الكاتب: kafej

Rwanda’s government has attacked what it called a “disappointing” verdict from the UK’s top court which ruled a scheme to deport asylum seekers to the African country was unlawful.

The UK government suffered a major setback over its Rwanda scheme when the plan was dismissed by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

But a spokesperson for Rwanda’s government rejected the idea the East African country was unsafe for refugees, and argued there was “nothing wrong” with how it processes asylum claims.

Spokesperson Yolande Makolo told Sky News the judgment had been based on “hypocritical” and “dishonest” assessments by the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR).

Asked what she made of the verdict, she said: “It’s ultimately a decision for the UK judicial system. It’s disappointing – we have a really good record of hosting and welcoming migrants and refugees in this country.”

Rwanda remains “committed” to the partnership and is “ready” to receive migrants, she said.

The Supreme Court had said in its unanimous judgment that those sent to Rwanda would be at “real risk” of being returned home, whether their grounds to claim asylum were justified or not – breaching international law.

Sky’s Mark Austin pressed Ms Makolo on this, to which she said the court had been referring to the risk of refoulment – the forcible return of refugees or asylum seekers to a country they could be subjected to persecution – and that this was based on “hypocritical criticism from the UNHCR”.

She said Rwanda had worked with the UNHCR for a “long time” and had not refouled anyone.

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The first case of a strain of feline coronovirus that has killed thousands of cats in Cyprus has been found in the UK.

In the words of one of the leading experts on the virus, it is “pretty terrifying”.

Professor Danielle Gunn-Moore from Edinburgh University has spent more than two decades researching the illness.

She tells Sky News it’s likely the case traced by scientists wasn’t the first to reach the country – and it’s almost certain to crop up again.

Here’s what you need to know about why this strain is different, the symptoms cat owners should look out for and when you should act.

What happened in Cyprus?

A feline coronavirus started spreading through Cyprus, known as the “island of cats”, in January.

The deadly mutation of the virus is called feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), and is generally fatal unless treated.

Upwards of 8,000 cats died on the island – some reports put the number as high as 300,000.

Infected cats started receiving a human COVID-19 treatment from August, which Professor Gunn-Moore says had been effective in treating the illness.

What is different about the Cyprus strain?

The strain that originated in Cyprus is a recombination of a feline coronavirus and a canine coronavirus, and is called F-CoV-23.

It’s “particularly nasty”, Professor Gunn-Moore says, because it’s taken the pantropic spike from the canine virus – this means it “gets into all cells” rather than staying in one site.

For most cats who get the standard version of feline coronavirus, the virus will stay in the bowel and may cause some diarrhoea – but otherwise the symptoms are mild.

Occasionally the virus will travel to another part of the body and mutate, causing the more serious FIP.

With this “traditional” version of the illness, FIP arises from an “individual mutation in an individual cat”, Professor Gunn-Moore explains.

By the time the coronavirus has mutated to become an FIP-causing illness, it can’t then replicate in the bowel, meaning the more serious version of the illness is not transmissible through the cat’s faeces.

What is “terrifying” about the Cyprus strain is that the cats are shedding the same virus – meaning it has been passed directly between them, rather than needing to mutate individually in each animal, Professor Gunn-Moore says.

Is there anything else different about Cyprus?

There is a chance that the genetics of the cats in Cyprus has something to do with how easily the virus has spread.

Professor Gunn-Moore says she’s “really, really hoping” that is the case because that could mean it wouldn’t spread so “efficiently” in other countries – but at the moment there is no evidence one way or another.

Read more:
Cats to be treated with human COVID medicine in Cyprus
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What do we know about the UK’s first known case of F-CoV-23?

The cat was brought to the UK from Cyprus and was taken to the vet after developing symptoms.

The cat is in quarantine so it can’t go outside and is now being treated with a high dose of anti-virals.

How likely is it the new strain will spread in the UK?

Professor Gunn-Moore has “major concerns” about the virus spreading in the UK.

She says she “can’t believe” this is the first case to exist in the UK.

