It’s been a snowy and bitterly cold morning in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

It’s a place where journalists and their cameras are usually not allowed; its brutal history makes it a highly sensitive location.

But this morning it was shut down to the usual tourist hordes, and we were invited in and allowed to film freely; a mark of a special occasion.

The occasion this time is an annual political event known as Lianghui or the Two Sessions.

It’s China’s equivalent of the State opening of Parliament, a moment of pomp and ceremony, a moment where the curtain rises just a touch on what China’s leaders think, and what they want.

Nearly 3000 delegates are here from across the country, all members of China’s legislative body.

Many were wearing the traditional dress of China’s many ethnic minorities; a show of diversity deemed highly important.

In theory, they are here to discuss policy and vote on new laws and constitutional changes; in reality, they rubber-stamp decisions already made behind closed doors.

But there is no denying that the spectacle of it all is impressive.

In the cavernous Great Hall Of The People, everything was pitch perfect; the band, the staging, even the tea cups were refilled in perfect choreographed unity.

Trying to decipher where China is headed is always a little bit of a game of reading between the lines, and so it was today.

The economy, for instance, is clearly still sluggish. The published growth target of 4.5 to 5% is the lowest goal China has set itself for over 30 years.

But this year, there is a little more insight about what China’s ambitions might be, and that’s because this year sees the publication of China’s latest ‘Five Year Plan’, a blueprint of sorts on what China’s strategy should be between now and 2030.

It might sound a bit lofty, but in the past these plans have been highly indicative; in the 1980s, for example, it was a Five Year Plan that heralded China’s infamous Reform and Opening Up — the policy that ultimately made it rich.

This year’s plan focuses on how China can really grow and win through leadership in the high-tech race; it seeks technological self-reliance, national security, and state guidance of the economy.

While Xi Jinping didn’t speak himself today, there is absolutely no doubt that everything laid out was a reflection of his leadership and his vision for an ascendant China.

He comes into this annual political moment in arguably one of his strongest positions for years; hot off a year of outmanoeuvring Donald Trump in the US-China trade war, purging swathes of his military’s leadership and further consolidating his absolute power.

You can see it in everything from the staging to the deferential body language; his power is all but unchallengeable.

And it’s absolutely designed to send a message to the world.

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While Lianghui is primarily focused on domestic policy, it is not happening in a vacuum and events in the Middle East are the unavoidable backdrop.

The reality is that China won’t mind the contrast between the show they staged today, with all its displays of unity, order and might, with the chaos they see being unleashed by President Donald Trump.

It’s a contrast that suits their narrative – China is the superpower worth betting on.

The prime minister confirmed the move in a Downing Street press conference

Sir Keir Starmer has announced that the UK will send four more jets to the Middle East “to strengthen our defensive operations”.

The prime minister confirmed the news in a press conference this afternoon. The Typhoon jets will join operations in Qatar amid the ongoing conflict, he said.

Sir Keir told the briefing he was focused on “providing calm, level-headed leadership in the national interest”. It comes as defence secretary John Healey met his counterpart in Cyprus to ease tensions about Britain’s response to drone attacks on the island.

Read our ongoing coverage of the latest situation here: Iran war LIVE as Doha and Azerbaijan hit by attacks

Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer said earlier on Thursday that F35s have also been deployed to defend allies in the Middle East, and air defence destroyer HMS Dragon has been deployed to Cyprus, setting sail next week. Wildcat helicopters with anti-drone capabilities have also been dispatched to the island.

Speaking at the press conference in Downing Street, the Prime Minister said he had chaired a Cobra meeting on Thursday morning. He said he wanted to reassure people “worried sick about their family and friends” and “the potential for even greater escalation”.

He said: “I want to reassure the British public about the action that we are taking while the region has been plunged into chaos. My focus is providing calm, level-headed leadership in the national interest.

“That means deploying our military and diplomatic strength to protect our people, and it means having the strength to stand firm by our values and our principles, no matter the pressure to do otherwise.”

In Cyprus, Mr Healey met with Vasilis Palmas where he defended the UK’s deployment of military assets in the Middle East after RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus was hit by a drone. Cyprus’s high commissioner to the UK said a British military presence to defend the island was “the least we expect” in a criticism of the UK’s approach to managing the conflict.

