Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist

We’re about to close this page, but news doesn’t stop, and neither do our efforts to work out what’s real and what isn’t.

Many times we work into the early morning as we react to the unprecedented ways in which technology changes the news environment.

Right now, we’re reviewing images of an explosion claimed to be near a food distribution site in Gaza. There could still be images from Graz, Austria, to review for the evening bulletins on TV and radio. And as people head to work in Los Angeles we can’t be certain what the day will bring.

If you want to see more of our investigations, videos and analysis - head to the BBC Verify pages on the website.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

The protests in Los Angeles have drawn fresh attention to President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.

One of his election pledges was to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”.

It’s tricky for us to measure Trump’s progress on this pledge because his administration has stopped publishing regular figures on immigration enforcement.

So here’s what we do know:

In April, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a press release, external it had removed 65,682 people in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term.

In the same week as that release, Border Czar Tom Homan said in a news conference that 139,000 individuals had been deported so far.

ICE and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are the main agencies responsible for deporting people with no legal right to remain in the country. It’s possible that the larger number mentioned by Homan includes people deported by both agencies.

Image source, Getty Images

The Migration Policy Institute said in April, external that the Trump administration “appears on track to deport roughly half a million people this year—fewer than the 685,000 deportations recorded in fiscal year (FY) 2024 under President Joe Biden”.

It said most of Biden’s deportations were “quick” returns of people who had crossed the border illegally, whereas the Trump administration has focused on removals of migrants already living in the community. This type of removal takes longer and can be more costly than removals at the border.

We haven’t been able to find any more recent deportation figures but we’ve asked ICE and CBP for an update.

Rob England
BBC Verify senior journalist

The amount being paid to house asylum seekers has been “quite considerably” reduced over the past year, according to UK officials.

Speaking to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Home Office civil servant Simon Ridley said more room-sharing in hotels had meant the per-person cost had been driven down.

His comments confirm BBC Verify’s analysis of official data we received via a Freedom of Information request which suggests the average nightly rate paid per person fell from £162.16 in March 2023 to £117.97 in December 2024.

Mr Ridley said “extra beds” had been added to larger rooms in order to accommodate more people which has increased the number of people per hotel.

BBC Verify has figures which show the number of people per hotel increased from 131 in March 2023 to 175 by the end of 2024.

The cost of housing asylum seekers over a 10-year period has been estimated at over £15bn in a National Audit Office report.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Reuters

Austria has an estimated 837,000 registered and more than 1.7 million unregistered firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey, external, an independent research project at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

That’s 30 firearms per 100 people – the second highest in the European Union after Finland.

To own a gun in Austria, you have to be at least 21 years old and a citizen of the European Economic Area (that’s all the EU countries plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). According to the Austrian government, external you also need a justification, a psychological report and a firearms licence.

We couldn’t find Austrian sources for deaths by firearms but the EU's statistics agency, Eurostat, recently compared gun-related deaths across all 27 member states.

It found Austria had 10 firearms deaths in 2021 and seven in 2022 - lower than some countries with a similar population size such as Greece.

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

A video shared this morning on social media shows a large controlled demolition apparently being carried out by the Israeli military in a built-up part of Gaza City.

A caption on the video says it was filmed by the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Brigade 646 in Shejaiya. We're unable to independently corroborate who filmed it but it’s clearly taken from a drone.

By matching the undergrowth on the right, the distinct crater in the front-left and the layout of buildings and roads to satellite imagery, we were able to geolocate the footage to a part of the Shejaiya neighbourhood which is controlled by the IDF. It's about 2km (1.2 miles) from the boundary with Israel.

A wide section of this part of Gaza City has been destroyed, as we reported here on BBC Verify Live last week, and recent satellite imagery suggests demolitions and clearances are continuing.

The IDF previously told us it has "eliminated dozens of terrorists, dismantled terrorist infrastructure sites above and below ground" and is "committed to conducting its operations in accordance with international law".

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, X/BBC

We’ve confirmed that a video claiming to show the deadly shooting at the Dreierschützengasse high school in Graz, which was viewed around 80,000 times in its first hour online, is not of today's incident.

The footage, which was shared on X by Belarusian opposition media outlet Nexta and carries its branding, shows two people - one of whom is shooting at an unseen target.

But the video is not from Graz today - using Google reverse image search to scour the internet for the same scenes appearing elsewhere we’ve found copies online that are 10 days old.

We have geolocated the video to a skatepark in the Floridsdorf district of the Austrian capital, Vienna, more than 90 miles away from the school. It appears show to an incident on 30 May.

Nexta has now removed the video from their post, but versions of it continue to circulate online in relation to today’s incident. We have contacted the company for comment.

The footage has the potential to be inflammatory as the Arabic phrase for “God is greatest” can be heard, which may lead to people speculating incorrectly about the identity and religion of the gunman.

Police have confirmed the suspect in today’s shooting was a 21-year-old Austrian man from the Graz area.

BBC Verify is dedicated to investigating claims and analysing sources.

We're keen to know if there's a story you think we should investigate. We're particularly interested in things being shared online via social media or messaging apps that could be fake, factually inaccurate or misleading.

It could be that something you've heard or seen doesn't feel right or you want to know if someone is using generative-AI to spread disinformation.

You can send your suggestions to the team here.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Overnight we’ve seen that the official X account , externalfor the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been posting about “California sanctuary politicians and rioters”.

The term “sanctuary” is used to refer to places in the US which have some limits on how much they are willing to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement.

DHS recently published what it described as a “comprehensive list” of sanctuary jurisdictions which it said were “defying federal immigration law”. But just three days later the list was taken down.

Officials from several locations named on the list - including Boise,, external Virginia, external and Las Vegas, external - pushed back and said that they did not have sanctuary policies.