There is a frequent passage of cats from Cyprus to the UK, she says, with some rescue centres working on a model of bringing back animals from Cyprus to rehome here.

There are also two army bases on Cyprus and people stationed there may be moving their pets between countries.

“Certainly we know that quite a lot of cats are getting rescued from Cyprus pretty regularly, so the chance of this happening again is high.”

What symptoms should cat owners look out for?

The clinical signs of FIP are the same whether it’s the standard strain or F-CoV-23, although neurological symptoms such as wobbliness and seizures are more common with the latter.

Kittens and younger cats are typically more susceptible to FIP, but in Cyprus the virus affected a “sweep of ages” – which also suggested immunity to a previous bout of feline coronavirus didn’t protect against the new strain, Professor Gunn-Moore says.

Other symptoms include a distended belly, possible breathing issues if the cat has fluid around its lungs, being depressed and off their food.

Do cat owners need to be worried?

Cat owners need to be vigilant, Professor Gunn-Moore says, but they don’t need to start keeping pets inside.

If you have rehomed a cat from Cyprus this year, or live near a cattery that gets rescues from Cyprus, you should be particularly careful, she adds.

“If they see the cat becoming depressed or swollen belly or wobbly back end, seizures, anything like that – just a cat that’s not feeling well – go to your vet quickly and say you’re worried about F-CoV-23.”

If the vet does diagnose FIP, they should get in touch with the team at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh which will sequence the virus to see if it is the standard strain or F-CoV-23.

The virus is mostly spread via an infected cat’s faeces. If your cat may come into contact with a cat that’s got a connection to Cyprus – a neighbour’s cat, for example, or other animals at a cattery – you should be extra-vigilant.

How is FIP treated?

There are two anti-viral COVID-19 drugs that are used to treat FIP and are licensed for use in the UK.

Professor Gunn-Moore says while they are expensive, they are effective at treating the illness – and seem to work well on the new strain.

One of the biggest challenges facing Israeli forces during their ground operation in Gaza is the huge network of underground tunnels used by Hamas.

Hundreds of kilometres long and up to 80m (262ft) deep, the system is used for various reasons – including carrying out attacks, smuggling in goods and storing weapons.

Israel-Hamas war live: All telecoms go down in Gaza

More than 200 Israeli hostages are also thought to be held within the tunnels.

But they aren’t easy to find, often hidden under buildings of all kinds. So how will the IDF tackle them?

Military expert Chris Morris told Sky News Israeli forces have five options…

1. Sending special forces down

He explained that while Israel doesn’t know the full extent of the tunnel network, it is well-informed and has developed a “special military unit” specifically designed to deal with them.

“They are very well-equipped, they are very well-trained. They have psychological countermeasures, and they have tests to ensure they are mentally robust enough to, if needed, go down into those tunnels,” the military education teaching fellow said.

In the first instance, the IDF would send down unmanned vehicles to check for booby traps and collect robust evidence of activities inside the tunnels, he added.

But sending people down is never going to be the preferred option and Israel will want to avoid “tunnel fighting at all costs”.

Ideally, Israeli forces will try “capping off” the tunnels instead…

2. Destroying entrances into the tunnels.

Mr Morris said Israel could do this by bulldozing them or dropping explosives.

“There are a number of different, very rudimentary, physical ways that you can take them out, but the challenge is identifying them,” he said.

“Simply sealing off the tunnels will have an effect, but ideally you would want to know what’s down there.”

3. Block entrance with foam bombs

A foam bomb or a sponge bomb is a specialised chemical device that releases a burst of expanding foam that quickly hardens.

“This is one of the Israeli wonder weapons,” Mr Morris said. “They drop these cannisters that effectively block off the tunnels.”

The downside for Israel is they are only a short-term solution.

“In the long term, the foam can be removed.”

4. Sewage

Israel’s fourth option could be to copy a move previously made by Egypt to tackle smuggling – throwing sewage down the tunnels.

“It’s a very effective solution,” said Mr Morris. “It would make sense militarily for them to use it should the conditions converge.”

