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On Monday, Indonesia maintained major travel disruptions and public safety measures following a massive 25-hour eruption of the Anak Krakatau volcano, even as geological authorities reported that the volcano’s most intense activity was beginning to subside.

According to Indonesia’s Geological Agency, the continuous eruption that sent lava fountains soaring and generated a detonation loud enough to be heard 435 miles from the volcano’s site concluded on Sunday. However, the volcanic island did not return to a stable state overnight. On Monday, Anak Krakatau continued to display moderate, intermittent eruptive activity, releasing plumes of dark ash into the atmosphere and triggering small, localized seismic tremors. Inclement weather in the region has also blocked scientists from conducting clear visual monitoring of the volcano’s crater, complicating ongoing hazard assessments.

Indonesia’s air navigation authority AirNav Indonesia confirmed that air quality tests detected dangerous levels of volcanic ash in the airspace surrounding Jakarta and multiple other population centers across the country. In response, officials ordered eight airports to remain shut until 6 p.m. local time on Monday. The shutdown includes four major commercial hubs operated by state-owned airport manager InJourney Airports: Jakarta’s two primary international airports, Soekarno-Hatta and Halim Perdanakusuma, Husein Sastranegara International Airport in West Java, and Radin Inten Airport in Lampung, located on the southern tip of Sumatra.

As of Monday, InJourney Airports reported that the closures have already disrupted roughly 2,300 scheduled flights, impacting an estimated 268,539 passengers traveling through the four affected major hubs. Beyond travel disruptions, Indonesian public officials moved quickly to protect student health, authorizing temporary remote learning transitions for schools across ash-affected regions, including Jakarta, West Java, Banten, and Lampung provinces. The policy shift is designed to minimize children’s exposure to toxic airborne ash that can cause serious respiratory distress.

Geological Agency head Lana Saria warned that the threat of further volcanic activity has not passed. “The probability of additional eruptions in the coming days remains high,” she stated. Saria outlined the primary ongoing hazards, noting that future eruptions could launch volcanic bombs, produce widespread heavy ashfall, and generate lava flows if large-scale sustained activity resumes.

Anak Krakatau, which translates to “Child of Krakatau,” is a volcanic island located in the Sunda Strait between Indonesia’s two most populous islands, Java and Sumatra. The active volcano formed from the remnants of the original Krakatau, whose catastrophic 1883 eruption was one of the most explosive volcanic events in recorded history, triggering a multi-year period of global cooling by blocking incoming solar radiation with atmospheric ash. In 2018, another major eruption of Anak Krakatau triggered a devastating tsunami after volcanic activity destabilized the volcano’s slope and caused a massive underwater landslide. The disaster killed at least 430 people across coastal Sumatra and Java.

Indonesia sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a global belt of active seismic faults that hosts the majority of the world’s earthquakes and volcanic activity. As a result, the country is home to more than 120 active volcanoes, making frequent volcanic eruptions a persistent natural hazard for local communities and national infrastructure.

Two weeks after catastrophic flash floods swept through southern Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Nepal marked a national day of mourning on Monday to honor the hundreds of lives lost to the disaster, capping 13 days of traditional mourning for grieving families across the Hindu-majority nation.

According to Nepal’s national disaster management agency, the flooding that struck on August 26 has already claimed more than 1,300 lives across Nepal and Tibet, with close to 5,000 people still unaccounted for — a number that includes foreign nationals working and traveling in the flood-hit region.

In traditional Nepalese Hindu culture, the mourning period for lost loved ones spans exactly 13 days, during which immediate family members remain at home to receive condolences and respect from extended relatives and community members. The 13th day marks the conclusion of the mourning process, when families hold final rituals to offer prayers for the peaceful journey of the departed souls. For hundreds of families whose relatives remain missing, swept away by floodwaters or buried under landslide debris, these rituals have taken the form of symbolic funerals, carried out without the recovery of their loved ones’ remains. Per Hindu tradition, cremation is a non-negotiable final rite, and holding the ceremony even without a body gives many grieving families a small measure of spiritual closure amid their uncertainty.

The Nepalese government had previously designated Monday as an official national day of mourning, requiring all federal and local government offices to lower their national flags to half-mast as a mark of respect. In the capital city of Kathmandu, dozens of grieving family members gathered outside the prime minister’s office and major government ministry buildings to demand that authorities accelerate search and rescue operations. Many of the missing are workers employed at hydropower projects along the rushing Bhotekoshi River, who were either swept away by surging floodwaters or trapped under debris from flood-triggered landslides.

Search operations are still ongoing for the hundreds of people who remain missing after the disaster. In recent days, rescue teams have pulled multiple survivors from the debris more than a week after the floods struck: two Nepalese workers were extracted from a damaged hydropower plant on Friday, followed by a Chinese worker rescued alive on Saturday, giving hope to families still waiting for news of their relatives.

