Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

That’s all from BBC Verify Live for today, but if you have a moment here’s a few highlights of our coverage.

In Sudan, we’ve been following the battle for control of the southern city of Babanusa. Click here to see our analysis of new satellite imagery and here to read about the on-the-ground footage we’ve verified.

After a surge of in AI-generated videos claiming to show victims of the conflict in Sudan, we’ve tracked the clips down to two TikTok accounts that appeared to be coordinated. Since our reporting went live, TikTok has deleted the accounts.

Plus, after reports that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer might face a leadership challenge from backbench Labour MPs, here’s some behind-the-scenes details on how BBC Verify tracks opinion polls.

We will be back tomorrow morning, so please do join us for more then.

Marco Silva
BBC Verify senior journalist

Social media posts criticising California governor Gavin Newsom for linking January’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires to climate change have gathered millions of views.

They were posted in response to Newsom’s remarks at a conference this week in Brazil, where he described California as one of the “most cursed states as it relates to climate”.

Many of the critical posts attribute the cause of the wildfires to arson. A 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of starting the Pacific Palisades fire.

But extreme wildfires require three things to occur: hot, dry and windy conditions which scientists call “fire weather”, abundant vegetation and an ignition source.

“An arsonist is much more likely to be successful in the current climate than they would otherwise be,” says Dr Matthew Jones, senior research fellow at the University of East Anglia.

A study by the World Weather Attribution group has found that climate change made the “fire weather” conditions which drove the LA fires around 35% more likely.

California experienced very wet years in 2022 and 2023 and a huge growth of vegetation, which dried out in a drought last year to create abundant kindling to burn.

In those conditions an ignition source, whether caused naturally like lightning or through human action like arson, can have catastrophic consequences.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Today we’ve tracked a surge in AI-generated videos claiming to show victims of the ongoing civil war in Sudan back to two TikTok accounts which appeared to be coordinating.

I reached out to TikTok to ask whether these accounts were operating in line with the platform’s policies on AI-generated content.

Within an hour, both accounts were no longer visible.

TikTok told me that the accounts have been banned for violating its rules on posting misleading and deceptive AI-generated content which could cause significant harm.

TikTok says that in April, May and June of this year, 97% of the videos which violated these rules were “proactively removed before they were reported to us.”

Image source, TikTok

Marco Silva
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Reuters

US conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has wrongly claimed that “the government has finally admitted that chemtrails are real”.

“It’s called geoengineering and it’s far worse than anything you imagined,” wrote the former Fox News host on X to promote an episode of his podcast.

The post has been viewed more than five million times but it confuses terms that, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are “often inaccurately used as alleged synonyms”.

The term “chemtrails” describes a widely debunked conspiracy theory suggesting chemicals are being sprayed onto the atmosphere for shadowy reasons, such as population control.

“There's clearly something going on”, said Carlson in the episode. He then claimed, without providing any evidence, that intelligence agencies “don't want anyone to talk about this”.

Those long, thin lines of cloud in the sky are in fact condensation trails, or contrails.

They form when water vapour and soot particles, generated by the combustion of fuel when planes fly at high altitudes, freeze and form trails of ice crystals.

Geoengineering refers to attempts to manipulate the environment with the goal of changing the climate. It involves a wide range of activities: from cooling the Earth by reflecting solar radiation into space to removing planet-warming gases from the atmosphere by planting trees.

The EPA has said it is “not aware” of contrails ever being intentionally formed over the US for geoengineering.

We have approached Carlson for comment.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

We earlier reported about the battle taking place south of Sudan for the control of the city of Babanusa in West Kordofan.

The city has been besieged by Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with verified video emerging that appears to show the paramilitary group gaining ground in southern Sudan.

The latest phase of fighting appears to have resulted in huge fires around the city, although it isn’t clear whether the fires were started intentionally.

Satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows large patches of land around the city having been burned over the past few days. Some of the fires affected built up areas of the city.

In the below image captured on Sunday, we can see smoke rising from areas that are burning.

Image source, Planet Labs

I also checked Nasa’s satellite-based platform Firms, which detects heat sources on Earth’s surface, to confirm. This data captured lots of heat signatures in the area over the past week, although we don’t know the causes of the fires detected.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Earlier we told you about two TikTok accounts sharing dozens of AI-generated videos claiming to show victims of the civil war in Sudan.