The DHS said the list was taken down because it’s “being constantly reviewed and can be changed at any time and will be updated regularly”.

Los Angeles County - where two cities which have seen unrest are located - was named but the cities themselves (Paramount and Compton) were not on it.

BBC Verify obtained an archived version of the DHS list, external using a tool called Wayback Machine - a website we often use to trace online content that has been removed.

Olga Robinson and Shayan Sardarizadeh
BBC Verify

We're seeing more and more images and videos created with AI - artificial intelligence - going viral.

Take this fake video of National Guard troops at the LA protests shared on TikTok.

While the quality of these fakes is gradually getting better there are still some common giveaways.

First, the details - it often helps to zoom in to see those. AI struggles with limbs, facial features, hair, skin tones, lighting and smaller objects. They can look unrealistic or out of place, defy gravity or can be missing altogether.

It also often can’t reproduce text correctly – like the “LAPC” logo on the police car here instead of “LAPD”.

Background can be a giveaway too. The further from the centre of the image you look, the fuzzier the details become.

People, buildings and other details blend into each other or lack precision. A typical AI image would have several of these tell-tale signs.

If you’ve done the checks and still not sure whether a picture is fake, it is probably best not to share it.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, House of Commons

During the statement on the government’s winter fuel payment U-turn in the House of Commons yesterday, Pensions Minister Torsten Bell made this claim: "The triple lock will see state pension spending rise by £31bn a year annually over this parliament."

The triple lock is the mechanism where the state pension rises by whichever is higher of inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5% each year.

An annual increase of £31bn seemed very high, so I had a look at what the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the official forecaster, is predicting for state pension spending.

You’ll find it in the tables attached to the OBR forecasts from March - go to table 4.7 in this spreadsheet, external. State pension is row 40.

What the OBR is predicting is that total spending on the state pension will go up by £31bn over the course of this parliament - not every year - from £138bn in 2024-5 to £169bn in 2028-29.

We asked the Department for Work and Pensions to comment on Torsten Bell’s claim and its response was: “Our commitment to the triple lock for the entirety of this parliament will mean spending on people's state pensions is forecast to rise by around £31bn.”

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Reuters

We’ve been reviewing images of damage after overnight Russian air strikes across Ukraine.

A picture said to be from Kyiv included a very useful detail for us to locate on publicly available online maps - shop signs.

The image showed a KyivStar mobile phone store and a Roshen confectionery outlet.

There are tools that can help us automatically generate a location just from this kind of information - the proximity of two known businesses. But in this case I checked manually and once this location was confirmed I took a virtual walk around the area on Google Street View and soon found another building which was hit overnight.

We’ve also identified two damaged buildings – a church and a maternity hospital - in the southern port city of Odesa.

Reports suggest there were no casualties at either site, but regional head Oleh Kiper has said one man was killed in the city following the latest attacks.

Image source, State Emergency Service of Ukraine

Shayan Sardarizadeh
BBC Verify senior journalist

AI chatbots are increasingly being used as fact-checking tools, with social media users asking them whether something they have seen online is true or not.

However, incorrect answers from two chatbots are misleading users about the origin of news photos showing National Guard troops, sent to Los Angeles during the recent unrest, sleeping on bare floors.

California Governor Gavin Newsom posted two images on Monday, which he said showed the troops "being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another”, external.

People who used ChatGPT, designed by OpenAI, to authenticate the pictures were told they dated back to Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 - referring to the metadata on the images, external.

Grok, owned by xAI, gave a similar answer to multiple users asking about the images. It said claims the images were linked to the recent unrest in LA "lack credible support”, external.

Image source, X

When we asked ChatGPT where the pictures came from it told us they were most likely captured during the “National Guard deployment to Washington DC in January 2021”.

The reality is the two images were first published by the San Francisco Chronicle, external on Monday. The paper said it had exclusively obtained the images, which it said showed National Guard troops sleeping on the floor of “one or more” of the federal buildings in Los Angeles that they'd been sent by the Trump administration to protect.

BBC Verify ran a reverse image search on both photos and found no copy of them online before 9 June.

Merlyn Thomas
BBC Verify senior reporter

Yesterday, the team was examining footage released by the Israel Defense Forces which it said showed the tunnel network underneath the European Hospital in southern Gaza.

The Israeli army announced it had found the body of Mohammed Sinwar - the Hamas leader in Gaza - who it said was the target of Israeli air strikes on 13 May.

Following BBC Verify's previous investigation into the strikes, we've been piecing together the footage to try understand what it shows.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

With protests against immigration raids and mass deportations in the US spreading to cities across the country, we’ve seen a number of misleading images and videos circulating online.

One example we've come across is a video showing a street brawl from 2023 that is being passed off as new violent protests in Florida.

The video has a watermark with TX Street Fights as part of the name which is the first clue that it could be misleading. TX represents Texas not Florida.

By taking a screengrab and using reverse image search, we found a version of the video posted in January 2023, external.

We can match the buildings and shops in the video to Google Street View imagery from one of the streets in Austin, the state capital of Texas. And some of the police officers are wearing uniforms bearing the word Austin.

Other videos we've seen claiming to be of recent anti-ICE protests have included footage from an anti-Trump demo in Boston this April.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning.

Welcome to our live page where we'll be bringing you the latest from the BBC's specialists in open-source verification, fact-checking, data journalism and disinformation debunking.

This morning our teams are working to identify misinformation that is being posted online about the US anti-immigration enforcement protests and unrest.

You can follow the latest from BBC News on that story here.

Elsewhere, the verification team is looking into renewed attacks on Ukraine overnight and working to verify the latest information from the war.

And the fact-check team is gearing up for tomorrow's UK government spending review - we'll update you later on how we'll be involved with the BBC's coverage.

As ever you can get in touch with us via this link.