BBC Verify Live: What satellite images tell us about damage in Iran
Date: 10:34 BST
Title: How we're tracking developments in Iran-Israel conflict
Content: Emma PengellyBBC Verify journalist
Iranians wave national flags during a demonstration in Tehran, Iran, on Sunday
As we've been reporting, overnight on Saturday the US confirmed it had bombed three nuclear sites in Iran in an operation that it says was months in the planning.
Among the key outstanding questions are:
We'll be monitoring user-generated content appearing on social media and satellite imagery for further developments.
After the US attack, Israel and Iran continued to exchange fire on Sunday. In Yazd, central Iran, we verified a video of large explosions. According to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-affiliated Tasnim news agency, nine people were killed in the attack.
The amount of footage coming out of Iran remains relatively sparse. BBC journalists are unable to report from inside Iran due to restrictions by the country's government, making it difficult to assess the damage.
Also, with internet monitoring organisation Netblocks continuing to report, external an 'internet shutdown' in the country, access to social media videos and images has been very limited.
Update:
Date: 10:08 BST
Title: ICYMI: Satellite images of Iran show craters at Fordo after US bombing
Content: Benedict GarmanBBC Verify senior journalist
Satellite imagery that we looked at on Sunday shows the aftermath of US strikes on Iran's underground nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo.
High-resolution images from Maxar Technologies taken 22 June show six craters - likely the entry points for US munitions - as well as grey dust and debris scattered down the mountainside caused by the strikes.
We previously wrote about the type of "bunker buster" munitions required for a strike on a deep underground facility like this: a bomb called a Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). On Sunday, the Pentagon confirmed they were used as part of its operation.
Senior imagery analyst at McKenzie Intelligence Services, Stu Ray, told BBC Verify: "You will not see a huge blast effect at the entry point as it is not designed to detonate on entry but deeper down into the facility."
He added that it looks like three separate munitions were dropped on two separate impact points, and that the grey colouration on the ground appears to show concrete debris blown out by the explosions.
Ray also said the tunnel entrances appear to have been blocked off. As there are no visible craters or impact points near them, he suggests this may have been an Iranian attempt to "mitigate against deliberate targeting of the entrances by aerial bombardment".
It's uncertain how much damage the strikes have caused to the nuclear site itself. In the days leading up to the strike, Iran seem to have been taking actions to anticipate them, as we reported earlier.
Update:
Date: 09:56 BST
Title: Monday at BBC Verify
Content: Johanna ChisholmBBC Verify Live editor
Good morning from the team in the BBC's newsroom in London.
You join us more than 24 hours after it was confirmed that the US had carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. This coming more than a week after the conflict between Israel and Iran escalated.
We spent Sunday analysing satellite images, which begin to show the damage from those US strikes - we'll bring you more of that in our next few posts.
We're continuing to track developments in the Middle East today, as we try to get a clearer picture of how those strikes have impacted Iran's nuclear programme.
Our fact-check team is also across the government's new 10-year industrial strategy - which could see energy bills slashed by up to 25% for more than 7,000 UK businesses - and is set to be unveiled later today.
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Spectator
11 hours ago
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Why is it still acceptable to abuse men with long hair?