Authorities have shifted the bulk of their rescue resources to 12 affected hydropower projects, where roughly 900 workers are still listed as missing, with an estimated 500 believed to be trapped inside construction tunnels under mountainside debris. Specialized rescue teams from four countries — China, India, South Korea, and the United States — have joined the search effort, combing through mangled infrastructure, collapsed debris piles, and remote tunnel networks in the hopes of finding more survivors more than two weeks after the disaster.

A powerful eruption of Indonesia’s iconic Anak Krakatau volcano has triggered widespread travel chaos across the archipelago, leaving more than 270,000 passengers stranded after more than 2,000 flights were grounded and key airports extended shutdowns into a second consecutive day.

The eruption, which began late Friday in the Sunda Strait roughly 150 kilometers southwest of Jakarta, has sent towering lava fountains streaming into the sky and plumes of volcanic ash drifting across heavily populated regions including the national capital and Lampung province. Seismic activity remained elevated and unstable throughout the weekend, with the most recent outburst recorded at 20:23 local time on Sunday, according to Indonesian geological authorities.

By Monday, Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport—one of the busiest air hubs in Southeast Asia—and three additional affected airports announced extensions to their temporary closures until 18:00 local time Monday, after continuous monitoring detected unsafe levels of volcanic ash in surrounding airspace. Volcanic plumes reached altitudes of up to 6,000 meters on the Java side of the volcano and as high as 15,000 meters over Sumatra, according to Indonesia’s meteorological agency BMKG, with ash also falling across parts of Banten, Java’s westernmost province.

The disruption has rippled across daily life in the region: local schools shifted all classes to remote learning, and commercial shipping operations through the busy Sunda Strait have also faced major interruptions. Long, snaking queues formed in departure halls at Soekarno-Hatta on Monday as stranded travelers crowded service desks to seek ticket refunds, rebookings, and updated information on rescheduled flights.

For many travelers, the extended shutdown has turned routine or celebratory trips into stressful ordeals. A newlywed Malaysian couple, who just finished a week-long honeymoon in Bali, told reporters they face a five-day wait until their next available flight back to Kuala Lumpur, scheduled for September 11. “We only prepared enough money for our honeymoon and were supposed to go home yesterday,” 29-year-old Amir Hamzah told Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama. “We thought we would just sleep at the airport for a few hours and then take the morning flight home on Monday. We never thought we would end up being stuck here for days.”

Other stranded passengers have adopted a resigned outlook amid the unpredictable natural event. “This is nature, after all. So I have to accept it, because when it comes to nature, there’s no choice. Now I’m just waiting for the next update from the airline,” 58-year-old business traveler Suhardi, who was due to travel from Jakarta to Lampung for work, told Reuters.

Indonesia’s Geological Agency has issued a stark warning that the risk of additional large eruptions in the coming days remains high, while authorities have established a 3-kilometer exclusion zone around the active crater, barring all land access to the area and prohibiting commercial ships from passing through the restricted maritime zone around the volcano. In a reassuring update, however, officials confirmed there is no current tsunami warning linked to the volcano’s recent activity.

Indonesia’s Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi noted that authorities cannot yet predict when the closures will end, due to the highly dynamic and shifting volcanic activity and weather patterns. “We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” he said, adding that air quality and ash spread monitoring is being conducted every 30 minutes across affected airport zones to track whether ash plumes are expanding or receding.

Anak Krakatau—meaning “Child of Krakatoa”—rose from the sea in the early 1900s, forming in the massive caldera left by the catastrophic 1883 eruption of the original Mount Krakatoa, one of the most destructive volcanic events in recorded history. The volcano has seen sporadic activity for more than a century, but a major 2018 collapse triggered a massive tsunami that killed more than 400 people and displaced and injured thousands across coastal areas of Java and Sumatra.

Indonesia sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000-kilometer horseshoe of tectonic activity that wraps around the Pacific Ocean basin. Roughly 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 75% of all active volcanoes on Earth—totaling 452 active volcanic systems—are located along the ring, making the country one of the most geologically active nations on the planet.

On September 6, 2026, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City’s al-Zeitoun neighbourhood to lay to rest 100 people whose remains were pulled from the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli military strikes nearly three years prior. Among the victims recovered from the collapsed structures, 62 were children, a devastating toll that underscores the far-reaching human cost of the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip.

According to Gaza’s civil defence service, more than half of the deceased — 55 people — belonged to a single extended family, the Malakas, who were killed in an Israeli air raid on the neighbourhood in November 2023. The remaining remains were identified as members of four other local families: the Irahem, Qanbour, Balawi and Dahdouh. Al Jazeera’s on-the-ground reporting confirmed that no fully intact bodies were recovered from the strike site, with Israeli forces having repeatedly obstructed search and recovery operations in the area in the months after the attack.

Mourners, including grieving relatives and neighbouring residents, assembled outside the Imam al-Shafi Mosque to begin the funeral procession. Each set of remains was wrapped in a Palestinian flag, and crowds carried the caskets through neighbourhood streets to al-Maamadani cemetery in central Gaza City, where all 100 victims were interred in shared collective graves.

