Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

This live page will be closing soon, but our teams in London and Washington DC will continue providing verification and fact-checking for BBC News this evening.

After the funicular crash in Lisbon that killed at least 16 people, an engineering expert told us it appeared that a “catastrophic technical failure” was to blame. We also explained how we verified the first images from the scene last night. You can continue to follow this story on the BBC’s main live page.

With US President Donald Trump saying he could send the National Guard to New Orleans to strengthen law enforcement in the city, we looked into police data that indicates crime rates there are actually falling. We also showed that a video claiming to show soldiers being moved to Chicago - where Trump has pledged to put troops on the ground - actually showed the build-up to a military parade in Washington DC back in June.

And we‘ve also brought you satellite imagery showing the area hit by a deadly landslide in Sudan as well as an update on the construction of new aid sites in Gaza.

BBC Verify will be back tomorrow morning.

Phil Leake
BBC Verify data journalist

The US trade deficit widened in July as companies resumed stockpiling ahead of tariffs taking effect in August.

The goods trade gap increased by 21% on the previous month and surpassed $100bn for the first time since March, according to figures published today by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Goods imports rose to a four-month high of $283bn while exports held steady at $179bn.

Switzerland was the biggest contributor to the overall rise, ahead of major trading partners China and Canada.

Growth of Swiss imports was partly down to a sharp rise in the value of gold imports, which came before President Trump confirmed they would not face tariffs, external.

Imports surged to record levels in the first three months of 2025 before sweeping tariffs were introduced in April, causing the deficit - the difference between what the US buys from overseas and what it sells - to widen to almost $163bn in March.

The next three months saw reduced activity but today’s data indicates another wave of stockpiling.

The total US trade deficit across the year to July stands at nearly $840bn, up 23% on the same period last year.

Fridon Kiria
BBC Monitoring

We’ve verified an image shared on Telegram of damage to a building in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine earlier today following an apparent Russian drone attack that local officials say injured four people.

Images shared by the Zaporizhzhia regional administration show damage to the front of a residential block where we can see debris scattered on the pavement outside.

The sign for the coffee shop that occupies part of the building’s ground floor helped us find it on Google Street View. We can see it is in the city’s Pivdenny district.

Image source, Telegram

Alex Murray
BBC Verify journalist

On Monday, we reported on construction work at two new aid distribution sites run by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) using satellite imagery captured on 31 August.

We’ve since been looking at newer imagery, taken on Tuesday, to see how work has progressed and what more we can learn about these facilities.

The new distribution centres, in south-west Gaza, will replace a previous site located nearby which closed in June after a series of shooting incidents and chaotic scenes during aid collections. One of the new sites - close to al-Rashid street along Gaza’s shoreline - shows a radically different layout and construction from GHF existing facilities as it appears to use concrete panels rather than earth banks to create the perimeter.

The 2 September images seem to show it has not yet been completed. Public access to the site appears to be planned from the north-east side.

The second site shows signs of continuing groundworks where the surface appears to be being levelled. It is directly opposite the entry point of the former GHF site known as SDS1.

We’ve highlighted some of the areas where we can see changes on the site between 31 August and 2 September.

Image source, BBCx

Marco Silva
BBC Verify senior journalist

Having verified images showing the aftermath of yesterday’s Lisbon funicular crash, BBC Verify has spoken to engineering experts to try and piece together what may have been the cause.

The Gloria funicular comprises two carriages which are connected by a cable running through a pulley system at the top of the hill.

When the carriage at the top begins its descent it pulls that cable and drags the carriage at the bottom upwards.

“One cannot move without the other moving,” says Carlos Oliveira Cruz, professor of civil engineering at the Higher Technical Institute of Lisbon.

“The fact that the lower one stayed still [at the bottom] while the upper one went down uncontrollably suggests there was something that failed in the connection between them.”

For safety reasons the cable itself runs below ground inside a channel located between the tracks and is not visible in the footage circulating online.

But Oliveira Cruz suggests there may have been other failures including braking systems that should have slowed the descending vehicle.Getting to the exact cause “will take weeks of analysis,” he says. “From a technical point of view, it was a catastrophic failure.”

Kayleen Devlin
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, EPA

US President Donald Trump has suggested that New Orleans in the state of Louisiana could be the next place where he deploys National Guard troops to bolster law enforcement.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump said: “We’re making a determination now - do we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor who wants us to come in and straighten [it] out.”