Overnight on Monday, a hangar at RAF Akrotiri was hit by an Iranian-made Shahed drone, which was launched from Beirut in Lebanon, according to Cypriot officials. Two further drones detected on Monday were shot down by British warplanes, which took off from Akrotiri.

Asked if he thought the UK had acted with sufficient urgency to protect people living in and around the bases, high commissioner Kyriacos Kouros told Sky News: “Already we have the presence of Greek forces on the island. Two frigates arrived, four aircraft arrived, all of them with abilities to combat drones.

“The French are coming. So… the least we expect is the Britons to also be present since, as I said, we are not only defending Cypriots on the island.”

Sir Keir insisted the UK had been preparing for the possibility of conflict “long before” it began with Israeli and US strikes. He said Britain “started pre-deploying to the region in January and February, particularly to Cyprus and Qatar”.

This included fighter jets, air defence missiles, and anti-drone systems and was done over around eight weeks in conjunction with the US and other allies, he said. He added: “I’m satisfied that we can keep our people safe and we’re working very hard to make sure that wherever people have registered their presence, we can help them with the information that they need and the support they need, and get them back to the United Kingdom as quickly and as safely as possible.”

Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been pulling in the crowds recently, which is quite a feat in troubled times for cinema. Published in 1847, Emily Brontë’s tale of psycho-sexual power dynamics is just one of many enduring female-authored 19th century novels exploring female sexuality and desire for autonomy. These characters existed within a system that allowed women few education or career opportunities.

The ever-popular work of canonical British female writers such as Jane Austen, the (other) Brontë sisters and George Eliot were very different in style and tone. But they also draw attention to various forms of gender inequality.

Their novels focused on issues such as inheritance and property laws, the pressure on young women to marry for financial security, the sexual double standard and the lack of career prospects for women. In doing so, they gave voice to the frustrations of an expanding female readership in the 19th century.

The work of these and lesser-known female authors was crucial in shaping and fuelling public debates on what was referred to in the mid-Victorian period as “the woman question” (women’s right to vote). It later became the first-wave feminist movement in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The emergence of two inventive new literary forms in the early 20th century were key. One was modernism and the other the new printed paperback; both were intertwined with the expansion of women’s concerns and desires in the social and cultural sphere.

Modernism saw the burgeoning of experimental female writers such as Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys in the 1920s. Then came popular genres such as mass market romance and what is now described as “cosy” crime fiction in the 1930s. Women writers and readers were creating spaces in high art and mass culture that centred female experience and domestic and personal life from the beginning of the 20th century.

The second wave

Given the importance of novels and reading to the history of feminist struggle, it is not surprising that second-wave feminism drew heavily on women’s literary heritage. This saw the publication of landmark academic studies of women’s writing such as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). And with them came the proliferation of university courses on women’s writing.

The 1960s and 1970s also witnessed the birth of polemical feminist bestsellers. This included Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and “consciousness raising” popular novels, such as The Woman’s Room (1977) by Marilyn French.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a more diverse group of feminist writers came on the scene. Writers like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Rita Mae Brown, continued to shape and expand the political and cultural scope and influence of women’s writing into queer, black and postmodernist forms.

Bookgroups, BookTok and the feminist novel

In our own era, while men are reading fewer and fewer novels, female writers and readers are keeping the world of fiction alive. Aside from being the major purchasers of fiction, women are far more likely to enhance and socialise their literary interests. Local book groups and online review and recommendation communities such as Booktok are popular spaces for exploring new literature.

They are also the driving force in the creation and consumption of successful new literary cycles. For example, one of the publishing success stories of the last ten years in English language fiction was the female-centred psychological thriller/domestic noir crime novel. This included the likes of Gone Girl (2014), The Girl on the Train (2016), Big Little Lies (2017) and The Housemaid.

As feminist literary critics have pointed out, not only are these novels predominantly written and narrated by women. Through widespread circulation and screen adaptations, they have also continued to bring to light key gender and power issues such as coercive control, domestic violence and the murder of women. At the lighter end of the spectrum, the recent explosion of “romantasy” fiction (a romance-fantasy hybrid) focuses on female desire and pleasure.

