Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’re coming to the end of the day for this live page, but BBC Verify teams here in London and in Washington DC are on shift through his evening to continue their work.

Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been covering today.

As the UK announces sweeping changes to asylum policy, our fact check and data journalists have been digging into four questions:

• How do the UK’s asylum claims compare with Denmark?
• How many asylum cases are being appealed to tribunals?
• What’s the latest on migrant small boats crossing the English Channel this year?
• How many visas are issued to citizens of Angola, Namibia and the DRC?

Our verification team have been busy analysing footage of a fuel tanker ablaze after a Russian attack close to the Romanian border, as well as verifying video of a rebel drone strike targeting soldiers at a weather station in Myanmar.

Plus, click here to read our full story on how police in Tanzania crushed election protests with lethal force.

BBC Verify Live will be back tomorrow morning with more, so please do join us then.

BBC Verify correspondent Merlyn Thomas explains how we analysed verified video footage to show Tanzania police crushing election protests with lethal force.

You can read our full investigation here.

Marco Silva
BBC Verify senior journalist

US President Donald Trump has wrongly claimed that, despite selling the most wind turbines, China is not using wind power.

Speaking to UK broadcaster GB News, Trump suggested that China - which he called a “very smart” country - has been using fossil fuels while selling wind turbines to “suckers” and “stupid people”.

“They use oil and gas, they use coal, but they don't use the wind," he claimed.

But China has become a global leader in wind power.

Image source, EPA

“China is the country with the highest wind power generation and highest growth rate of wind power generation in recent years,” says Biqing Zhu, a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

The Global Energy Monitor, a US-based research group, estimates China accounts for about 44% of the world’s operating wind farm capacity, external. And the International Energy Agency (IEA) also says, external that in 2023 China built about two-thirds of all the new wind power capacity added worldwide.

Despite this progress it is true that China’s energy mix is still dominated by fossil fuels — coal in particular. In fact, according to the IEA, one of every four tonnes of coal used globally is burned to produce electricity in China.

The Chinese Wind Energy Association says that, in 2023, only around 9.5% of the electricity China generated came from wind.

In recent years, Trump has consistently called on the UK and other nations to stop building “ugly“ wind turbines, arguing they are “ruining” Europe's fields and valleys.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been reporting this afternoon on a Russian drone strike that set fire to a fuel tanker in the Ukrainian port city of Izmail. Click here to read more about what we verified earlier.

I’ve just been checking a platform called Fire Information for Resource Management System (Firms), which is run by Nasa and uses orbiting satellites to detect thermal anomalies on the earth’s surface - in other words, active fires

In the city of Izmail, the two red boxes below indicate that the system has detected two heat signatures. The first of the two heat signatures was detected by a passing satellite at 03:00 local time (01:00 GMT) and the second a little before 13:00 local time (11:00 GMT).

This aligns with reports that the Russian drone attack took place overnight and the blaze on board the fuel tanker has continued to burn through the morning, leading to the evacuation of the Romanian village on the other side of the Danube river.

Image source, NASA

Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist

Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan has announced an investigation into the violence around her re-election which the opposition say left hundreds killed. The Tanzanian government has not provided casualty figures.

We’ve been looking into this since the time of the presidential election, when an internet blackout was imposed on the nation for five days, coinciding with a curfew.

Once the internet was restored we saw a flood of violent images from inside the country, many of Tanzanian police units firing weapons at crowds.

Peter Mwai, BBC Verify’s reporter in Nairobi, spent two weeks matching about 50 of these to exact locations in the major cities of Dar es Salaam, Mwanza and Arusha. My role was to peer-review his findings as part of our verification process.

In doing so further images fell into place and we could see the wider picture, such as how close armed police were to bodies in the street or to protests.

In the case of Morogoro Road, a major thoroughfare through Dar es Salaam, by putting these videos together, we could see how many of the bodies lay close together and at the same time.

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who will announce changes to the asylum system this afternoon, is reported to have taken inspiration from Denmark which toughened up its rules in recent years.

Denmark’s asylum claim numbers have dropped since 2015. It receives far fewer claims than the UK, just over 2,000 in 2024 compared with more than 108,000 in the UK - although of course Denmark is a considerably smaller country.

One of Denmark’s changes - which the UK may adopt - is the policy of returning asylum seekers once their country of origin has been proven safe.

However, this has not actually resulted in substantial numbers of people leaving Denmark (although it may have served as a deterrent).

The Netherlands Institute of International Relations points out, external that - as of last year - of 30,000 Syrian refugees in Denmark only 1,200 cases had seen their cases re-assessed, a few hundred had seen their status revoked, but none had been returned.

Yi Ma and Fridon Kiria
BBC Verify and BBC Monitoring

We’ve verified footage emerging from Myanmar’s Rakhine state that appears to show a drone strike as part of the country’s civil war.

Yesterday videos began circulating online showing a drone strike by the Arakan Army, an armed group in Rakhine State, on a group of Myanmar soldiers. In the footage, the troops can be seen gathered in front of a tower before an explosion sends up smoke. Several soldiers appear to fall to the ground while others run.

Image source, Facebook

We have geolocated the footage to the Kyaukphyu Meteorological Radar Station. A reverse-image search indicates no earlier uploads of the video before yesterday. According to sources on the ground who have spoken to BBC Burmese, this attack happened on 14 November.

Rakhine has been one of the hardest impacted regions by Myanmar’s ongoing civil war, which began in May 2021 when the military ousted the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and set off a conflict with a range of ethnic and anti-junta groups.

