Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’ll be closing this live page shortly, but our late reporters in London and Washington will continue verifying material and checking facts.

Today we’ve been looking at live facial recognition technology - how it’s used and how it works - as the UK government announced the expansion of its use by police forces in England.

The team has also been verifying footage of the impact of Typhoon Podul, which hit Taiwan earlier today and is heading to China.

And we've been using heat source satellite data to investigate reports of recent Ukrainian drone strikes in Russia.

BBC Verify Live will be back on Thursday.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Earlier, as part of our work examining the expanded use of facial recognition by the police in England we explained how BBC Verify also uses the technology in our work.

Here’s a quick demo of one tool we mentioned earlier - Amazon Rekognition - which we got to compare two photographs of me.

I scrolled through my photos app to find two pictures that are as different as possible.

In the one on the right from 2021 I’m wearing clear glasses and looking directly at the camera.

The picture on the left was taken this summer. I’m wearing sunglasses, a cap and you can only see my profile.

Despite the different composition of the two pictures, Amazon Rekognition gave a similarity score of 99.4%.

In a BBC Verify investigation, we would never rely solely on one tool like this and would only use it alongside other forensic techniques.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Reuters

We often hear from our readers and Graham in London got in touch to ask about a post I wrote last week looking at how many small boat arrivals get asylum.

In that post, we said that between January 2018 and March 2025 just over half - 53% - were granted asylum at the initial decision stage.

Graham wrote in about people who appealed against their initial decisions and were subsequently granted asylum.

Here’s what we know: The Home Office told us there are no figures specifically for small boat arrivals who are later granted asylum on appeal. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice does publish , externalfigures for , externalall asylum appeals, external, regardless of how people initially ended up in the UK.

The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, analysed , externalthose , externalasylum decisions in a three-year period, external from 2019 to 2022.

It found that less than half of the cases (43%) were appealed and as of June 2024, less than half of those appeals - 42% - were successful. This raised the overall asylum grant rate for all applications from 62% after initial decisions to 70% after appeals. As more appeal cases are resolved, this figure might change.

If you have a question you would like us to look into you can contact us via this page.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Image source, Getty Images

We’ve been talking today about facial recognition technology and how it is used. But how do these tools actually recognise your face?

Prof Pete Fussey is an expert in advanced surveillance at the University of Southampton.

He says the process used by Live Facial Recognition (LFR) vans can be roughly simplified into three steps.First, police decide who they want to target and compile a database of individuals fitting that profile.

“That profile could be based on a type of offence, a court order or just people the police want to talk to,” says Fussey. This watch list will include photographs, usually taken from custody records.

Second, the images from the database and the live images filmed by the van’s cameras are converted into a code based on biometric information about the person’s face. This is the same technology used by Face ID on an Apple iPhone.

“It measures parts of your face that don’t change over time, like the distance between your eyes, and also the relationships between your features, like the size of your eyes compared with your mouth,” explains Fussey.

Finally, the police will set a similarity threshold between 0 and 1. In most cases, a similarity score of about 0.6 will be flagged to the person operating the system as a potential match. The higher the score the greater the confidence that the system has correctly made a match.

Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist

We’ve been following up reports of recent Ukrainian drone strikes in Russia.

It’s proving hard to verify footage we’ve seen purporting to show the attacks because they were filmed at night making it hard to identify buildings and features of the surrounding area.

However, using Nasa’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (Firms) which detects active hot spots on the planet’s surface, we can see it’s picked up heat sources at the Unecha oil pumping station, near Vysokoye in Russia’s Bryansk region.

We put the co-ordinates of the heat sources from Firms into Google Earth and confirmed the location was the Unecha facility.

The Ukraine Armed Forces have confirmed, on Telegram, one strike on an oil pumping station which it says supplies the Russian army.

We are continuing to look for aftermath footage from this and any other locations that have been hit.

BBC Verify's Yi Ma has been following Typhoon Podul which brought driving rain and strong winds to Taiwan earlier today.

This verified video uploaded to social media shows the storm passing through Taitung City on its westerly track across the island.

Emma Pengelly and Joshua Cheetham
BBC Verify journalists

We're looking at the increasing use by police in England of facial recognition cameras today which is also a technology used by a wide number of news organisations including the BBC.

Facial recognition works by identifying and measuring key features on a face, like the width of a nose, distance between the eyes and shape of cheek bones. These features are then compared with other faces stored on databases.

There are several tools - both free and payable - available to the public like Pimeyes and Search4Faces, which we use to help identify people in pictures or videos. We use other services like Amazon Rekognition as well to compare faces and see if they might be the same person.

