BBC Verify Live: Costing winter fuel U-turn and fact-checking immigration claims

Ned Davies
BBC Verify open source investigator

On Sunday, an aid vessel carrying activists – including Greta Thunberg – bound for the Gaza Strip was intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The ship, named the Madleen, is operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FCC) – a group that says it’s working “to end the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza”.

BBC Verify has been looking at claims by the FCC that the vessel was intercepted in “international waters”. These are areas of water outside the territorial jurisdiction of any one country – normally 12 nautical miles (22km, 13 miles) from any coastline.

The FFC says that Israel “disregarded the international laws protecting civilian navigation”.

As a UK-registered vessel (listed under its formal name, the Barcarole) it would, in international waters, be subject to UK laws and regulations, under the protection of the UK.

Maritime lawyer Benjamin Maltby told the BBC that it would be highly unusual for a country to intercept and board a vessel registered to another country in international waters, adding that the move could be considered provocative.

The co-ordinates where the FFC claimed the interception occurred are 80km (50 miles) north of the Egyptian coastline, and around 200km (125 miles) from the coast of Gaza.

We have analysed information from MarineTraffic, which publishes data broadcast by vessels’ automatic identification system (AIS), as well as data from a tracking system installed onboard by the investigative group Forensic Architecture.

The location and time of the Madleen’s interception given by the FFC is consistent with the speeds, directions, and locations being broadcast by these two systems in the hours before the incident. There were no known Israeli naval vessels broadcasting their locations in the area at the time.

The IDF has been approached for comment on the location and legality of the interception. They have previously acknowledged that the Madleen was intercepted, and was being taking to an Israeli port.

• Follow our separate page for live updates on the aid boat

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Nato secretary general Mark Rutte is meeting Keir Starmer today and is expected to make a speech calling for members to increase their defence spending, possibly to as much as 5% of the size of their economies measured by GDP.

But it’s not clear what steps he will take to ensure that they do so, bearing in mind that nine Nato members did not achieve the previous target of 2% last year, according to the latest Nato estimates.

Defence spending under Nato’s definition already includes spending on pensions for retired soldiers and civilian employees of military departments.

The 5% is likely to include 3.5% of GDP on core defence spending, while the remaining 1.5% will be made up of “defence-related expenditure”, a somewhat vague term, which Rutte said could include the costs of infrastructure and industry.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

A bit earlier, we brought you details from the government’s announcement that more than 75% of pensioners will be eligible for winter fuel payment this coming winter in England and Wales.

We will not have the costings of this policy change checked by the independent forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), until the Budget is delivered in November.

The government says changing the threshold for getting the payment to £35,000 will cost £1.25bn and will be about £450m cheaper than giving the £200 or £300 payment to all pensioner households.

There may also be some administrative costs to making the change.

The government has said that there will not be “permanent additional borrowing” as a result of this change.

That could imply a £1.25bn cut to spending or the government perhaps raising more through taxation to pay for it.

Kayleen Devlin
BBC Verify senior journalist

There’s a lot of footage circulating online of the Los Angeles protests, and we’re working on verifying some of the earliest footage available. We’re going beyond what news agencies are filing, as we dig through videos and images uploaded by people at the scene.

The earliest footage we have verified so far is from Saturday 7 June. In it, we can see a car on fire near a Dale’s Donut store in Compton, south of downtown Los Angeles.

People in the video can be seen standing near the vehicle waving Mexican flags.

Pictures of the scene show the same car in flames with law enforcement officers standing nearby holding weapons – in one image, you can see tear gas being fired. We can tell this occurred shortly after the video was captured as the car is more severely damaged by fire.

In a separate video, taken on Sunday, it shows a line of Waymo self-driving taxis in flames. We reverse image searched and geolocated that footage to Los Angeles Street in downtown LA.

According to local reports, a group of demonstrators approached the taxis at about 17:00 local time (01:00 BST).

Elsewhere in downtown LA, we’ve verified footage of protesters smashing windows at the LAPD headquarters – one of them can be seen using a skateboard. This is most likely to have been filmed on Sunday evening as it’s nighttime footage which first appeared online on Monday morning.

We are continuing to verify online footage of the protests to build up a picture of what happened and when.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

President Trump’s US travel ban comes into force today, affecting foreign nationals of 12 countries. People from seven other countries face travel restrictions.

Last week, BBC Verify looked at the US government’s justifications for these measures.

The rate at which people overstay their visas was given as a reason for nearly every country facing the ban.

But what threshold of overstay rates must be met for a country to be placed on Trump’s ban list isn’t clear.

For example, Chad – which is on the list – had an overstay rate of nearly 50% for business and tourist visas in 2023. But this equated to just 377 over stayers.