The most watched video has been viewed one million times on TikTok, which supposedly shows a woman holding a baby as she runs from a car on a dirt road.

Like almost every post by these accounts, the video is 12 seconds in length. This is a sign that an AI text-to-video model has been used, as most commercially available generators can only create clips between 10 and 15 seconds long.

It also has the same background music which has been used in nearly all of the other videos - a trick often used to obscure imperfect audio that AI tools produce.

In the video itself, there are three things that stand out:

• The woman’s right hand appears deformed (AI often struggles to recreate realistic fingers and limbs)
• The car’s license plate contains jumbled symbols (text-to-video generators also have issues creating numbers and letters which make sense)
• The woman leaves no footprints in the sand as she runs diagonally across the road

Each of these details alone might not be enough, but adding them together means we can conclude the video is AI-generated.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been looking into a surge in AI-generated videos claiming to show victims of the ongoing civil war in Sudan.

Some of the most widely shared clips can be traced to two TikTok accounts, sudanfree19 and helpsudan4, which appear to be coordinating what they post.

Both accounts started posting 10 days ago and have already a combined 138,400 likes and nearly 19,000 followers.

Some of their videos have been watched hundreds of thousands of times and reshared on other social platforms.

The two accounts follow each other and regularly post the same AI-generated clips - which vary in length from 10 to 12 seconds.

That’s significant, because most text-to-video AI generators will only create clips 10 to 15 seconds long.

None of the 120 videos posted by the accounts have been labelled as AI-generated.

Soon, I’ll take a closer look at one of their videos and show how you can tell it was made using AI.

Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, X

We’ve been analysing newly emerged CCTV footage showing traffic building up before an explosion on a major road in India’s capital New Delhi.

The blast in front of the city’s famous Red Fort on Netaji Suighash Marg on Monday killed at least eight people, police have said.

The clip that we’ve verified appears to be someone using their phone to film a CCTV feed on a screen. We can see red police barriers in the middle of the road and traffic lights in the distance.

Despite the lights being green, dozens of cars look to be stationary seconds before a huge flash of light appears and the feed goes black. Towards the end of the clip we can hear someone asking to play the video again.

The timestamp of 18:50 local (13:20 GMT) and date embedded on the CCTV video fits with reports about the blast. We were also able to match the footage to satellite images and Google street view pictures of the area.

Reverse image searches of several screen grabs from the video indicate it was first uploaded to the internet recently.

We don’t yet know what caused the blast, but Indian PM Narendra Modi has said anyone found responsible "will not be spared".

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

It’s being reported that allies of the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer are saying he would fight any challenge to his leadership from Labour MPs, while Health Secretary Wes Streeting has denied plotting against his boss.

Opinion polls suggest that were a general election to be held now, about one in five voters would choose Labour.

We have been tracking polls by different companies. The data is for England, Wales and Scotland, or sometimes the whole of the UK, depending on the poll.

To compile our poll tracker we first use the headline percentages on voting intention, which pollsters calculate by excluding or otherwise adjusting for those people who answered "don't know" or "won't vote".

We then take an average of each party’s position over the most recent two-week period, using only the most recent poll of any one company.

Different pollsters also report different numbers, which is why it’s useful to look at the overall trend.The chart below shows this variation. The lines are the averages, while each dot is a party’s position in one poll.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

During our review of footage showing drone strikes on a warehouse in Kharkiv, we found that the same moment had been filmed from two different locations in the Ukrainian city.

One video shows two strikes taking place at the location we verified earlier. The second video begins recording slightly later, and shows smoke rising from the first strike, before a second drone hits.

This second strike is therefore captured in both videos.

To confirm this, we’ve synchronised the footage, which you can view below.

As you can see, the smoke plume generated by this strike is identical in both clips.

We have confirmed the point of view of one of these clips to a large street in central Kharkiv. This was confirmed by matching the road layouts and shop signs to pre-existing streetview imagery.

Yi Ma
BBC Verify researcher

Image source, Threads/@holidaily.cafe

After leaving 27 people dead in the Philippines, Typhoon Fung-wong has moved toward Taiwan. Although much weakened, the tropical storm has brought heavy rainfall and flooding to several parts of the island.

