Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We will be closing this live page shortly - there is however more to read from BBC Verify as we’ve been investigating the legality of a US attack on a boat said to be carrying drugs off Venezuela.

We’ve heard from legal experts who say the attack - which the White House says killed 11 drug traffickers - may have violated international law. You can read the full story here.

An unsubstantiated claim by a Venezuelan minister that a video of the strike was made by artificial intelligence was also debunked by us.

With Prime Minister’s Questions returning to the House of Commons we fact-checked claims by Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch.

Elsewhere we reported on fast-fashion outlet Shein deleting an image that appeared to show US murder-accused Luigi Mangione modelling a shirt. It is unclear whether the picture was created using artificial intelligence or a manual photo editing tool.

Plus, we’ve analysed the military equipment on display at China’s military parade, as well as the significance of the equipment we didn’t see.

We’ll be back tomorrow morning with more from BBC Verify.

Thomas Spencer
BBC Verify researcher

Image source, Reuters

We’ve been hearing from military experts about the conclusions they have drawn from today’s military parade in the Chinese capital, Beijing.

China, they agreed, has showcased its ambition to improve military technology on land and sea with the ultimate aim of challenging US superiority.

Eric Heginbotham, co-director and principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Wargaming Lab, said the array of weaponry on display showed China was “demonstrating that it can compete with the United States – and be a leading military power – in all domains and that it can lead in some”.

Mike Plunkett, a naval expert from the defence intelligence company, Janes, agreed this signalled Chinese military ambition to “at least match or even surpass the US” in some regards.

China, he said, is “sending the message that enemy ships, submarines and bases can be held at risk and, if necessary, attacked”.

Jonah Kaplan, an Asia Pacific analyst at the risk intelligence company Sibylline, says the parade also revealed Beijing’s main priorities - to prevent Taiwanese independence and assert its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been reviewing some satellite imagery taken in recent days that shows some of the preparations for today’s massive military parade in Beijing, celebrating 80 years on from China’s victory over Japan in World War Two.

Earlier we reported on the Chinese military equipment we did not see on display but here’s some of what was picked up by satellite.

Image source, Maxar

These two images, taken last Sunday, show tanks, missile launchers, armoured vehicles and drones in rehearsals for the parade at the Yangfang military base outside Beijing.

Image source, Maxar

This third image, taken yesterday, shows military equipment in formation before they travelled to the centre of the capital for today’s parade.

Image source, Maxar

China unveiled a range of new weapons, drones and other military hardware in today’s parade which took place in front of China’s President Xi Jinping, along with other world leaders including President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

• Read more: What new weapons on show at huge parade say about China's military strength

Anthony Reuben and Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify

Here are two claims we fact-checked from today’s Prime Minister’s Questions - the first session since the House of Commons returned from its summer recess.

Does the UK have the fastest growth in the G7?

Defending his record, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told MPs: “We’ve got the fastest growth in the G7.”

Whether Starmer is correct depends on the time period selected to measure growth. The most recent set of figures show the UK economy experienced 0.3% growth between April and June - which was not the fastest in the G7.

However, if you look at the figures for the first half of the year then the UK was the fastest, with 0.7% growth in the first three months of the year. If you look at the year to the end of June the UK grew 1.2% which was not the fastest in the G7.

Image source, PA Media

Has unemployment gone up every month under Labour?

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that "unemployment has gone up every single month under this government”.

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics, external show that since July 2024 - when Labour came to power - the unemployment rate didn’t go up every month.

It stayed the same month-on-month five times and rose by 0.1 percentage points in the other four months. Between July and September 2024, the unemployment rate was 4.3%. It has since climbed to 4.7% according to the latest figures, covering April to June 2025.

Looking at the number of unemployed people rather than the percentage rate, external, unemployment fell in four months and rose in five since Labour took office.

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.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

The online fast-fashion outlet Shein has confirmed to BBC Verify that an image appearing to show US murder accused Luigi Mangione modelling a shirt did appear on its website but has now been removed.

The image apparently showing Mangione in a short-sleeved white shirt has been shared widely on X, TikTok and Facebook, with one post on X gathering nearly five million views, external.