When comparing faces, Amazon Rekognition gives a similarity score. Experts say a score of more than 90% suggests a high probability that the two images feature the same person. There’s an example of how we used the technology in this BBC Verify investigation.

But these facial recognition applications do have limitations. For example, there are concerns over its ability to learn how to correctly identify non-white faces. The lighting, angles and quality of the photos being compared can also affect the results.

We don’t rely on the tools alone to give us a definitive answer but facial recognition can form part of our wider research.

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.

Yi Ma
BBC Verify researcher

Image source, Threads/@candybiu2023

Social media users in Taiwan have been posting footage showing the impact of Typhoon Podul after it made landfall on the island’s east coast.

The storm has now moved west across Taiwan having recorded gusts of up to 118 mph (191 km/h), according to the country’s Central Weather Administration.

We have verified a video taken from inside a car showing a large street sign and several motorbikes being blown down.

By matching building features and road layouts on Google Earth, we’ve confirmed the video was taken in the south-eastern city of Taitung.

Reverse image searches show that this video has not appeared on social media before today.

The Taiwanese government said one person is missing and another 33 have been left injured by the storm.

We’re currently verifying other videos showing damage from the storm and will bring you more here when we have them.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Getty Images

Home Office Minister Dame Diana Johnson was on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this morning where she was questioned about the use of facial recognition technology by the police in England and Wales.

It comes as the UK government plans to expand the deployment of facial recognition vans in England.

When asked about South Wales Police’s use of the technology to catch ticket touts, Johnson said: “I don’t know whether they’ve used it for ticket touting so I think it’s probably best I don’t comment on that,” and then went on to say: “The public deserve to know what it’s being used for.”

Back in 2017 the BBC reported that the South Wales force had used live facial recognition at the Champions League Final in Cardiff to try and identify ticket touts.

We later reported that of the 2,470 potential matches with pictures of criminals thrown up by the system on the day, 2,297 of them were wrong. But South Wales Police said nobody had been wrongly arrested

US President Donald Trump claims Washington DC has been "overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals", but DC Mayor Muriel Bowser says violent crime is "at a 30-year low".

BBC Verify Correspondent Nick Beake has been looking into the crime statistics and asking people how safe they feel in their city.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, PA Media

Ten Live Facial Recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven police forces in England to help catch serious criminals, the Home Office has announced.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Home Office minister Dame Diana Johnson said the technology would be used to identify offenders wanted for serious crimes such as “rape, GBH, robbery, knife crime and domestic abuse”.

LFR has been used for almost a decade, and we know that at least six forces in England and Wales have deployed the technology:

• Metropolitan Police
• South Wales Police
• Northamptonshire Police
• Bedfordshire Police
• Hampshire Police
• Essex Police

I’ve contacted each force to ask how often and for what reason this technology has been used. I’ve also asked about how often it’s led to an arrest and whether it’s mistakenly identified suspects.

There’s already some publicly available data on its use by certain forces. According to figures compiled by a group of London Assembly , externalm, externalembers, external, for example, the Met used LFR 117 times in an eight-month period between between January and August 2024 - up from 32 times in a four-year period between 2020 and 2023.

Emma Pengelly and Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalists

We’ve been verifying a video of two large blasts in southern Gaza that was posted on social media overnight.

The footage was filmed from the main building at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis with the camera pointing to the east. Two explosions light up the night sky and people can be heard shouting.

We’ve previously verified videos from this location so confirming where it was filmed was straightforward. The school building in the foreground, the palm tree and pylon can be matched with online mapping so we know the location is accurate.

By counting the seconds between seeing the blasts and hearing the sound of the explosions we’ve estimated each happened about 1.7km and 1.4km from the hospital respectively.

From this video alone it’s not possible to say what was targeted or the kind of munition used.

We’ll continue to monitor the latest material coming out of Gaza and will be updating you throughout the day.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning.

We're here to bring you the latest updates from our team as they fact-check claims and verify video to feed into the BBC's reporting this Wednesday:

Right now we're looking at these stories:

• We've carried out checks on videos posted from the city of Khan Younis showing two large blasts overnight and we're also monitoring posts from Gaza City as Israeli forces prepare to launch what it says is an operation to take over the city
• Facial recognition: Our journalists are gathering available data on how the technology is used by police forces in England and Wales to see how often it's deployed and for what offences

Elsewhere, we're checking data from Nasa satellites that track heat sources on the Earth's surface to monitor the development and spread of wildfires across Europe.

We'll bring you more on those stories throughout the day.