The boundary between literary and genre fiction is becoming increasingly blurred. But contemporary female writers such as Rachel Cusk, Bernadine Evaristo, Anna Burns and Eimear McBride continue to produce innovations in style and form. And younger female writers of “rage” and “sad girl” novels like Ottessa Moshfegh, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Rachel Yoder, Raven Leilani and Aria Aber are not afraid to explore edgy and unsettling accounts of women’s experience.

In life-writing, creative non-fiction and autofiction, women’s stories have also proliferated. Post #MeToo bestsellers such as Acts of Desperation (2022) by Meghan Nolan, and Three Women (2020) by Lisa Taddeo, tearing down comfortable myths of equality and exposing the persisting inequalities in women’s personal relationships.

For more than two centuries, women’s writing has not only reflected the constraints of patriarchy but actively challenged and reshaped them. As long as women continue to write, read and reimagine the world through fiction, novel reading will remain a vital site of feminist resistance and possibility.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Clifford Ian Church, 63, lured a 25-year-old woman to his flat and forced her to submit to his sexual demands by hitting her to the floor and telling her “you are going to be hit every time you refuse”, Catherine Silverton told York Crown Court.

He also told her she needed teaching a lesson and locked them into the flat together.

She managed to escape naked into the Harrogate block of flats’ communal area.

Also naked but for a pair of socks, he pursued her and chased her up two flights of stairs, grabbed her as she desperately clung to a door frame and tried to drag her back to his flat until a resident, alerted by her screams, opened the door.

She had believed he was, in her words, a “nice old man”, said Ms Silverton.

Serial rapist Clifford Ian Church being interviewed by police (Image: North Yorkshire Police)

Police revealed after the case that Church dressed himself and left the flat hurriedly after the rape. He had thrown the woman’s clothes into the communal area for her to collect.

Church was on parole from a life sentence for raping, attempting to rape and sexually assaulting a 37-year-old woman on the seafront in Redcar, in an incident that Judge Simon Hickey said was very similar to the 2025 rape.

He was also jailed for eight years in 1997 for rape, attempted rape and attempted indecent assault of a 16-year-old girl. In total he has eight offences of rape and attempted rape.

Church, formerly of Harrogate and now recalled to prison to continue serving his first life sentence, pleaded guilty to raping the 25-year-old woman and assaulting her.

Giving him a second life sentence and ordering him to serve a minimum of 12 years before he can be considered for parole, the judge said: “It was a prolonged, determined and sustained incident that must have left the 25-year-old victim terrified.”

Church is already on the sex offenders’ register for life.

After the rape on August 9, 2025, police launched a major hunt for Church, putting out urgent public appeals across York, North Yorkshire as well as Cleveland and West Yorkshire. 

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Ms Silverton said Church had met the latest victim, a homeless drug addict, in Leeds and after a couple of meetings persuaded her to come by bus with him to Harrogate on the excuse that she would be paid £100 and some drugs for bagging heroin and crack cocaine. 

He gave her £100 on the bus and never mentioned anything sexual until they were in the flat.  Then he locked the door and told her to get her clothes off. She refused and he hit her to the ground.

On September 19, police found Church, who had been drinking, at Bradford Interchange and arrested him. He had been released from the first life sentence on November 1, 2017.

For Church, Rebecca Randall said his best mitigation was his guilty plea which had spared the 25-year-old the ordeal of giving evidence.

He had become somewhat institutionalised and behind bars had become a laundry orderly. He also helped new prisoners by advising them on how to avoid self-harming.

He had long-term alcohol and drug addictions which he had tried to overcome after his release in 2017 but had not been able to access the help he needed.

The Chief Constable of the PSNI has vowed to “relentlessly pursue” officers abusing their position for sexual purposes after a report found evidence of predatory behaviour in the police.

Jon Boutcher told the policing board that such incidents make him and the senior team “so angry” and serve to “undermine everything we’re trying to achieve”.

A report published this week analysed allegations involving officers (all male and aged between 30 and 50) between 2018 and 2024 and found predatory behaviour features in 30% of the most serious cases investigated by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland.

The report also highlighted the vulnerabilities of the 36 victims (all female) identified in the cases, from being a victim of crime, to mental health issues, domestic abuse, suicidal ideation or addiction.

There was evidence of targeted exploitation of women, with police officers in those cases often making inappropriate use of police systems to identify women for sexual exploitation or acquire further information in relation to potential victims.

In his opening remarks to the board on Thursday, Mr Boutcher said “any abuse of position for sexual purposes is not simply wholly unacceptable, it’s abhorrent”.