Mangione has been charged by US authorities with the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last December and is currently being held in federal custody.

“The image in question was removed immediately upon discovery,” a Shein spokesperson said, adding they are “conducting a thorough review and are strengthening our monitoring processes”.

An archived version of the page is still accessible via the Internet Archive Way Back Machine, external.

Facial recognition tool Amazon Rekognition found a 99.9% similarity score between the fake image and a real picture of Mangione appearing in court.

Reverse image searches suggest the image has not appeared on the internet before the early hours of this morning.

It is unclear whether it was created using artificial intelligence or a manual photo editing tool.

“The image is low resolution, but there are a few signs that it might be AI-generated or manipulated,” said Henry Ajder, an expert on generative-AI.

“This includes the lighting and texturing of the image, particularly of the skin, as well the appearance of a blob-like artifact above the right forearm. The right hand also doesn't appear to show typical segmentation of the fingers,” he said.

Ajder added that generating an image like this using AI is now far quicker and easier than manual photo editing.

Matt Murphy
BBC Verify senior journalist

A strike carried out by US forces on a boat in the Caribbean Sea - which the White House says killed 11 drug traffickers - may have violated international human rights and maritime law, legal experts have told BBC Verify.

Maritime law

The US is not a signatory to United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but the Department of Defense has previously said the US should “act in a manner consistent with its provisions”, external.

“Force can be used to stop a boat but generally this should be non-lethal measures,” said Luke Moffett of Queens University Belfast, and the use of aggressive tactics must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defence”.

Human rights law

Prof Moffett also says the use of force could amount to an “extrajudicial arbitrary killing” and “a fundamental violation of human rights”.

Under Article 2(4) of the UN charter, countries can resort to force when under attack and are exercising their military in self-defence.

But Prof Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told BBC Verify the US operation “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point”.

“The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets,” he said.

US constitutional law

As well as international law, US domestic law has a role to play here. The US constitution says that only Congress has the power to declare war.

However, Article II of the US constitution says "the president shall be Commander in Chief of the Army" and some constitutional experts have suggested that this grants the president the power to authorise strikes against military targets.

But it is unclear whether that provision extends to the use of force against non-state actors such as drug cartels.

Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, X

We’ve been looking at posts on social media overnight following reports of strikes in the vicinity of the Sheikh Radwan clinic, located north-west of Gaza City.

In a video we can see an ambulance on fire is being extinguished by emergency staff. The distinctive roof, entrance and surrounding buildings in the footage match with those we can see on Google Maps at the site of the clinic.

After carrying out reverse image searches on some key frames, we established that the footage was recent, with no older posts before last night.

So far, it’s unclear if anyone was injured in the incident.

Olga Robinson
BBC Verify assistant editor

We've been looking into comments by Venezuela's communications minister, who suggested - without evidence - that the video of a US strike on what the White House has said was a drug-carrying vessel was created with artificial intelligence.

Freddy Ñáñez posted on X, external with a screenshot and quotes from a conversation with Google's Gemini chatbot that has apparently concluded the video may have been AI-generated.

Experts and fact-checkers say AI chatbots can be unreliable as a verification tool as they can hallucinate results and wrongly identify real footage as fake and vice versa.

We uploaded a copy of the video - which Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social network, external - through SynthID, Google's own AI content detector. It didn't identify any markers that showed it was created using Google's artificial intelligence.

Emmanuelle Saliba, chief investigative officer at GetReal Security - which specialises in detecting malicious digital content and deepfakes - told us they also “didn’t detect any digital watermarks that are sometimes inserted at the point of AI generation”.

“The length of the scenes in the video are longer than what generators are currently capable of outputting. And consistency between scenes, which is a challenge currently for generators seems to hold,” she said.

“Right now I do not see any evidence of AI-generation but we can't rule out manipulation. As you see some information has been redacted/blurred out from the video.”

This means that the footage could have been enhanced or altered with help from AI or by using traditional editing tools, rather than being entirely created using artificial intelligence.

