Fans started their preparations four days before games and would release pigeons to celebrate goals, this book extract reveals

Football in Albania is a national obsession. Yet between the late 1960s and Stalinism’s slow, lingering death in 1991, it became more than mere fixation. In a country where the 1967 rewriting of the constitution denied people their freedom of faith, football became the new religion, with pilgrims from Gjirokastër to Shkodër, Lezhë to Sarandë, filling stadiums every Sunday afternoon in worship of their new, auxiliary gods.

In those moments of ordered chaos, Albanians appeared free from the trials and injustices of their moribund, regime-subscribed lives, transported – via the vehicles of football and shared human experience – to a higher plain; a vista of harmony and liberty.

Exclusive: Paul Raffile held webinar where he said app failed to protect children, and his offer was rescinded hours later

Meta revoked a job offer to a prominent cyber-intelligence analyst immediately after he criticized Instagram for failing to protect children online.

Paul Raffile had been offered a job as a human exploitation investigator focusing on issues such as sextortion and human trafficking. He had participated in an 24 April webinar on safeguarding against financial sextortion schemes, during which he criticized Instagram for allowing children to fall prey to scammers and offered possible solutions.

Efforts to cut down on time-wasting are laudable. But there are flaws in the new scheme that need to be tweaked before a worldwide rollout

Lionel Messi was not happy. It was a little over 40 minutes into Inter Miami’s trip to Quebec to take on CF Montréal this past Saturday and the star-studded Eastern Conference leaders were 2-0 down. But it was not that Miami were losing that had vexed Messi. He just wanted to be on the pitch.

Miami had won a free kick 30-yards from goal, slightly right of centre – prime Messi territory. Yet he was not allowed to take it. He’d received treatment on the pitch a minute earlier after being fouled by Montréal defender George Campbell. Due to a new set of rules adopted this season to crack down on time-wasting , Messi had to wait on the sideline for two minutes before being allowed to re-enter the game.

A group of determined teenagers is in dispute with the state for not doing more to protect their community from the noxious byproduct of oil extraction in the northern Amazon

Fourteen-year-old Leonela Moncayo gets angry when she talks about the gas flares burning near her home. She grew up on the outskirts of Lago Agrio, a city on the edge of Ecuador ’s Amazon rainforest, at the heart of its oil industry, where patches of tropical forest canopy are interspersed with oil wells spewing huge flames of fossil gas.

For Moncayo, these gas flares have meant disease and death for many in her community, which is why she and other schoolgirls have been leading the fight to have them turned off.

One female director hides that she has a child; younger women face a 39% gender pay gap; and harassment is widespread. Insiders say it’s a wonder the television industry has any women left at all

‘When is the good time to be a woman in TV?” asks Michelle Reynolds, a former TV producer and director. “In the start you get molested and infantilised, in the middle if you have babies they won’t let you work flexibly, then when you get past 45 you’re too bloody old.”

Now is not the best time for women in TV. According to recent research by the Creative Diversity Network, whose Diamond report collects data from the UK’s big broadcasters, the gender gap is widening. The number of women in senior roles fell 5% between 2019 and 2022. One in three directors are women, yet they get only a quarter of director credits. Contributions from female writers fell from 43% to 32% between 2016 and 2022. Behind these figures, women are less likely to be employed on peak-time shows, which are generally more prestigious and have larger audiences, than men.

Restrictions on collective power led to decades of exploitation and stagnant pay for workers. Why not try another way?

Profiteering is nothing new. Stanley Baldwin had a pithy description for the new intake of Conservative MPs at the 1918 general election, noting that they were “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”. The future Tory prime minister was right. Many companies had found a war economy greatly to their liking, securing lucrative government contracts and making a mint in the process. Profiteering was rampant.

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the Unite union, says something similar has been happening since the war on Covid began in 2020. A study of the reports and accounts of almost 17,000 firms – big and small – showed that pre-tax profit margins were, on average, 30% higher in 2022 than they were in the years immediately before the pandemic began.

Labour leader to commitments for general election with six key points ‘put up in lights’ as part of party’s offer to swing voters

Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, has been giving interviews this morning about new guidance for schools in England on sex education that says “the contested theory of gender identity” should not be taught. The proposals were briefed to right-leaning papers earlier this week, but the Department for Education has only now issued a press notice. The new version of the guidance does not seem to be available online yet.

In interviews this morning, Keegan claimed the government had to act because pupils were being exposed to “inappropriate” material. She told the Today programme:

I’ve seen some materials where they talk about gender identity being a spectrum, there being many different genders looking at you know, trying to get children [to] do quizzes on you know, what’s a different gender identity and what isn’t.

Ignoring biological sex in the material I saw anyway … and a lot of that material has caused concern.

I don’t think it’s widespread, I mean, I don’t know because you know, it’s not something that we’ve gone and done a particular survey of.

How can one broom tear apart a Canadian curling community? John Cullen investigates in Broomgate. Plus: five of the best post-apocalyptic podcasts

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Major news for fans of Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? – the “poo dunnit” that rocketed to the top of last year’s podcast charts, and featured in our best pods of 2023 . The amateur sleuths behind the series have just announced another, this time taking on a completely new mystery about a tiny blue corduroy suit, a tiny suitcase and a tiny man. More on that next week – but you can listen to the hilarious trailer here in the meantime.

If slightly ridiculous but utterly gripping true crime is what you’re after, though, this week’s top pick ticks all the right boxes. In CBC’s Broomgate , comedian and curler John Cullen investigates the “super broom” scandal that rocked Canada’s curling world in 2015.

Annapurna Interactive; PC, Switch
This compulsive atavistic mystery is told through bewildering yet tantalising non-linear narrative strands that the player must tease apart

It is both a pleasure and a relief to discover that while the titans of the mainstream games industry are tearing themselves apart in their unquenchable thirst for shareholder value, there are still smaller companies out there making brilliant, original games. This month, we’ve already seen Crow Country and Animal Well, and now here is the latest highly stylised puzzler from Swedish studio Simogo, previously responsible for eerily folkloric Year Walk and groundbreaking audio-textual adventure Device 6. It is, in short, one of the most compulsive mystery games I’ve played for years.

The set up for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is classic adventure territory. A woman is invited to an abandoned hotel in Siracuse, Italy, by an eccentric artist who says he needs her support to complete an ambitious, perhaps even revolutionary project. But what is really going on in this labyrinthine building, and what has happened to the family that owned it for generations? The answers lie behind an array of locked door puzzles, the solutions hidden in odd movie posters, notes and strange phone calls. There are artefacts connected to an avant garde film director, a dadaist artist, a stage magician; there are secret rooms and hidden passages, and at the heart of it all is a time-spanning atavistic mystery told through multilayered narrative strands that the player must tease apart in a brilliantly non-linear fashion.