"European Parliament votes to create 'BERLIN TIME' that UK could be forced to adopt". That was the colourful claim from British tabloid the Daily Express on March 26. The article claims that MEPs have voted to "advance plans to shift to Berlin time in 2021". Although some elements of the article are correct, no specific time zone is being imposed in the EU. We tell you more.

This story originated with a false declaration by the head of the European election candidate list for France's far-right Rassemblement National party, previously known as the Front National. During an election rally, Jordan Bardella claimed that the EU's international trade treaties were allowing imports into France of "hormone beef, genetically modified salmon and chlorine-washed chicken". Actually, none of these products are commercially available in the EU, neither home-grown nor as imports.

Multiple articles have been published in various languages, claiming that Sweden has banned mandatory vaccinations. They appear to come from a communiqué put out by the controversial American alternative therapy lobby group that calls itself the National Health Federation. According to the various stories, this ban was inspired by a claim that mandatory vaccines went against the Swedish constitutional right to choose one's healthcare. So what actually happened? We tell you more.

On February 17, the British tabloid The Sun on Sunday claimed to have uncovered a "secret" EU plan to avert chaos if the UK leaves the bloc on a no-deal basis. The Sun on Sunday describes this as "key documents quietly slipped out by Brussels". The UK's former Brexit minister Dominic Raab then tweeted the story, asking "why so little coverage"? The answer is that the so-called "secret plan" wasn't in fact a secret at all. We tell you more.

This is a recurring piece of fake news in Georgia, where more than 80% of the population follows the Eastern Orthodox traditions. It seems to have originated on the Georgian news site Mediacity.ge in late 2016. Mediacity claims that the European Parliament's foreign relations committee adopted a resolution equating the Orthodox Church with the Islamic State group. In reality, the resolution calls on EU institutions to beef up their responses to propaganda sponsored by the Russian government.

Is Turkey joining the EU? That was a claim made back in 2016, in one of nearly 1,600 pro-Brexit adverts run by the official Brexit campaign, "Vote Leave" and two associated campaigns, "BeLeave" and "DUP Vote to Leave". At the time the advert was produced, Turkey was involved in accession negotiations. This means it had applied to be a member and was negotiating with the EU - but the process is not a guarantee of membership.

Is France about to hand over its Alsace and Lorraine regions to Germany? This claim was widely shared by web users in January 2019 as France and Germany prepared to sign a new cooperation treaty. It originated with a now-deleted video, made by French MEP Bernard Monot – a former member of the far-right National Front party, and now with the politically similar France Arise movement. The text of the treaty is publicly available, and it contains no mention of territorial handovers of any kind.

This story was put about by an American conservative activist called Charlie Kirk on December 3, 2018 – and retweeted by US President Donald Trump. Kirk’s tweet lists claims about the Yellow Vest movement in France, including that the phrase "We want Trump" was being chanted in Paris. But as AFP Fact Check have pointed out, this video is not from France, and is not even a recent recording. We tell you where the video really comes from.

In this episode of Fact or Fake, we focus on a Swedish website with close ties to far-right and anti-immigrant groups. In November 2018, it published several false claims about the UN migration pact. Among them was a petition claiming the UN text would "consider illegal immigration to be a human right". The website also falsely claimed that negative reporting on immigration would be banned. We take a closer look.

For a couple of weeks, a photo has been doing the rounds on certain European news sites. It shows a credit card, with the logos of the European Union and the United Nations refugee agency. According to websites including Voice of Europe and Slovenia's Nova 24, this card is distributed to undocumented migrants to finance their travels across Europe. We've checked the claims – and they're totally false.

In this episode of Fact or Fake, we look at a claim made by Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. At the end of September 2018, he asserted that charity rescue ships were bringing "hundreds of thousands of immigrants each day" to Italian shores. Salvini made the comments in an interview with the right-wing French news magazine Valeurs Actuelles. We've checked, and the numbers are vastly exaggerated.

On October 30, 2018, one of Italy's Five-Star Movement's official Twitter accounts tweeted a video with an Italian translation of Jeroen Dijsselbloem. He's the former head of the Eurogroup, which shapes eurozone policy. He gave the original interview in English to TV network CNBC. In the tweeted video, the Italian voiceover says Dijsselbloem is "openly inviting the markets to launch an attack on Italian finances." In the original video, however, Dijsselbloem makes no such statement.

Have British MEPs "forgotten" their staff? This story originated in the UK’s Daily Express newspaper. All British members of the European Parliament are supposed to stop working as MEPs once the UK leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. The newspaper claims that the contracts and salary payments of all 73 of them will continue for three months after that date. It also contends that MEPs' staff will receive no such redundancy payments. But there are three major problems with the report, as we explain.

Russian business news website Gazeta.ru reported that Angela Merkel publicly snubbed Theresa May at the informal EU summit in Salzburg on September 20, 2018. The article states that the German chancellor deliberately "humiliated" the British prime minister by refusing to shake her hand. According to the website, Merkel was taking revenge for Brexit. But the two women had in fact met and spoken earlier in the day - and therefore had no need to say another "hello" at this later point.