It was a hairy situation. At a drab corporate dinner in a posh hotel basement, one of my fellow diners grew increasingly prickly. My publication had committed some slight against him – perhaps passing him over for one of our phoney awards, more likely misspelling his name. Unassuaged by my non-apologies, the fur was beginning to fly, though with as much ferocity as Bagpuss might muster. As my assailant stared at my luscious locks cascading onto my chest, he decided things must get personal. He leant across the table and yelled: 'And get your hair cut!' The advice wasn't without merit; I'm perennially in need of a trim. But the incident spoke to something darker in the soul of British men, borne of frustration, drink, and perhaps subconscious lust. It is one of the last acceptable prejudices in modern Britain: barnets. The topic is an unlikely point of agreement between white contrarian hipsters and racial justice activists. Earlier this year, a group of the latter launched a petition to end 'hair discrimination' against people sporting afros, braids or dreadlocks, a phenomenon that has 'destroyed' some of those affected, as social entrepreneur Salha Kaitesi recently told the BBC. Whether facing unwanted contact, comments or professional chastisement, those with traditional black hairstyles argue they should be left alone. 'By discriminating against us, you're literally just saying we shouldn't belong or we shouldn't be who we are,' Kaitesi said. It's a new spin on a fashionable cause, at least. And as befits the vogue for legal boilerplating, her campaign calls for the Equality Act to be rewritten to make explicit mention of hair discrimination. This is despite the fact that the legislation already covers hairstyles worn because of cultural, family and social customs. The politics of hair is nothing new. Even two decades ago, my own all-boys secondary school carved out generous exemptions for bewhiskered pupils. While the official policy was not far off short back and sides with a clean shave, South Asian classmates were sufficiently numerous to make a mockery of having any standard at all. Such liberalism has crept into working life, as a stroll around any office would show you. Even the City of London, that bastion of stuffy privilege, now hosts a vivid array of barnets. The easing of dress codes has coincided with laxer rules about hair, perhaps encouraged by growing diversity in the workplace. Keep it kempt and you can often get away with anything. Or at least you can most of the time. For while the socially-astute conformists will know to avoid a brush with race relations law, white men with long hair are still fair game for follicular abuse. To paraphrase famous baldy Gregg Wallace, 'men of a certain age' are frequently forthright in expressing their distaste, as if traditional British mores haven't been suffering an unbroken series of catastrophic defeats since the 1960s. In that decade, lengthier styles on men were indicative of everything from mere idleness to the worst seditions: communism, anarchism and sexual deviancy. Long-haired men at the time report being refused service at pubs, subjected to a non-consensual trim, or in grimmer cases even beaten up. The correlation between barber abstinence and disobedience is true, of course. As Graham Nash once put it, long hair 'was a flag, it was a symbol of rebellion, of a new way of thinking, of a tantalising of your parents, a finger in the face of convention'. As well as symbolising good music taste and access to decent drugs, it was most of all a threat to the establishment. Perhaps then the man who heckled my flowing locks outside a Redhill pub some years ago was continuing in that tradition of defending the beliefs of every right-thinking person. Something similar may well be true of the Millwall fans who called out to their Lord and Saviour on seeing a friend of mine the other side of a security barrier – though in fairness, he does rather look like Jesus. But I suspect at its heart the verbal attacks on the long-hairs owe most to sexual jealousy from the baldies. Certainly many women cannot resist a floppy fringe after a few drinks, if only for the shampoo recommendations. It is hardly nit-picking to argue that men and women of all colours and creeds should be allowed to wear their hair how they like, if only to prop up one of the few AI-proof industries Britain has left and maintain a steady supply of hirsute tribute acts as rock pioneers die off. The government must act to end this disgraceful prejudice – at least once it's fixed the economy.
The National
12 hours ago
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Times
15 hours ago
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Liberal Britain's had its fill of illegal immigration. Why now?
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We need something new.' • Will UK-France treaty stop small boat crossings? The deal explained The same shift in tone has taken place across Europe, where the Schengen free movement zone is becoming increasingly constricted. Ten years ago this month, Angela Merkel famously told Germany 'Wir schaffen das' — we can manage this — as she opened her country's doors to a wave of Syrian migration. Today, Germany has introduced enhanced border checks, as have Austria, Poland and Sweden. We have clearly passed an inflection point in Britain, too. But why? What changed? Some of the answers are staring us directly in the face. As the home secretary pointed out on Tuesday, we are now 400 weeks into the small boats crisis and more than 25,000 people have come this year already, which is a record. America's re-election of Donald Trump, who has effectively shut down the asylum system on his own southern border, along with Reform's surge in domestic opinion polls, has also highlighted just how fed up many voters are with a system that has seemingly veered out of control. Polite opinion is belatedly responding to this shift. 'Attitudes have hardened around asylum because of the visible lack of control in the Channel and around asylum hotels,' says Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think tank. 'It's the visibility of it.' The particular imagery of boats landing on beaches provokes an atavistic recoil from many in this country, which has always seen the Channel as its moat, protecting Britain from unwanted continental advances. 