Sherie Ryder and Fridon Kiria
BBC Verify and BBC Monitoring

We’ve been looking at social media posts overnight claiming to show a drone attack on an oil refinery in Russia’s Saratov region some 460km (280 miles) north-east of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian military’s general staff confirmed in a post on Telegram that it had carried out the strike.

As footage of explosions lighting up the sky and sirens sounding emerged we were able to verify the location of the strike by comparing buildings seen in the foreground to those on street level mapping by the Russian search engine Yandex.

Putting frames from the video through a Google reverse image search confirmed it was new. This is not the first time the oil refinery has been targeted.

On 11 November it had to stop primary oil refining following repeated Ukrainian attacks.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Business Secretary Peter Kyle has denied that scrapping plans to allow workers to claim unfair dismissal from their first day in a job breaches Labour’s election manifesto.

The UK government will instead cut the minimum time before workers can make a claim against their employer from two years to six months.

Last year’s manifesto said, external that they would be: “introducing basic rights from day one to parental leave, sick pay, and protection from unfair dismissal”.

In an interview yesterday evening, Kyle was asked if he accepted that the change to six months was a breach of the manifesto.

“No,” he said, adding “because we also promised in the manifesto that we would bring people together, that this would not be legislation that pits one side against another.”

He highlighted that the outcome was a compromise between unions and employers. The Labour manifesto did say there would be consultation with businesses and workers before the legislation was passed.

But it was also clear that the legislation would include protection from unfair dismissal from “day one”.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

A video appearing to show a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent detaining his own mother has gathered hundreds of thousands of views across social media – but it’s been made using artificial intelligence (AI) software.

There are clear red flags that lead us to say the video is AI-generated, such as the scrambled text on an agent’s uniform and the van.

We also found the TikTok account that first posted the video with the caption “AI-generated parody – not real footage”.

Another way we can spot AI-generated videos is to look out for a watermark added by the text-to-video generator that made it.

Videos made using OpenAI’s Sora model, for example, will place a watermark for a few seconds at the top left of the screen. It then moves to the middle right, bottom left, back to the top left and then repeats the pattern.

Increasingly, however, we’re seeing attempts to hide these watermarks in order to mislead the viewer. We’ve marked out below where we can identify attempts to remove a watermark which appears on screen for a few seconds at a time in the same three places.

In the first image below, when the watermark is removed from the top left the roof in the background is blurred for a few seconds. Then in the central image, the clasp on the agent’s jacket on the right briefly disappears. And in the final image, when the watermark is removed from the bottom left, the woman’s dress temporarily appears distorted.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify senior journalist

There have been repeated claims that the suspect in Wednesday’s Washington DC shooting entered the US under a Biden-era Afghan resettlement scheme that did not carry out adequate vetting.

At an FBI press conference earlier today, US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro said “this is what happens in this country when people are allowed in who are not properly vetted”.

And in a press release, external shortly after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the suspect “is one of thousands of unvetted Afghan nationals let into the country under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome program.”

More than 190,000 Afghans have been resettled under this scheme , externaland another programme called Enduring Welcome following the Taliban takeover in 2021, including those who worked on behalf of the US government.

The official government website, external for Operation Allies Welcome mentions a “rigorous” and “multi-layered” vetting process, which involved collecting biometric information such as fingerprints and other biographic data from Afghans before they were allowed to enter the country.

However, a 2024 audit, external carried out by the US government watchdog, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), found weaknesses in the government’s ability to identify potentially negative information (such as national security concerns) about some Afghans who had entered the country under Operation Allies Welcome.

Earlier this year another OIG audit of the scheme , externalcommended the FBI for its role in screening Afghans for national security risks.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Syrian state media is now reporting that at least 10 people were killed during an overnight Israeli military operation in the village of Beit Jinn close to the border with Lebanon.

Israel says six of its soldiers were injured, three of them critically. The Israeli military (IDF) says they were fired on during the operation which was planned to arrest members of the Islamic Jihad group. The IDF accused them of planning “terrorist plots against citizens of the State of Israel.”

IDF spokesman Avichay Adraee released footage showing two air strikes. We have geolocated one of these to a central part of the village and seen corresponding footage from the ground that shows a partially collapsed building and a burned-out vehicle.

Additional footage filmed a short distance away shows what appears to be a burned out Israeli military vehicle and damage to a mosque.

The village is located less than 3km (1.8 miles) from the buffer zone between Israel and Syria which was established after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Footage has emerged showing the aftermath of a raid by Israeli troops into the southern Syrian village of Beit Jinn. Syrian state media says at least five people were killed and Israel says six of its soldiers were injured. We’ve verified footage from the village and will bring you more here shortly.

Later we’ll bring you more on the work we did to confirm the identity of the Afghan man suspected of shooting two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC. Last night US President Donald Trump announced that one of the soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, had died from her injuries.

We’ll also bring you more on the flooding in Indonesia and Sri Lanka that has killed dozens of people. We’ll use verified video to report on the devastation brought by recent heavy rain.

As ever we’re keen to investigate claims you may have seen or heard as well as any images that appear to have been made using AI. Get in touch with us here.