Whereas in the same year, Colombia – which isn’t on the list – had an overstay rate of just 4% for this visa type.

While the proportion of people who overstay is relatively small, this equates to some 40,000 Columbians staying in the US beyond their visa expiry.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

President Trump and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said US Marine troops may be mobilised, if the unrest in Los Angeles continues.

Some online have questioned the legality of this and California Governor Gavin Newsom has said “threatening to deploy active-duty Marines… is deranged behaviour”.

It wouldn’t be the first time in US history that this has happened though.

About 1,500 Marines were deployed to LA during the riots of May 1992, which followed the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man.

The president at the time, George H W Bush, used a mechanism called the Insurrection Act to deploy the Marines.

This law gives the president the power to use US military personnel domestically to assist civilian authorities, for example in law enforcement.

“Federal military participation in civilian law enforcement like this has been rare, particularly over the past half century,” says the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Center says that – according to US law – the Insurrection Act should be used “only in a crisis that is truly beyond the capacity of civilian authorities to manage”.

But, it adds, because the Act doesn’t clearly define the situations in which it can be used, it gives the president “significant power” to decide when and where to deploy military personnel on American soil.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has just announced that more than three quarters of pensioners – nine million people – will be eligible for winter fuel payment this coming winter in England and Wales.

• Follow our separate live page for updates on the government’s policy change on winter fuel payment

The threshold to lose the £200 or £300 payment will be having an individual in the household having an income of £35,000 or above.

The previous system of restricting the payment to those receiving Pension Credit was based on household income instead of individual income.

It will now be treated similarly to child benefit, which people who are not eligible for have to repay by completing a tax return.

But the government says the new system will not mean lots of pensioners having to fill out tax returns because the money will be automatically clawed back.

• For context: More than 10 million pensioners lost out on the payments, worth up to £300, when they became means-tested last year

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify senior journalist

Protests in Los Angeles against immigration raids in the US are continuing for a third day. A bit earlier, we heard from former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg, who claimed to BBC News that:

“The Biden White House admitted that – at least according to them – they had 11 million illegal immigrants enter the country.”

There were more than 10 million border “encounters” during President Biden’s time in office, according to US Customs and Border Protection.

While that number is historically high, it doesn’t mean this many people came into the US and stayed illegally.

Some would have attempted to cross the border multiple times and been counted more than once and others would have been apprehended and removed. The numbers also include people who tried to enter the country legally and were deemed “inadmissible”.

Separate figures – from the the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – estimate there were 11 million unauthorised migrants living in the US in 2022.

However, this number reflects the total population of unauthorised immigrants – not how many arrived under Biden.

The DHS data show the estimated illegal migrant population has remained relatively stable:

• 2010: 11.6 million
• 2020: 10.5 million (*during President Trump’s first term)
• 2022: 11 million (*under President Biden)

BBC Verify has previously investigated illegal immigration in the US, which you can read more about here.

Matt Murphy
BBC Verify digital lead

One of BBC Verify’s key roles is authenticating clips and images circulating online, which our reporters may want to rely on in news stories.

We do this by examining features in the clips which could help locate the images and verify whether it is where the poster says it is.

Landmarks such as trees, signs and even road or footpath layouts can give clues about where a clip is. They are then cross-referenced with other images we already know are from the location, such as images online and satellite data.

We will also run the video through a reverse image search to establish when the footage first appeared online.

If the clip has not previously appeared in search results that it a good indication that it is new.

We’re currently poring over video footage and images shared online in recent days to piece together the scale of the Los Angeles protests – we’ll bring you the result of this work a bit later on.

Ukraine dubbed its operation inside Russia on 1 June “Spider’s Web”.

New information continues to emerge about the daring series of drone attacks at multiple locations inside Russia.

BBC Analysis Editor Ros Atkins and the BBC Verify team have been assessing a range of material – from satellite images to drone footage – to build up a picture of what happened and how it was done.

Johanna Chisholm
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning and
welcome back to BBC Verify’s rolling live coverage, where we’ll be posting
updates from our team working on fact-checks, online open-source gathering,
disinformation debunking and data journalism.

We’ve just finished
our morning meeting, and the main prospects that our team will be across today
include:

• We’re geolocating and chronolocating videos to track the scale of the Los Angeles protests that unfolded over
  the weekend in response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids
• We’re also fact-checking the White House’s claims about
  illegal immigration in the US
• And using online mapping tools, we’re trying to geolocate where the aid ship carrying activists – including Greta Thunberg – was intercepted by the IDF after trying to reach the Gaza Strip

Plus, we’ll be looking out for more
details after the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said they found the body of a Hamas chief in a tunnel underneath the European Hospital in the
southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday.