Phil Leake
BBC Verify data journalist

The number of antisemitic hate crimes in Greater Manchester increased at the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict in October 2023 but has since returned to lower levels, according to monthly data collected by the police.

Greater Manchester Police have figures dating back to March 2020 on the number of hate crimes recorded against different religions, external.

They show a spike in hate crimes against Jewish people in late 2023, with 85 reported in October and 68 in November.

This compares with an average of 12 per month between March 2020 and September 2023.

Incidents remained high in early 2024 with 34 hate crimes per month on average in the first half of the year, before falling back to levels seen before the conflict.

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

With today’s announcement that Dame Sarah Mullally is the new Archbishop of Canterbury, I’ve been looking at the data on Christianity in England and Wales.

Fewer than half of people described themselves as “Christian” in the latest Census, the first time that has happened, external.

A total of 27.5 million people, 46.2% of the population, were recorded as Christian in 2021, down 13.1 points from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011. This includes all forms of Christianity.

However, the Office for National Statistics said that “Christian” was still the most common answer, with “No religion” coming second. The question on religion was voluntary.

Figures on attendance come from the Church of England’s (C of E) own surveys, which suggested congregations had grown for four years in a row, external following years of decline. And it is still not back to where it was before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Preliminary data from the C of E’s annual Statistics for Mission, suggested there were about 1.02 million regular worshippers in 2024, up 1.2 per cent on 2023, with about 701,000 who attend across the week.

Matt Murphy
BBC Verify senior journalist

Germany’s Munich airport has reopened after several drone sightings forced it to close and cancel more than a dozen flights on Thursday night.

It’s the latest in a series of recent drone incursions across Europe. Last week Denmark blamed a “professional actor” for an incident that shut Copenhagen airport for several hours.

It’s unclear who is behind these events, but Dr Ulrike Franke from the European Council on Foreign Affairs told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that the Munich incident could have been caused by “a capable state actor” or a “hobbyist”.

“We’ve had instances of larger drones in recent days and weeks – and in some instances mothership drones, larger drones which send out smaller drones – flying near critical infrastructure,” she said.

“These are instances where we can be certain these aren’t hobbyists… most likely a state, most likely Russia.

“In the Munich case at this point we don’t have enough information about the type of drones, and how they moved, to give us information as to who was flying them.”

Franke urged airports to equip themselves with anti-drone technology to combat the surge in incursions to airspace. She suggested that to date, officials haven’t “seen the economic need” to invest in the technology.

Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist

The last of the 42 boats sailing in the Global Sumud Flotilla which had been heading towards Gaza has been intercepted by Israeli forces.

Since Wednesday night we’ve watched almost all of the boats being boarded by the Israeli military as it was live streamed on the flotilla’s YouTube channel along with videos on their Instagram account.

By yesterday evening only one boat, the Marinette – which had been sailing a long way behind the others – had not been intercepted.

At 07:56 BST, according to the timestamp on the Marinette’s livestream, one passenger held up a piece of paper to the camera reading: “We see a ship!”

At 08:29 BST a dinghy full of armed troops wearing tactical gear pulled alongside the Marinette, with a much larger military vessel visible in the background. This tallies with the flotilla’s claim the boat was intercepted at 10:29 local time.

The latest data on the Marinette, via the flotilla’s tracking website, put it 43 nautical miles (80km) from the Gaza coast at 08:07 – shortly before it was boarded.

Shayan Sardarizadeh, Ghoncheh Habibiazad and Paul Brown
BBC Verify

After police named the suspect in the Manchester synagogue attack last night, BBC Verify got to work searching for his online footprint.

We found records of an address in Greater Manchester which listed Jihad al-Shamie and three other individuals with the same second name.

Through social network analysis, were able to find online profiles for the suspect’s brother and father, the latter of which had a photo of a man matching Jihad al-Shamie’s description cradling a baby. The photo was captioned was “welcome grandson”.

Face matching tools then led us to two other images online, one from a LinkedIn profile and from a site for English tutors.

Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify senior journalist

Drone activity in the vicinity of Munich airport led to its temporary closure late on Thursday, according to German authorities.

The flight tracking site, FlightRadar24, is one tool we can use to see the impact of disruption to commercial air traffic.

It shows delays to departures at Munich starting around 21:00 local time (20:00 BST) and continuing for the next hour or so, with arriving flights being diverted to other German cities including Stuttgart. A TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon flew on to Vienna in neighbouring Austria.

Flights begin to arrive on schedule at Munich starting from 04:30 local time (03:30 BST) this morning.

There’s been no confirmation of where the drones came from but this incident follows recent disruption at other airports in Denmark and Norway in the last fortnight.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning from BBC Verify Live.

We’re investigating new reports of drone activity at a European airport after flights were disrupted at Munich last night. Germany’s second biggest airport had to halt operations because of the unexplained drones leading to the cancellation of 17 flights.

We’re looking for any footagethat might shed more light on the latest incident and what flight-tracking datacan tell us about the disruption.

Following yesterday’s attack at a synagogue in Manchester members of our team worked until the early hours of this morning checking and verifying the suspect’s online presence.

We’ll explain here how we checked a range of internet profiles to learn more about Jihad Al-Shamie, the man police have named as carrying out the attack.

And with the announcement that the Bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally, is to be the new Archbishop of Canterbury our data team has been looking into the stats on how many people are attending Church of England services.