The paper attempts to describe a number of linguistic and pragmatic aspects of modeling the anti-Russian discourse in the English language media headlines. The authors focus on the coverage of the Skripal poisoning case and the specific language means employed by a range of English-language news sources, such as The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Politico, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, The New Zealand Herald, The Herald. The results of the study indicate that one of the most effective and widespread media manipulation techniques is misinformation accompanied by a discrepancy between the headline and the content of the article. The research seeks to classify manipulation techniques according to the way of their actualization in the language and the degree of misinformation: full fabrication, partial fabrication, manipulated content, selective quoting, false connection, emphasizing communication relevant elements by means of the actual division of the sentence. The implementation of such manipulation techniques is aimed at shaping public opinion on the incident at issue in order to promote a negative image of Russia and its leader in terms of their alleged involvement in the Skripal attack.

The article regards the phenomenon of political communication from the perspective of the particularities of constructing gender identity by politicians. As far as the influence of the gender factor on politicians' speech is concerned, the most relevant approach among many others is the discourse approach formed within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, which considers political discourse as the object of study. The paper deals with the notion of political discourse and examines a hypothesis that gender factor might have a number of manifestations in political communication. It is noted that studying the specificity of constructing gender identity by politicians in discursive practices is becoming a highly topical issue as the importance of female participation in public and political life is growing. Political decision-making has long been considered the prerogativeofmen, but now the necessity of studying the female factor in this sphere is obvious. The author dwells upon the historical background of linguistic gender studies and summarizes the main stages of their development focusing mainly on the theory of the social construction of gender. The founders of this theory advance the thesis that an individual's gender identity is shaped in the process of constructing gender relations in communicative interaction. Further in the article we analyse a few devices of creating the images of masculinity and femininity by famous English and American politicians. As structural components of gender identity, masculinity and femininity turn out to be modifiable parameters depending on the pragmatic attitudes of communicators. Traditional androcentrism of political discourse may account for modifying the female speech style towards masculinity to achieve certain communicative aims.