voice—over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. russian television says this is the moment that moscow came under attack. the bbc has not independently verified the images russian tv showed.

but from early morning, people in and around the russian capital did report hearing explosions. i heard them too. at home, my windows shook from the force of the blasts. russia's defence ministry accused ukraine of carrying out the attack, but said that russia's military had downed all the drones. ukraine has denied having anything to do with this. president putin clearly doesn't believe that. translation: the kyiv regime has chosen the path of scaring l russia and russian citizens by launching strikes on residential buildings. this is a clear sign of its terrorist activity. as they flew towards moscow, the drones sparked disbelief. "look at that", the man says. "it's right above our house!" one of the drones crashed into a high—rise apartment block. another flew into this

residential building. here is part of it on the ground. the explosives failed to detonate. the area was cordoned off and emergency services removed it. among the local residents, the sense of shock is palpable. "we are all on edge," marat says. "i don't know what we should do about it." "i fear for my life, and the lives of my loved ones," sastelena. "things are not as calm and stable as we have been told." the moscow authorities say there was minor damage and no serious injuries, and the situation is under control. but for muscovites, this drone attack is a wake—up call. a sign that this war, that many here still perceive as being far away, is coming much closer to home. that feeling has been growing since these explosions over the kremlin earlier this month. an apparent drone attack. and just days ago,

a large—scale cross—border incursion from ukraine into russian territory was another embarrassment for the russian authorities and a sign of growing insecurity. but no sign of any political u—turn. after this morning's drone attacks, this message from the kremlin is clear. what it calls the special military operation in ukraine will continue. aras amiri should now be able to look forward in her life. she is free, back in the uk, and pregnant with herfirst child. but every day her mind goes back to the prison where she was held for three years and to the friends she made in there. it's an experience that breaks many people. and it has long—lasting

effects on all of us. she was held in the much feared evin like other political prisoners, she spent time in solitary confinement. she was interrogated around the clock, blindfolded and threatened. she still has nightmares about her time there. lack of freedom is the hardest thing, the unfairness. still in evin are women who, along with nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe, became her best friends in jail. niloufar, serving a 10—year sentence, and sepideh. they are so fun and lively and generous. so much loved by all the prisoners. why them? there has been pressure on environmentalists in iran, who are just doing the job of conserving nature and wildlife in iran. also injail is houman, sepideh�*s husband, here tracking leopard footprints. this is a photo he took of a critically endangered

asiatic cheetah. this cheetah cub was being looked after by the group. while tracking wild cheetahs with cameras, they were accused of spying, although even members of the iranian government have acknowledged there is no evidence. it's incredibly unfair, every day that they are in prison. and i think already they have been through so much. i just want them to be able to be back with their families, their loved ones, nature, and to protect iran's wildlife again, which is what they have been always doing, and so dedicated to it. the director of the persian wildlife heritage foundation, kavous, died in suspicious circumstances in 2018 while under interrogation. morad tahbaz co—founded the group. he has british and american citizenship, and his family hoped he would be released alongside nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe last year, but he is still being held, along with tahar, amir hussein and sam.

aras told me they're not only important scientists, but inspiring human beings. they really shared with us the love that they have for nature. the fact that they're still kept in, that is really heat—breaking, and a big loss for iran. she thinks of them every day and says her heart burns for them and for all they have endured. a myanmar militaryjet circles a primary school.

when they think it's safe, they run. but the plane circles back. across myanmar, the military is carrying out increasingly deadlier strikes. on the ground, they are struggling to suppress an armed uprising, demanding democracy. so they have taken this war against their own people to the sky. translation: they are under attack by revolutionary forces | and they don't have enough men to fight back. so now the air force is very important to the military. what would the myanmar military�*s strength be like without the air

force? without the air force, it is very likely that the military would fall. before defecting, captain zay thu aung upgraded the capital's airport for the arrival of advanced fighter jets. we prepared for six su—30s, we built three open sheds. so far, two of the sukhoi—30s have arrived from russia. they are the most powerfuljets in the air force's arsenal. altogether, more than 50 people were sent to russia to get training, to operate these jets. captain aung didn't want to be one of those pilots. after 18 years in the air force, he fled with his family across the border to thailand. i saw that they killed people. i don't like that wicked behaviour.