He said: “It represents the most egregious breach of trust and a violation of the standards we expect of police officers and staff.”

He added: “I want to reassure this board and everyone watching that we will relentlessly pursue and deal with these people.

“Our collective commitment as a senior team and as an organisation is for zero tolerance for this type of activity.

“While the ombudsman’s report identifies serious individual misconduct, importantly, very importantly, it very much recognises the positive strategic direction we have taken and the significant work done to strengthen professional standards, enhance vetting and misconduct reporting processes and for learning from past failures.”

The Chief Constable said the organisation “will do everything necessary to deal with such issues” but that “the numbers of these officers are numerically incredibly small”.

“Albeit any such officer, even one, is unacceptable,” he said.

“The vast majority of our people are amazing and are more disgusted at this behaviour than anyone, because it undermines who we are and what we’re here to do – to protect society and look after vulnerable people, not exploit them.”

Mr Boutcher added: “There is no place for these people in the PSNI, we will find them and we will sack them.”

Political representatives on the board, Alliance MLA Nuala McAllister and Sinn Fein MLA Linda Dillon, both raised concerns on the findings of the ombudsman’s report.

Mr Boutcher replied: “When I arrived here I was concerned about the levels of misogyny in society here, and I don’t know if that’s simply because it’s more prevalent here, or simply because I’ve not noticed that prevalence increase generally in society, because of the online harms that we see and the way mainly young men are being shown things that nobody should look at through the internet, and being developed into people who become bad adults, as opposed to good, positive members of the community.”

He outlined that he had met with female officers and one of a number of initiatives to spur on cultural change was having officers “commit to a statement of intent with regards to our values and our behaviours”.

He said: “I can absolutely assure you that this type of behaviour, it makes me so angry, the members of this senior team so angry, because I know, because of the work that the rank and file do, some of which I described in my opening remarks, this undermines everything we’re trying to achieve.

“It goes to recruitment, it goes to trust in cops, goes to reporting, so we will work incredibly closely with the ombudsman to make sure that, and there will be, I think, almost certainly, quite considerably historical cases that will emerge from this work.

“And I would encourage anyone with any negative experience or any information about any such wrongdoing to please come forward and report it to either ourselves or the ombudsman so that we can clear house with regards to these behaviours.”

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It was confirmed in December that all 104 matches at the World Cup will have two hydration breaks, prompting talks between broadcasters and FIFA about showing adverts during them

FIFA will allow broadcasters to show adverts during their live coverage of World Cup matches. ITV will be among the channels able to cut away during the mandatory hydration breaks at this summer’s tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Amid concerns over player welfare, FIFA confirmed in December that there’ll be one three-minute-long break in each half. The decision opened up the opportunity for broadcasters to show adverts while play is stopped for the first time.

Previously, adverts have only been permitted at half-time of matches. The Athletic report that after holding talks with broadcast executives, FIFA will allow in-game adverts.

Fans of basketball and American football will be used to the kind of commercial breaks which happen during timeouts in those sports. Broadcasters have, however, been told to stick to FIFA’s guidelines for in-game adverts.

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Football’s global governing body has told broadcasters that the breaks shouldn’t start within 20 seconds of the referee pausing play. The guidelines also say that they must return to the match feed more than 30 seconds before play resumes.

Broadcasters will therefore have a two-minute and 10-second window. ITV, who unlike BBC are permitted to show adverts, are yet to confirm their plans regarding adverts.

ITV could opt for split-screen commercials, keeping one eye on the action – like has been seen in this year’s rugby Six Nations. Since implementing the change, ITV have suffered backlash from viewers who feel that the adverts are a distraction.

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Broadcasters could also switch back to their studio panel for in-game analysis or show highlights during the hydration breaks. The breaks have been made mandatory after multiple players and coaches complained about the intense heat during the Club World Cup which was held in the USA last summer.

“For every game, no matter where the games are played, no matter if there’s a roof, [or] temperature-wise, there will be a three-minute hydration break. It will be three minutes from whistle to whistle in both halves,” World Cup chief tournament officer Manolo Zubiria said.

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“Obviously, if there’s an injury [stoppage] at the moment of the 20th or 21st minute and it’s ongoing, this will be addressed on the spot with the referee.”

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