His remarks come after the administration announced it wants to crack down on urban crime. Trump ordered around 800 National Guard soldiers into Washington DC last month while also floating plans to do the same in Chicago - a move Illinois Governor JB Pritzker - a Democrat - has condemned as "attempting to manufacture a crisis".

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry - who is a Republican like Trump - endorsed the president’s comments, posting a video of the announcement on X , externalwith the caption: “We will take President @realDonaldTrump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!”

Official statistics show crime in New Orleans has been falling.

Preliminary data from the New Orleans Police Department, external shows all crimes against the person have declined in the last 12 months with rape down 31% and a 27% decline in armed robberies. Shoplifting, however, is up 12%.

Overall crime also fell in 2024, external with 26% fewer offences that year compared with 2023.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

BBC Verify is dedicated to examining the facts and claims behind a story to try to determine whether or not it is true - whether that’s a political statement, a video shared on social media, or images from a war zone.

And we’re also keen to hear from you - is there something you think we should investigate? We're particularly interested in claims you have heard or seen that maybe don’t seem right.

Or perhaps you’ve come across something online and want to know if it was created using AI or even a deepfake.

You can send your suggestions to the team here.

Aisha Sembhi and Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify

We’ve been taking a look at footage circulating online in recent days claiming to show military vehicles departing the US capital Washington DC for the city of Chicago.

It comes as President Donald Trump has continued talking about sending the National Guard into the Illinois city to address crime, as he has done in Washington DC.

One post featuring the video has gathered nearly two and a half million views and claims that “Trump has started moving troops into Chicago as promised”.

Analysis by BBC Verify has shown that this video is old.

We check to see whether videos have previously been posted on the internet by taking grabs of some frames and running them through platforms like Google Lens.

If it finds them elsewhere we can see when they were posted and confirm the footage is not new.

In this instance the video is old as it shows military vehicles being moved into Washington DC ahead of the the 14 June Army Day parade.

Image source, X

Emma Pengelly and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify

As soon as the news broke last night about the funicular crash in central Lisbon our late shift was tasked with finding and verifying images and footage from the scene.

We started looking for social media posts showing what happened that could be fed into the BBC News live page and passed to producers working on TV news.

Here are some steps we take to verify material

When we find social media posts purporting to be from the scene of a breaking news story we first check that the images or footage are current by carrying out reverse image searches.

This means taking a series of grabs from the video and putting them into Google Images.

If it doesn’t find any matching images then we can be confident it’s new, not old material being reused.

Once this is done, we can check the location from where the footage was filmed or picture taken.

This may already be incorporated in a post but we need to check to be absolutely sure it’s from where it claims to be from.

We do this by using Google Maps in the first instance.

If we have a good idea where the incident took place we can check street level imagery using tools like Google Street View.

Image source, Eric Packer

Peter Mwai and Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify

We have received high-quality satellite imagery showing the area hit by Sunday’s deadly landslide in a remote part of the Darfur region in western Sudan.

The images from the specialist satellite firm Maxar allow us to assess the scale and extent of the landslide.We have matched the satellite imagery to video and pictures of the aftermath that we previously verified as having been taken from a location south of Tarseen village in the Marra mountains.

According to Maxar’s analysis of the images “the debris flow/landslide damage did not appear to flow through any town centres in the vicinity. However, there is considerable debris in local washes and canyons”.

This corresponds with what BBC Verify has been seeing in aftermath footage shared on social media. It also raises questions about how many people died, given the armed group in control of the area has insisted that more than 1,000 people were killed.

UN officials estimate at least 370 people died but have said it is hard to assess the scale of the incident or the exact death toll as the location is hard to reach.

Aid workers from several agencies are expected to get to the affected the area today.

We’ll bring you more on what we’ve learned from the satellite imagery during the day.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Welcome to the live page where we bring you updates from BBC Verify on our work across the day. The team specialises in verifying publicly available material, unpacking and explaining data, checking facts and debunking disinformation.

Right now we’re assessing new satellite imagery showing the aftermath of Sunday’s deadly landslide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The high-resolution pictures show the impact of the landslide in the surrounding area.

Elsewhere we’re looking into reported overnight strikes in the Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine as well as monitoring social media for any new developments from Gaza.

Last night BBC Verify sourced and authenticated footage that was posted on social media following the Gloria funicular crash in Lisbon. We’ll share here on the live page how we do that and the steps we take to ensure what you see on BBC News is authentic.

Speaking of authentic - we’ve seen a video purporting to show US troops being moved into Chicago following US President Donald Trump’s threats to use the National Guard to tackle crime. But it’s not new, nor is it from Chicago. We’ll explain more later.