i didn't like their cruelty against the people whom they are meant to protect. in the air, this is how the resistance is trying to fight back. 25—year—old khin sein leads a group of female drone bombers. they adapt civilian drones to carry home—made bombs, and rely on public donations. translation: compared with a plane, our- drone is like a sesame seed. if we fly high, like 300 metres above, they don't even know that we are coming. so we can attack them effectively and they are scared of drones. but the military is dominating the sky, carrying out devastating attacks on civilian targets, including schools and hospitals.

this is the aftermath of the bombing on a busy food market in syria. more than 30 people killed. here are bodies of ukrainian civilians, shot and burned by russian soldiers. these videos, that were posted online, show evidence of potential war crimes. but look on the big social media platforms and you won't find them anymore. violent images are being

removed for breaking rules on graphic content. but that means evidence needed to prosecute war criminals can be lost, and for good. whether or not the social media companies publish it or take it down, you cannot afford to lose this material. these videos, these images, very graphic. but it is important, because the world needs to know what is happening.

ten years ago, imad owned a pharmacy near the local market in his hometown of aleppo, syria. he was at work when a barrel bomb hit the area. it was an attack by the syrian government. imad's friends and customers among the dead. he now lives in france. we have hidden his identity to protect his family back home. it is still hard for him to talk about what happened.

he remembers a local tv company filming the attack, and had seen the footage online. years later, when applying for asylum in the eu, he looked for it again. removed by facebook, twitter and youtube for breaking rules on graphic content, in the chaos of the country at war, the original footage was also lost.

it appeared the image showing evidence of potential war crimes were missing for good. and here lies the problem. social media companies have long been criticised for allowing easy access to distressing content. now they are increasingly cracking down swiftly to delete it, but by deleting it, evidence of crime and abuse can be lost forever. the social media companies are being overcautious. they have copped a lot of criticism over the years for leaving graphic, violent stuff up. i think their instincts are to over moderate now and to take stuff down, because that seems like the course of least resistance. most of this content is taken down by artificial intelligence, automatically finding things like violence, pornography and child abuse, and we wanted to see how it works, so we contacted a company called hive that helps companies such as facebook and reddit to monitor

their programme. the program it searches for blood, corpses or nudity and gives a score from zero to one, a higher score meaning the machine is more confident in what it identified, and it correctly found dead bodies and in our videos, like these which got more than zero point nine. it is likely that this video will be removed automatically without being flagged for review, but it lacks the ability to spot human rights violations. you could see why they have developed and trained their machines whenever they see something that looks difficult or traumatic, to take it down. i think the next question for them is — how do we develop the machinery to then make more reasonable decisions? major content believes graphic content can stay online if it's in the interests. but our experiments suggest the opposite.

we decided to see what the platforms would do with the videos we tested. instagram took down three of four within a minute. youtube age restricted the same three, but ten minutes later and removed them all, then gave us this morning. they failed to upload altogether after we tried again. 0ur appeal to restore the videos was rejected. the videos we tried to upload were filmed by igor from ukraine. he used to be a travel journalist, but since

the russian invasion, he's been documenting attacks on civilians. like this one on a road outside kyiv. igor posted the videos on facebook and instagram, they were immediately taken down. he wanted to share the images to challenge the kremlin�*s claim that the murder of civilians never happened.

the russian war in ukraine has been called the most documented in history. so why does it matter that a few videos are being deleted? open source investigators say the loss of even one visual record could weaken their understanding of the whole event, whether it's in ukraine, syria or elsewhere, and proving that war crimes have been committed is incredibly hard, so getting as many sources as possible is vital. because it's almost like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.

some angle, like this one, can help us understand the direction of travel of missiles, for example, in some of the other videos, and you can see here it's blurred, the footage is here for you, but for my colleagues, it's really important to understand how a person was wounded, and what caused the death, and the close—ups of videos can really help us determine that. in order to save videos like these, some have taken it upon themselves to preserve them. this is a video of a bombing of a central hospital in ukraine. this is a video of shooting protesters in sudan. this is an archiving organisation based in berlin. their small team has created a tool that quickly and automatically downloads and preserves footage from war zones before it's deleted. on a daily basis, we monitor different countries for any

content that is uploaded to social media. we archive this content related to different types of human violations, such as the use of illegal munitions such as chemical weapons, or a cluster munition. they have saved well over 700,000 images from war zones, before they were removed from social media. including three videos of the attack on the market in aleppo, where emad witnessed his friends and customers die. they can only focus on a couple of areas of conflict, leaving others to fill the gaps. rawal lives in the united states and has family in ethiopia's northern tigray region. in recent years, the country has been

wracked with violence. i knew what i was looking at was horrible, i've never looked at stuff like that before. from her new york flat, she spends her spare time watching videos with dead bodies. it's been two years now. it was your sense of duty. it was just hard. i think the work was hard, i spent hours doing research and so when you are seeing this content trickle in and you are trying to verify it using whatever open source intelligence tools you can get your hands on, but you don't know if yourfamily is ok, that's really hard. shootings, massacres, mutilation — all of these were saved by rawa and other members of her community.

