Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

We’re bringing today’s BBC Verify Live coverage to a close soon, but the team’s work will continue.

Using Google Earth and stock images, we geolocated several social media clips of the cross-border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia forces.

We also verified video purporting to show explosions in Cambodia, but which actually showed the aftermath of a Russian strike on Ukraine from June.

Elsewhere, our data team pored over the latest crime statistics for England and Wales, including the new grouping of sexual assault, domestic abuse and stalking incidents, which will be used to measure the government’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls.

Coming up, our late shift colleague will be verifying dramatic footage that has emerged of a wildfire in Cyprus, which will feed into the BBC News at Six and Ten.

Paul Brown and Emma Pengelly
BBC Verify

Image source, X

Over the past hours, videos showing the immediate aftermath of strikes on the northern city of Kharkiv in Ukraine have been shared on social media channels.

Thirty-three people, including four children are reported to have been injured in the strike, according to the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.

Multiple plumes of smoke and extensive damage to a residential development in the Shevchenkivskyi district - close to the centre of the city - can be seen in the footage.

We verified the material by matching nearby buildings to satellite images. Google Street View images of the area go back to 2019 when the area was still under development - but the outlines of structures are clearly identifiable.

In a statement, the prosecutor’s office said: “According to preliminary data, the attack was carried out by two UMPB-5 controlled aviation bombs… The distance of launch is about 100 km.”

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the body which regulates official statistics, has put out a statement on crime figures., external

It said that there had been “considerable discussion in the media about rates of crime and the reliability of crime data in England and Wales”.

The OSR didn’t mention him by name, but on Monday Reform UK leader Nigel Farage held a press conference on his party’s crime and justice plans.

During the event he said that the Crime Survey for England and Wales - one of the key measures of crime in the country - “is based on completely false data”.

I fact-checked Farage's claim at the time by pointing out that the survey is considered a trusted source of official crime data.

And in its recent statement, the stats watchdog has reiterated that view, saying that it has “confidence in the quality and reliability” of the survey.

The OSR went on to say that the police recorded data used in many of Farage’s claims about increasing crime does “not provide reliable long-term trends”.

Phil Leake
Data journalist

We’re continuing to dig into the latest crime statistics published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

A total of 5.2 million (10.6%) of people aged 16 and over in England and Wales were victims of at least one domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking incident in the year to March 2025.

This includes 3.2 million women (12.8%) and 2 million men (8.4%). Looking at the individual crimes, 2.9% of over-16s experienced stalking, 7.8% experienced domestic abuse and 1.9% experienced sexual assault. Each of these estimates were very slightly lower than the year before.

Domestic abuse has been declining in the long-term whereas stalking has remained steady over the last decade. Sexual assault has been increasing at the same time after declining in the decade before that.

The ONS recently widened its definition of domestic abuse to include controlling and coercive behaviour, leading to a rise in the estimated number of victims.

Shruti Menon
BBC Verify senior journalist

As we’ve been monitoring footage from the Thailand-Cambodia tensions, we came across a video claiming to show explosions in Cambodia.

At the time of writing, one post on X had over 105,000 views, but it was not what it claimed to be.

A reverse image search found that it was neither recent, nor from Cambodia. In fact it showed the aftermath of a Russian strike on the north-western Ukrainian city of Lutsk in early June.

Sharing old or unrelated footage is common on social media at times of breaking news as people seek to boost their profiles and get more clicks this way.

This is why we run recency checks on all footage we verify to ensure that it is pertinent to the story we are covering.

Image source, X

Shruti Menon and Peter Mwai
BBC Verify

We’re analysing social media footage of the cross-border clashes between Thai and Cambodian forces.

So far, we’ve verified five videos that have emerged online today - all from the Surin and Sisaket provinces of Thailand, near the border with Cambodia.

Three show a petrol station shop fire in Sisaket. We can’t tell from the footage what caused the fire. Aftermath images have also appeared in Thai media, which matches the footage.

In another video, we see students frantically evacuating from classrooms - we’ve geolocated it to Ban Khok Sa-At school in the Surin province.

To confirm this, we matched the buildings seen in the video with images of the school on Google Earth.

Yet another video shows uniformed men ducking into a building as gunfire rings out and smoke rises from a nearby building inside the Phanom Dong Rak Hospital. A particular landmark statue in the hospital campus seen in the video matches stock images available of the hospital.We've also found some videos that claim to be recent, but have actually been online for several weeks. Weeding out this footage, helps our BBC colleagues to ensure only relevant material is put to air.

Image source, X

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

Image source, Getty Images

The UK and India have signed a major trade deal that will cut tariffs.

But what’s the current trading relationship between the two countries?

The UK imports a lot more from India than it exports back.

In 2024, this trade deficit was over £8bn.

That means that the value of goods and services imported to the UK from India, totalling about £25.5bn, was larger than the value of goods and service the UK exported to India - about £17.1bn.

Altogether, India is the UK’s 11th largest trading partner in the world, external.

To put that another way, for every £100 worth of trade the UK does with other countries, £2.40 of it is with India.

The biggest export from the UK to India, worth over £2bn last year, was non-ferrous metals. These are metals that don’t contain iron, such as aluminium or copper.

Scrap metal and metal ores were another big export along with power generators, drinks and tobacco and general industrial machinery.

The biggest imports were refined oil, clothes, telecoms and sound equipment, medicinal and pharmaceutical products and iron and steel.

Robert Cuffe
BBC Verify head of statistics

Around one-in-eight women in England and Wales experienced sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking in the year to March 2025, according to figures published this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), external.

The ONS has published data before on each of these crimes individually, but this is the first time that they have combined them to estimate how many women experience the crimes commonly grouped as violence against women and girls (VAWG).

It’s also the first use of an expanded definition of domestic abuse that includes controlling and coercive behaviour.

The combined measure has been produced to monitor the government's ambition to halve VAWG in a decade.

The Home Office says it will provide more detail later this year on how this will be used with other stats to monitor progress on halving VAWG.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Telegrapm

Drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have continued overnight with an attack on a depot in the coastal resort of Sochi.

We’ve verified two videos from Adler, located to the south of the city’s airport. One shows Russian surface-to-air defences operating off the coast - apparently trying to shoot down drones, while another shows an explosion on the ground.

We were able to pinpoint the location by comparing the video to a 360-degree image posted on Google, using nearby buildings as reference points.

Separate data from Nasa shows heat signatures - usually a sign of a fire - at the location of the depot which is located close to the airport.

Russian media has reported that one woman was killed in the strikes - but we have not independently verified this.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify live editor

Good morning and welcome to Thursday's edition of BBC Verify Live.

It’s already a busy start for our open source and data journalists who are digging into several developing stories.

In Gaza, we’re continuing our work to understand how much aid is actually reaching the Strip.

In Russia, a drone strike hit the city of Sochi overnight, reportedly killing one person. The strike also caused a huge blaze at an oil depot, which our team has already confirmed.

Elsewhere, at least 12 Thai civilians have been killed in crossfire, as Thai and Cambodian troops clash. We’ll explain how we verified the footage.

Closer to home, the latest crime statistics for England and Wales have just been released. Our head of statistics is analysing what the data tells us.

If there's anything you want BBC Verify to look into you can always get in touch using this form.