I have been working to verify eyewitness accounts and videos of the storm’s impact which are surfacing on social media. A Threads user uploaded drone footage showing widespread flooding across local farmland in one of the hardest-hit areas, Yilan County in north-eastern Taiwan.

I confirmed the location by matching the landscape with satellite imagery. A reverse-image search suggests that it first appeared on social media today.

According to Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration, the storm is expected to continue weakening as it moves northward.

As of 15:00 local time (07:00 GMT) today, Taiwan’s Central Emergency Operation Center reported 70 injuries and no deaths or missing persons.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

We have verified a video showing fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) at a university compound in the town of Babanusa, suggesting the group has gained ground in southern Sudan.

Babanusa in West Kordofan region has been under RSF siege for two years. The armed group has repeatedly tried to capture the headquarters of the Sudanese army’s 22nd Infantry Division in the south-west of the city.

Following the fall of el-Fasher in North Darfur region last month, the RSF indicated Babanusa could be its next target.

The latest video we have verified shows RSF fighters apparently celebrating at the main gate for the Babanusa Colleges of the University for Peace in the east of the city.

A sign on the gate seen in the footage says Peace University in both English and Arabic, plus we we were able to match the gate and a line of trees we see inside the compound to satellite images.

The fighters being filmed mention the date is 11 November 2025 and their camouflage matches with common RSF uniforms, although their identifying shoulder patches are not visible.

A second verified video shows RSF fighters driving along the main road in the north of Babanusa, indicating the group may also be in control of this area.

Image source, X

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

The UK government announced yesterday that it was going to look again at its decision not to pay compensation to women born in the 1950s who say they were not informed about changes to their state pension ages.

The main campaigning organisation, Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi), says that plans to raise the state pension age in the UK to be in line with that of men were not communicated to the women it affected.

The Waspi acronym has become synonymous with the women impacted by these pension changes, which were put in motion in 1995 and took place between 2010 and 2020. The state pension age for all is now 66, but had previously been 60 for women.

A report by the Parliamentary ombudsman, external last year recommended that between £1,000 and £2,950 compensation be paid to each woman over an “injustice”.

The report estimated that paying that much to all women born in the 1950s would cost between £3.5bn and £10.5bn, although it acknowledged that not all women born in the 1950s “would have suffered injustice”.

To put that money into context, the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank estimates, external that abolishing the two-child benefit cap would eventually cost about £3.6bn a year.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Reuters/Sofiia Gatilova

Verification can sometimes prove to be more complex than it first appears, a problem I encountered when looking at aftermath videos of this morning’s strike in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

At least five people are reported to have been injured in the attack on a warehouse belonging to a haulage company, including two in an apartment across the road from it.

The company itself confirmed the attack on their Facebook page. So it initially seemed that key stage of verification, finding exactly where the attack took place, would be simple.

There are five sites attributed to the company on Google Maps, but none of them were a match for the footage of the strike and its aftermath for us to geolocate and verify it. Buildings were not quite aligned, and the surroundings were completely different.

So a more painstaking trawl across the city was required for other possible sites. We eventually confirmed the location by matching buildings seen in the background to imagery on Google Street View.

Having established the location from aftermath footage, we are now working to verify dramatic clips filmed from a distance showing the moment of impact.

Adam Durbin
BBC Verify Live editor

The team has been examining videos and pictures emerging from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which has been hit by Russian strikes this morning. The footage shows two drones flying low over the city before exploding in short succession in the same area of the city centre. The regional head of Kharkiv, Oleh Syniehubov, has said three Shahed-style drones in total were used by Russia in attacks and five people were injured.

We’re also looking into AI-generated videos from both the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the civil war in Sudan that are being shared online as if they are authentic. A recent spate of videos has supposedly shown Ukrainian soldiers surrendering, while numerous fake pictures and videos of apparent victims of war crimes carried out by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan are also spreading online. They’re circulating alongside real, verified footage from both conflicts.

Plus, after the government indicated it would reconsider rejecting compensation payments for women allegedly hit by changes to the state pension, our fact-checking team are digging into how much Waspi compensation could potentially cost the government.