she says they feel compelled to document what is happening thousands of miles away as ethiopia's authorities tightly control the flow of information. all we had outside of regional and government backed tv programmes that were coming out, the only glimpse in to what was going on back home was through social media. we all felt that we had the responsibility to archive this information and be active online, to preserve this event, but i've seen things already get deleted and, as a community, we tried to track some videos down and we could not. when videos are deleted, they pretty much become inaccessible. social media companies don't have any obligation to give them to human rights group or lawyers, the only organisations that can demand access our law enforcement agencies, but even this is not straightforward. investigators need to provide the precise url for the video they are looking for,

which might be years after the incident. the complicated process and huge time involved is why the us state department's office of global criminaljustice says content must be preserved for years. tech companies have a role to play here in recognising that while these wheels ofjustice do turn slowly, they do turn indelibly, so this information could be critically important. we have already had situations in which the information that was on social media platforms such as facebook otherwise has been used as evidence in a court of law, and so we need to be able to preserve this so that the potential evidentiary value can later be mined when we have a better understanding about what happened and who might be responsible. human rights organisation say the answer is to warn users the video is graphic, also to remove it or archive it. this would protect people while allowing the videos to be preserved for possible future use as evidence. we are asking the social

media companies to allow for a system that international investigators could use to get access to content that's been taken down to investigate potential war crimes. activists say the major social media platforms are open to the idea, but have yet to act. we have been engaging with companies for years now on this topic, and in these meetings they say all the right things, they say they are dedicated to ensuring accountability and they want their platforms to help ensure that accountability. in reality, they have not been willing to take any real tangible steps to solve this bigger problem. we asked youtube, twitter and meta, the owner of facebook and instagram, what they think about that idea and requested an interview. they declined. meta and youtube sent comments.

meanwhile, people affected by wars are doing what they can to ensure evidence and history aren't lost. when i'm thinking about what does justice look like, it's really putting this material forward to show that we haven't forgotten about you.

hello, there. you've probably noticed the weather not really changing very much over recent times, and that's because high pressure's been firmly dominating. and with high pressure around, it's not rained very much anywhere. but in warwickshire, in church lawford, you have to go back to may 11 — that was the last time it rained — so that's nearly four weeks of dry weather. some of the warmest weather has been across in northern ireland, county tyrone. it's been very warm in castlederg for the last nine days, but five of these recent days have seen temperatures reach 2a degrees — that's six above average. now, it's the west that had the highest temperatures again on tuesday, but england, stuck underneath this area of cloud, had much lower temperatures in many areas — for example, in leek, in staffordshire, 18 degrees on monday, 12 degrees on tuesday. we also had some cloud dropping the temperatures in parts of west scotland as well.

now, over the next few hours, we're seeing that cloud again thicken up across parts of england, wales, northern and eastern scotland. you might find a few spots of drizzle, although predominantly, it will be a dry start to the day on wednesday. the best of the early—morning sunshine, like recent times, will be across these western areas of the country. could be a few mist patches clearing and lifting, and then the sunshine comes out. i think there is a better chance of seeing this cloud break up across the midlands, east wales, so you probably will see some sunshine. but there could be some areas of eastern england again that keep the cloud all day. where that happens, temperatures into the teens — but otherwise, i think more of us will see temperatures into the low 20s. and with those sunny conditions out west, we'll see some very high levels of pollen building in across parts of england and wales, so it could be quite a sneezy day for hay—fever sufferers allergic to grass pollen. now, for thursday, again, there could be a bit of cloud around across eastern areas — probably east scotland, northeast england, the favoured spots for holding on to that. but otherwise, plenty of sunshine around, and those temperatures again reaching the mid—20s in the very warmest areas.

we then do start to see a change, courtesy of this storm system — storm 0scar — that's been bringing some torrential rain to madeira. what that's going to do — it moves to the southwest of the uk, and it shoves a load of humid air across the country. and so, we'll see a change in the weather conditions as we head into the weekend. as it turns more humid, we'll start to see some showers and thunderstorms break out. and although the rain from these will be hit and miss in nature, some could see the first significant rain for four weeks.

live from washington.