The state on Myanmar’s west coast is facing rising hunger and malnutrition. The World Food Programme warned in August that a combination of conflict and military blockades was severely limiting access to food and aid.

Neither the Myanmar junta nor the Arakan Army has acknowledged the apparent attack so far.

Phil Leake
BBC Verify data journalist

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to announce the UK may stop granting visas to people from Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) if their governments do not accept returns of people with no legal right to remain in the country.

The three African nations are the first to be threatened with visa bans since the government raised the possibility in September.

In the year to June 2025, the government enforced the return of just one person from Angola, two from Namibia and one from the DRC.

This is roughly in line with the average across recent years, with a total of 27 people from these countries having been removed since July 2019.

Meanwhile, a total of 5,926 visas were issued to citizens of the three nations in the latest year, down slightly on the previous 12 months but still the second highest figure in the past decade.

The top country in terms of visas granted was India, with around 730,000.

Thomas Copeland and Fridon Kiria
BBC Verify and BBC Monitoring

Image source, X

We’ve just verified some dramatic footage of a liquid petroleum gas tanker on fire following a reported Russian drone strike at a port on the Danube river in Ukraine - bordering Romania.

The video shows a huge flame erupting from a tanker called Ordina.

We have geolocated the video to the Ukrainian city of Izmail and we’ve matched the features of the ship in the video to publicly available pictures of Ordina.

Reverse images searches indicate the video has not appeared on the internet before today.

The footage appears to have been filmed from the small Romanian village of Plauru, just across the river.The village is now being evacuated due to the ship’s "proximity to Romanian territory and the nature of its cargo”, emergency services say.

Ordina is almost 125m (410ft) long and can hold up to 8292 cubic metres (1.8 million gallons) of fuel, according to ship tracking website Marine Traffic.

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

The number of asylum cases going to tribunal in the UK in the year to March were up 36% on the year before, while those closed went up by just 4%, according to the latest data., external

There were 79,005 immigration cases entering the system, just over half of which were to do with asylum refusals or losing protection as a refugee.

Other tribunal cases cover things like human rights or free movement for people from the European Economic Area.

This means the open caseload for immigration and asylum matters increased by 80% over the last year, according to the Ministry of Justice.

In the 12 months ending March 2025, there were 12,129 asylum appeals decided by tribunal, almost double the number the year before.

However, this is lower than the numbers going through the system before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Of those asylum appeals determined in the latest year, just over half (55%) were refused, the rest were granted. That’s a similar proportion to recent years.

Christine Jeavans
BBC Verify senior journalist

After a few days during which no migrant small boats were detected crossing the English Channel, the number rose at the end of last week.

Some 217 people were spotted on Friday, bringing the total for the year to 39,292.

This is higher than the number for the whole of 2024, but is below the record year of 2022, which saw 45,774 people cross in total.

For much of this year, the number of migrants detected crossing was actually much higher than the equivalent point in 2022.

That was due to a relatively high number of crossings in spring and early summer of this year.

However, a high number of autumn crossings in 2022 means that year remains the highest on record, at least for now.

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, EPA

The Polish military is set to inspect 120km (75 miles) of railway line after the route used to deliver aid to Ukraine was sabotaged with explosives, officials have said.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said “an explosive device detonated and destroyed the railway track” on the Warsaw-Lublin route. In a video posted to X, he added “unfortunately there is no doubt that we are dealing with a deliberate action, an act of sabotage”.

The first images we’ve seen of the location are from videos shared on Instagram yesterday evening. They were filmed near Mika station around 80km (50 miles) south-east of Warsaw. The footage show, externals, external a short train and a section of track cordoned off by police tape, external. There are police vehicles, quad bikes and a fire engine parked nearby.

A close-up picture of the track, which appears to have been shared online for the first time yesterday but has been cropped too close to verify, shows a section of the railway line is missing, scattered sharp fragments of track and apparent scorch marks.

Tusk has confirmed that a second similar incident is also being investigated a bit further south on the same line.

Kumar Malhotra and Fridon Kiria
BBC Verify and BBC Monitoring

Image source, State Emergency Service of Ukraine

We’ve been checking images from Balakliya in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region after reports of two overnight Russian strikes, in which local officials have reported three people killed and several others wounded.

Pictures shared by Ukrainian police on Telegram show badly damaged buildings and debris lying on streets nearby. We were able to verify the location of the attack by matching distinctive buildings to existing satellite images of the city.

Separately, we’ve also verified a video showing pitch black streets in the centre of the city of Donetsk in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. The blackout is said to have been caused by strikes on power infrastructure in the region. A tall distinctive building seen briefly at the end of the video helped us locate the footage using street view images.

In Russia itself, we’ve seen video posted overnight showing an explosion and ball of flames in the city of Oryol. Again, we used nearby buildings and landmarks to work out where this was filmed from. It’s not clear where exactly in Oryol the explosion happened or what caused it, although local media reports indicate the city had been targeted by Ukrainian drones.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

We’ve verified images showing the aftermath of an apparent Russian attack on the town of Balakliya in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region. The head of the town’s military administration posted on the Telegram messaging app that at least three people were killed.

UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to announce major changes to asylum policy later, so BBC Verify is examining the potential impact of measures that have already been reported in the media.

Elsewhere we’ve been investigating a video doing the rounds on social media that purports to be from 2000 and claims to show Donald Trump joking around with former President Bill Clinton. Our analysis - which we’ve also consulted an expert about - is that this video is almost certainly AI-generated.

If you’ve seen a claim made online or a video being shared that you think could be AI-generated do get in touch with us.