it’s Burma.

Yet time is a river, moving on. Though most inhabitants still walk around town, Chinese motorcycles are multiplying like cockroaches. Capitalism is everywhere, at least unofficially. In the market, money changers calculate kyat into yuan into dollars with the hustle of Wall Street traders. And finally there’s the new road from Tachilek to Mongla, funded largely by drug money. It now provides an easy transportation route for Chinese goods to Thailand, and tourists the other way.

Time takes its toll, clearly. The town of Mongla, capital of Special Region No.4, is under the control of Chinese narcotics boss Lin Mingxian. Here there once were beautiful poppy fields. Today it’s a sleazy mini-Las Vegas for day-trippers from Chinese Yunnan province.

Mongla is an example of what can be achieved when opium is eradicated – at least it was until a few months ago, when Beijing imposed a cash limit for exiting Chinese and banned most overnight stays.

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)

 

B.