'Boats are more worrying than Eurostar trains and lorries,' says Katwala. The roots of our current predicament go back decades, though, well beyond Trump or Reform. There were, of course, rows and riots over Commonwealth migration in the 1950s and 60s, culminating in Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. But our contemporary debate over immigration really began in 1997 with the election of Tony Blair. Net migration almost tripled in the first year of the Blair government, which relaxed rules around work and study visas. Blair was committed to his vision of a cosmopolitan, open-minded Britain, and keen for the economic benefits of immigration. And so, in 2004, as the European Union prepared for the accession of eight new eastern European countries, Blair made a fateful decision. Rather than adopt transitional controls of up to seven years on migrants from the new countries, Britain became the only major EU country not to apply temporary restrictions. At the time, government estimates put the maximum expected number of eastern European migrants at 13,000 a year. But almost half a million came in the four years that followed. 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This provoked a huge row, with Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, calling the speech 'very unwise' and saying it risked 'inflaming extremism'. Migration did drop briefly in the early years of the Cameron government, though nowhere close to the prime minister's stated target. But by now the world had entered the era of the smartphone, in which hyper-mobile migrants (and people-smuggling gangs) were able to communicate and move across continents with far greater ease. The internet meant Britain's pull factors — relative wealth, generous welfare provision, a large and poorly regulated grey economy, old imperial connections and use of the global lingua franca — became ever more apparent and appealing to far-flung populations. Combined with this were rising push factors, such as mounting war and instability. The number of people forcibly displaced by conflict doubled between 2015 and 2024, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The human exodus caused by the Syrian civil war was heartrending, but by 2015 the hardening response to it also highlighted the limits of public sympathy on migration across Europe. Between 2014 and 2016, John Dalhuisen was the director for Europe of Amnesty International Global, at the heart of its response to the crisis and a staunch critic of the 'one in, one out' deal between the EU and Turkey signed in March 2016. Then he had a change of heart. 'By 2017 I realised I was badly wrong,' he says. 'It was a volte-face.' He now runs the European Stability Initiative with Gerald Knaus, who helped broker the 2016 deal with Turkey that significantly reduced the flow of boat crossings. (Under the deal, a Syrian migrant arriving by boat in Greece was sent back to Turkey; in return a Syrian asylum seeker from Turkey was let in to the EU.) 'I never really abandoned the underlying principles, I just felt the [human] rights folk were miscalculating,' he says. 'There was a flat refusal to acknowledge an underlying political reality, which is that if societies are offered a choice between open borders or borders closed cruelly, they will choose the latter. We've seen that everywhere, again and again. The politicians have to offer control. Asylum for all is a beautiful moral intuition but it's not politically achievable.' Does the former Amnesty International man not worry about pandering to public sentiment that is arguably driven, at least in part, by xenophobia and racism? Isn't he letting the right set the terms of the debate? 'Is it pandering? Yes and no. The ultimate objective is to prevent really quite toxic political forces from coming into power. If you care about a rights framework, you need to keep these people out of power.' The small boats era began with a handful of Channel crossings in late 2018, as smugglers shifted from using lorries and ferries. Numbers peaked at more than 45,000 in 2022, although this year is on track to exceed that. In March 2020, under pandemic conditions, the government also began housing some asylum seekers in hotel accommodation as an emergency measure. By 2023, some 50,000 asylum seekers were living in hotels, costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a day. Alongside this, legal migration soared too. In 2021, Boris Johnson's government made a very Blair 2004 choice, taking the post-Brexit decision to liberalise visa applications from the rest of the world. The idea, as Priti Patel, the home secretary at the time, has put it, was to attract the 'brightest and best' to work in care homes, IT companies and at universities, hopefully boosting our flaccid economic growth. But again, the government drastically underestimated how many would come. In 2023, net migration reached a remarkable 906,000. 'People were understandably surprised by this,' says Davis. 'It was politically tone deaf. The Treasury as an entire department is like a drug addict, addicted to using the increase in the size of the workforce to grow the economy rather than improving productivity. They had allowed a whole load of industries to become dependent on it — hospitality, agriculture. They couldn't give up their supply.' Many of the Johnson-era visa rules were subsequently tweaked and immigration this year is expected to be less than half the 2023 number, at about 350,000. But with illegal migration still soaring, pictures of boats crossing the Channel daily still dominating the television news channels, and Sir Keir Starmer's promise to stop them proceeding slower than a Dieppe ferry, public anger remains high, which explains why that Overton window keeps moving. According to YouGov's opinion tracker, some 56 per cent of people think immigration and asylum is the most important issue facing this country, coming in first ahead of the economy on 46 per cent. The problem, Dalhuisen points out, is not just uncontrolled immigration itself but the perception of government impotence. 'People sense there's something wrong with the entire system,' he says. 'That's a dangerous and febrile position to be in.' Yet if (and it is a big if) something like the one in, one out scheme with France does actually work, and can be expanded across Europe, then Katwala believes the government has a chance of weathering this issue politically. 'If Starmer visibly has control, he would be in a more comfortable position,' he says. 'Net numbers are coming down and immigration's salience isn't as high for Labour voters. I think he's got a shot at this issue, if he can show that co-operation leads to some control.'