However, it wouldn’t be great “in terms of optics” and it could add to the building humanitarian crisis already spreading across the region.

Read more:
Statues in honour of Yasser Arafat are destroyed in Tulkarm
Families of Israeli hostages start five-day march

5. From the air

The final option is to use sophisticated weapons to target the tunnels from the air, he said.

“Israel has quite a significant inventory of weapons that can be dropped from the air, things like bunker busters, that can penetrate the ground,” Mr Morris explained.

However, even if precision-guided weapons are used, they could cause “a lot of collateral damage”.

Icelandic authorities are working on a plan to protect the evacuated town of Grindavik from a volcanic eruption, Sky News has been told.

Scientists currently believe the most likely site for magma to break through the surface is a short distance from the town, and it could flow towards houses.

But Almannavarnir, the Icelandic civil defence, said earth walls could be built to divert a river of molten lava away from the town.

Follow live: Iceland’s ‘biggest bulldozer’ despatched to build defences

Jon Thor Viglundsson, from the authority, said the technique had been tested in recent eruptions elsewhere.

“So this we will try,” he said. “You guide lava, you can’t stop it. You push up large amounts of earth. It’s the only way to make a funnel to turn lava away.”

The magma is most likely to erupt between one and 1.5 miles northeast of the town, according to the Icelandic Met Office.

But the high-risk zone is on a slope and exactly where the magma breaks through will determine whether the lava flows south towards the town or north towards a power station, where a defensive wall up to eight metres high is already being built.

Salome Jorunn Bernhardsdottir, a natural hazards specialist at the Met Office, told Sky News scientists were modelling different possibilities.

“It’s highly dependent on the contours,” she said. “The flow could go north or south.

“So, what teams have been doing is mapping out different scenarios, with different flow rates to see how effective barriers would be in diverting the flow.”

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The magma is currently believed to be at a depth of around 500m along a nine-mile line that passes close to Grindavik.

Dr Bernhardsdottir said the molten rock appears to be cooling and hardening in places.

But magma continues to build up in the area where an eruption is most likely.

Bariloche, Argentina – Standing on the land she inhabited for five years, 22-year-old Betiana Colhuan scrolled through her phone’s camera roll.

The screen flickered with memories of home: an image of Colhuan sitting in a field of yellow flowers. Another of her small son standing in front of the white horse she kept as a pet. A snapshot of the medicinal plants in her orchard.

But when she looked up, the ruins of her house lay scattered at her feet. Broken planks of wood were littered with old household items, including a tube of face cream, a broken mirror and a pink teddy bear.

“It is painful to see this space like this,” Colhuan said, her voice heavy.

Colhuan belongs to one of Argentina’s Indigenous peoples, the Mapuche. The land her community used to sit within falls under the administration of the Nahuel Huapi National Park, the country’s oldest national park and a popular outdoor destination.

But Colhuan and her neighbours were forcibly expelled in 2022. Now, they fear government inertia and the outcome of Argentina’s presidential election on November 19 could permanently end their hopes of returning.

“We are going to have to fight harder against some of [the politicians] who publicly express their hate against our people,” Colhuan said.

A history of displacement

Though often associated with the neighbouring country of Chile — where they constitute the largest Indigenous group — the Mapuche predate national borders. Their ancestral territory includes the southernmost reaches of Argentina, part of a region known as Patagonia.

But the Spanish conquest of the area, starting in the 16th century, led to bloody clashes with the Mapuche. By the 19th century, the newly established country of Argentina likewise endeavoured to remove the Mapuche through violence.

One effort in the late 1800s became known as the Conquest of the Desert. Argentinian military forces are thought to have massacred as many as 20,000 Mapuche and Tehuelche people. Survivors were displaced and forbidden from living together in communities.

“They had to disperse in order to survive,” said Orlando Javier Carriqueo, a spokesperson for the Mapuche Parliament. “The causes and effects of this genocide are very present in society, and not in a minor way.”

In 2006, however, Argentina’s congress passed a law to prevent the further eviction of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands. It also offered official status to Mapuche communities seeking state recognition.

