I need to let you know straight away that the first story I’m bringing you today is not nice. I’ll be talking about childlike sex dolls, so please be warned if you do read on.

Importing a childlike sex doll – that’s the official terminology for these items – carries a potential prison sentence of up to seven years. And yet Facebook is full of adverts for disturbing dolls with overtly childlike features.

We uncovered Facebook pages promoting websites selling these dolls and publishing 1,300 adverts on Facebook. They breach Facebook’s rules and the ads get taken down regularly, but that all seems to be part of the game. Every day, the pages publish new ads and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, gets some ad money every time.

On one site, the sellers assure potential customers that this is all legal: “Mini sex dolls are fundamentally different from child sex dolls … they look like child sex dolls, but actually they’re not!”

The ads are akin to indecent images of children. In the words of the law, these kinds of images have “a tendency to deprave or corrupt” people who see them.

It’s an ugly story, but it highlights once again how Meta profits from pretty awful stuff.

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

The local community living around Del Monte’s 80 sq km Kenyan pineapple farm, around 40km northeast of Nairobi, often refer to the land as “kwa guuka”, meaning “our grandfathers’.” 

Find out more

That’s because families were evicted from the land when it was first acquired by the company decades ago. The farm has long been a centre of tensions with the local community and two men were killed in separate incidents at the farm in August, amid unrest and calls for the fruit giant to reassess its approach to security.

Read more here. 

Shoe brands skirting US forced labour laws

When stories began to emerge several years ago that China was using Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities as forced labourers in Xinjiang, particularly picking cotton, the US was swift to take action. It introduced the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), prohibiting the import of goods connected to the persecution of Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities.

It was robust and it seemed to be working. But our investigative series, which also featured on the front page of the New York Times and Der Spiegel in Germany, proved that China has coercively moved many ethnic minorities from Xinjiang into factories in the east. From there, we were able to establish that forced labour had tainted goods from cars to trainers, including products still being shipped to the US.

Global brands often don’t know whether this forced labour is part of their supply chain.

This week we dug into a particularly interesting part of that. Since the UFLPA was introduced a lot of US imports of products like shoes have moved from China to Vietnam. You might have heard about that when Donald Trump’s big tariff announcements were made.

Our latest story digs into whether brands like Vans, North Face and Timberland are using Vietnamese factories to add final touches and skirt the law – or whether the supply chains are truly separate.

What went on at Chelsea? We need to know more

The news that the Football Association brought 74 charges against Chelsea FC for breaching regulations was a major moment to counter what one former Arsenal manager famously called “financial doping”.

The oversight body is bringing Chelsea back in line after Roman Abramovich, the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, allegedly used his billions to bulldoze the rules and turboboost the team to glory.

And it is a win for journalism. Our investigation was a forensic piece of work and a powerful collaboration with the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, among others.

We still have questions, of course. The FA issued a two-paragraph statement describing the charges in the vaguest possible terms. The disciplinary process will be held entirely behind closed doors. We will hear, eventually, whether the charges were upheld or not. We won’t get to know the reasons, and we won’t get all the details.

This is completely at odds with how society should function. Civil and criminal trials are almost always open to the public, but football has carved out a fiefdom where it can avoid all scrutiny. For all we know there could be a sweetheart arrangement to avoid more pain and embarrassment for Chelsea.

A hidden process can’t stand as a warning to the rest of the sport. If we can’t be specific about the things Chelsea did wrong, the immensely wealthy foreign powers that now rule over football will just follow the same methods. The details are the accountability.

I’m so proud of Simon Lock and the team that produced this stellar work. If you want to properly support us to carry on doing this challenging work, please become an Insider! Or, if that’s not possible right now, just forwarding this email or sharing our work helps us out massively.