Thomas Spencer
BBC Verify researcher

Image source, Planet Labs PBC

One thing that wasn’t displayed at today’s Chinese military parade was Beijing’s new fleet of massive self-propelled Shuiqiao-type bridge barges.

Back in March 2025, China’s military – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) - demonstrated this new equipment during a maiden shoreline exercise.

Satellite imagery seen by BBC Verify showed how the new barges were being used. This, along with footage originating from Chinese social media, showed them being linked together to make a ship-to-shore pier that vehicles can drive off.

The exercise also revealed how roll-on/roll-off freight ships could dock at this platform allowing them to quickly unload supplies in large quantities as part of an amphibious landing.

Figures provided by the International Institute of Strategic Studies report that China has a large force of 35,000 marines at its disposal.

Crucially, China’s bridge-barge fleet provides a means to deploy - and sustain - this amphibious invasion force.

And, according to a report by the US-based China Maritime Studies Institute, external, the landing barges “significantly improve the PLA’s ability to conduct over-the-shore logistics in a Taiwan invasion scenario”.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will be taking questions from MPs in the House of Commons at midday - as the weekly session returns from its summer break.

We’ll only have two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions before the House goes into recess for the party conference season.

It’s always hard to know what will come up, especially after such a long break (the last PMQs was in July), but we’ll make sure we’re ready for claims about immigration, free speech and policing.

We’ll also be looking out for anything about the economy following the announcement that the Budget will be on 26 November.

We’re standing by to file to the PMQs live page once the session is under way - and we’ll update you here as well later.

Image source, House of Commons

Jake Horton
BBC Verify senior journalist

In the Oval Office yesterday, US President Donald Trump was asked about a video circulating online which shows an object being thrown out of an open, top floor window at the White House.

The video was first shared , externalon Sunday , externalby an Instagram account, external which posts updates about Washington DC, with the caption: “One of our community members noticed some things being thrown out of one of the White House’s windows today. Doing some deep Sunday cleaning? Submitted anonymously.”

The footage has subsequently been viewed millions of times on X alongside comments such as: “This makes zero sense under any normal circumstances. The media needs to get answers.”

During a news conference on Tuesday Trump said “it was probably AI-generated”.

BBC Verify showed the video to Prof Hany Farid, a computer scientist and digital forensics expert, who said there was no evidence it was AI-generated or manipulated.

“We do not detect any digital watermarks that are sometimes inserted at the point of AI-generation,” he says.

“The shadows in the scene, including, the shadow cast by the tossed bag, are all physically consistent. The motion of the waving flags (on the top of the White House) have none of the tell-tale signs that you often see in AI-generated videos. The overall structure of the White House also appears to be consistent.”

We asked the White House about the clip. We’re yet to hear back, but a spokesperson told US media: "It was a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the president was gone."

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

US President Donald Trump says the US has carried out a strike against a vessel in the southern Caribbean killing 11 people he called "narcoterrorists".

Our team at BBC Verify is looking into what we know about the strike and its legality.

The president posted on social media that a military operation on Tuesday had targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua - which the Trump administration has designated a terrorist organisation.

The post was accompanied by a grainy aerial video showing a boat speeding across choppy waters before it bursts into flames.

Trump said the vessel was in international waters and was transporting illegal narcotics bound for the US.

We’re speaking to experts about the legality of the strike with reference to maritime, international and US law.

We’re also looking into an unsubstantiated claim by Venezuela's communications minister that the video shared by Trump was made using artificial intelligence.

• You can read the full story from BBC News here

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Hello from the live page team.

We’ll bring you updates here across the day as our specialist teams use forensic verification techniques and research tools to shed more light on today’s news.

Here’s what we’re working on today:

• The legal basis for yesterday’s US strike that US President Donald Trump says was targeting a drug-carrying boat in the southern Caribbean that killed 11 people
• What the new weapons China showed off in its Beijing parade earlier today tell us about its development as a military power
• We’ll be standing by to fact-check Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons so will be preparing for possible questions on the UK economy, illegal migration and free speech

As well as those we’re continuing to look for more information about the deadly landslide in Sudan that has killed at least 370 people in addition to what we verified yesterday.

More on those stories to come.