Still, only 314 recognised communities exist today in Argentina. Colhuan is part of a new generation that is reclaiming the Mapuche identity, after centuries of bloodshed and displacement.

Since she was a girl, Colhuan said she was trained by Mapuche elders to take on the role of a machi, a spiritual leader and healer.

Most modern-day machi live in Chile. But Colhuan became the first to earn the title on the Argentinian side of the Andes Mountains in nearly 100 years. She had to travel back and forth to Chile to learn from machi across the border.

She also serves as the head of the Lof Lafken Winkul Mapu community in Patagonia, made up of 15 families. Many of them used to live in urban settings in northern Patagonia, where their ancestors were relegated after they were forcibly removed from their lands.

Colhuan herself was born in San Carlos de Bariloche, an alpine-style tourist town close to the mountains and glacier-fed lakes of the Nahuel Huapi National Park. The group formed naturally, with members flocking to Colhuan after she began to offer traditional medicine and healing.

In 2017, Colhuan started living on a plot of land in the park, outside the village of Villa Mascardi. Colhuan said the land was the known location of an ancestral “rewe”, a sacred space in Mapuche culture, one that had been abandoned for many years.

Every machi needs to be close to a rewe in order to fulfil their sacred functions. Colhuan said that one of the machi who taught her had foreseen that the rewe in Villa Mascardi was to be hers. There, she could complete her training and start her spiritual practice.

Located in a forest clearing, the rewe was grassy and open. Colhuan and her young community set up a tall wooden sculpture with a carved face in the centre of the clearing. Around it, they placed branches from native plants, a traditional ceremonial adornment, renewed yearly.

The rewe became a place for Colhuan and her community to live and practice spiritual ceremonies.

“For five years, we were able to strengthen this ceremonial space together with other communities,” she said.

Fifteen traditional “rukas” — low wooden houses — were built on the land, together with a community centre to hold meetings. Colhuan and her neighbours did most of the building themselves, with tools and materials they raised money to buy. They also planted vegetable and medicinal gardens and kept various animals and pets.

Expelled from the rewe

But in 2017, shortly after they moved in, members of the Albatross group, a special unit of Argentina’s naval police, tried to evict them based on complaints from the park administration that they were “usurping” the land.

The expulsion quickly turned violent. Colhuan’s cousin, 22-year-old Rafael Nahuel, was shot dead by police in the altercation.

The officers involved alleged that his death was the result of a crossfire with members of the community.

“I was forced to use my weapon immediately on my assailant. I had no way out. I had to stop the aggression,” the officer who pulled the trigger, Sergio Cavia, said during his trial. But the community has disputed that claim, saying only the officers fired their guns.

Cavia has been accused of “aggravated homicide committed in excess of self-defence”. The verdict in his case is expected on November 22.

After Nahuel’s death, tensions increased. Neighbours in Villa Mascardi, fearing the community would encroach on private lands, claimed the group threatened them with violence and accused the Mapuche of robberies, arson and vandalism in the area.

Fifteen complaints are still being processed by a prosecutor. National headlines followed, chronicling the controversy. Colhuan said there is no proof that anyone in her group committed the acts detailed in the complaints.

The breaking point came when a nearby police post was set on fire — and the Mapuche community was blamed, though they deny any involvement.

In the aftermath, a judge ruled that the Mapuche could be forcibly evicted. On October 4, 2022, the police moved in. Colhuan said the eviction was “violent and abrupt”.

“They pulled us out of our houses — our rukas — by our hair, with our children in our arms,” said Colhuan, a mother of two.

Their houses and orchards were destroyed, their tools confiscated and their animals disappeared. What followed was eight months of house arrest for Colhuan, three other women and their youngest children, as the adults faced charges of “usurpation by dispossession”.

“They humiliated us in the worst ways possible because they saw us as Mapuche women, as Indigenous women,” Colhuan said of the police. She accused them of strip-searching and beating the women “as if we were terrorists”.

“The children are still scared to death when they see the police,” she added.

The police involved in the eviction did not reply to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Rising land values

Alejandra Perez, an anthropologist from the University of Buenos Aires who specialises in Indigenous rights, said the controversy over the settlement reflected, in part, the rising land values around the national park.

“These are all touristic areas, where the value of the land is much higher now with accessible flights,” Perez said. “Millions of dollars are coming in from the tourism industry.”

Those profits are expected to go even higher. The city of Bariloche has experienced a surge in tourism in recent years. In 2022, it reported that 65 percent more tourists had arrived in the area than in the five years before the COVID-19 pandemic combined.

For their part, leaders at the Nahuel Huapi National Park maintain the issue was a matter of legal status. Without the proper recognition and documentation, they could not allow the Mapuche community to remain.

“These people are not a recognised community. It is a usurpation for us. It is a matter for the federal justice system,” said Soledad Antivero, who is charged with public space management at the Nahuel Huapi National Park. “The national park was dragged into it because it is our land.”

That question of ownership, however, is fraught. Some Indigenous advocates believe Indigenous land claims should supersede the park’s authority.

How to define ancestral Indigenous land has also been a thorny question for the Argentinian government.

Some critics of the Mapuche settlement say there is no evidence of an ancestral presence in the Villa Mascardi area, but Colhuan and her fellow community members maintain their connection to the land is spiritual and deeper than documents can testify.

“What is being fought for is a broader idea of people, the idea of an ancestral territory that predated the formation of the state,” said Kaia Santisteban, an anthropologist from the University of Río Negro who studies Mapuche epistemology.

The path to formal recognition

In June, Argentina’s Ministry of Security reached an agreement with Colhuan and the other women under house arrest.

The charges for usurpation were dropped, and the government committed to recognising the rewe and rebuilding three houses. The deal also stipulated that only Colhuan, her aides and close family could live on the land, and that the rest of the community would be relocated to another place, still to be determined.

The national parks administration also signalled it was willing to work with Colhuan and her community once they received formal recognition from the state. It already co-manages land with several other Indigenous communities.

“We are public servants. That’s what we are there for,” Antivero, the park administrator, said.

On their end, Colhuan and her community have taken steps to be formally recognised by the Argentinian government, submitting personal documents to back up their claims and commissioning an anthropological study.

But the government has yet to grant formal recognition or follow through with its commitments. And in October, a prosecutor from the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation launched an appeal to repeal the agreement.

He argued, in part, that the agreement was based on the idea that Colhuan’s community was a legitimate one, which has yet to be established.

Indigenous rights at the ballot box

A rightward shift in Argentinian politics could also endanger Colhuan’s efforts to rebuild her community.

One of the leading candidates in this month’s presidential elections, far-right libertarian Javier Milei, previously supported a bill to repeal the 2006 law that allows Indigenous groups to seek formal recognition and reclaim land.

That same law created the framework that Colhuan’s community is following to gain state recognition.

Milei’s running mate, Victoria Villarruel, has also weighed in on the situation in Villa Mascardi. In an interview with the local outlet El Seis TV, she said the push to reclaim the land was “ideological” and that the community “pretends to build a Mapuche nation that never existed in the Argentinian republic”.

Ana Ramos, an anthropologist from the University of Río Negro who works closely with the Mapuche community, said that this narrative “radically goes in the direction of a reduction of Indigenous rights”.

If Milei wins the November 19 run-off election, she added, the Mapuche “will not only be criminalised but also repressed”.

But that alone will not stop the fight to reclaim ancestral land. “Mapuche mobilisations will not stop,” Ramos said.

Colhuan, meanwhile, is now left to grapple with the uncertain fate of the community she built. On a chilly, clear day in late September, she walked through the overgrown trails that once connected the houses in her community. The rewe still lay in ruins.

But then she pointed to the old-growth forest, towering behind the site. Her voice became resolute.

“Although you can see how everything is destroyed and how sad it is, you can also see the land, the nature that is still alive,” she said.

“This is what keeps us going today. The land is still alive and is asking us to protect it, to fight for it, so that the connection between us and this land is not severed.”