Palestinian civil defence teams have led incremental search efforts across Gaza to recover trapped remains in the years since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023, but the process has been severely hampered by systemic barriers. Israel has blocked most heavy rescue machinery from entering the besieged enclave, and much of the existing equipment available to Palestinian teams was destroyed in earlier Israeli strikes, leaving crews reliant on manual labour to sort through tonnes of collapsed concrete and debris.

Official data from Gaza’s health authorities puts the total Palestinian death toll from Israeli attacks across the territory at more than 73,650 since October 7, 2023. Thousands of additional bodies are still believed to be trapped beneath rubble across Gaza, with no clear path to full recovery under current conditions. Omar Nofal, head of Gaza’s government committee for missing persons, told Middle East Eye that roughly 6,000 people have been formally registered as missing since the war began, but he estimates the actual number of unaccounted-for people is closer to 15,000, most buried under destroyed residential and commercial structures.

This mass funeral is not an isolated event. Just one month earlier, in August 2026, Palestinians buried the recovered remains of 112 members of the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families, killed in another massive Israeli air strike on Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood in November 2023. That attack stands as one of the deadliest single strikes of the conflict, which has been labeled a genocide by multiple international human rights bodies. Israeli warplanes completely leveled an entire residential block where hundreds of clan members had been sheltering, killing more than 300 people including 44 children, 37 women and at least 10 people with disabilities. Most of the victims remained trapped under rubble for nearly three years, as recovery efforts were stalled from the start by the lack of heavy equipment — destroyed or blocked from entry by Israeli authorities.

A previously unannounced meeting between the top intelligence leaders of Turkey and Greece has emerged, shedding new light on the under-the-scenes diplomatic and security dynamics playing out across the volatile Eastern Mediterranean. Both Greek and Turkish media outlets have confirmed that Ibrahim Kalin, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT), traveled secretly to Athens last week to hold talks with his Greek counterpart, Themistoklis Demiris, director of Greece’s National Intelligence Service (EYP). The closed-door gathering comes at a moment of rising friction between the two neighboring NATO allies, with disagreements flaring over Aegean Sea territorial claims, deepening defense cooperation between Greece and Israel, and growing broader security uncertainty across the Eastern Mediterranean.

For decades, Greece and Turkey have been locked in long-running disputes that touch on multiple core strategic issues: competing claims over maritime borders in the Aegean, the status and ongoing militarization of disputed Aegean islands, and the long-running conflict over Cyprus. This latest high-level intelligence contact comes just days after Greece sealed a landmark $3.5 billion defense deal with Israel, under which Israeli defense firms will support Athens in building a sophisticated multi-layered air defense network dubbed the Achilles Shield. The agreement includes the procurement of Israel’s cutting-edge David’s Sling and SPYDER air defense systems, the Barak MX interceptor system, and advanced MMR multi-mission radars. As part of Greece’s broader $28 billion national air defense modernization program, the full upgrade is scheduled for completion by 2036. For Ankara, the rapidly expanding defense partnership between Athens and Tel Aviv has become a major point of concern, as Turkey’s own relations with Israel have deteriorated sharply over recent regional developments.

Details of the previously undisclosed visit were first brought to public attention by Turkish news outlet Yeni Şafak. In his analysis published in the outlet Saturday, columnist Yahya Bostan outlined the Turkish position conveyed by Kalin during the talks: Ankara maintains that it seeks a constructive working relationship with Greece, but will not back down from defending its established national rights and interests. According to Bostan, Kalin made clear that Turkey will not accept any unilateral Greek moves that create a fait accompli in the Aegean, or alter what Ankara views as the existing status quo through the militarization of disputed islands. The Turkish side also framed Greece’s effort to build a new regional security architecture through its partnership with Israel as a misstep, stressing that Turkey poses no threat to Greece but will not tolerate any actions that undermine its sovereign rights and interests.

Greek accounts of the meeting offer a different framing, focusing heavily on the potential for expanded bilateral security and intelligence cooperation. Greek City Times reported that the talks centered on cross-border security threats including organized crime, migrant smuggling networks, international terrorism, and espionage. Greek sources specifically noted that discussions covered the presence of roughly 300 Turkish individuals linked to 15 separate organized criminal groups operating in Greece, as well as Turkish nationals accused of coordinating migrant smuggling operations departing from the Turkish coast toward the European Union. Both sides confirmed that the meeting was arranged through the long-standing regular security communication channel that has remained open between Athens and Ankara, even amid broader political disputes.

This latest exchange is far from the only point of friction between the two nations in recent months. Ankara has also pushed back against Greek policy initiatives in the Aegean, including Athens’ Special Spatial Framework for Tourism. Back in August, Turkey’s foreign ministry publicly stated that the Greek framework held no legal weight for Turkey, and called on Athens to abandon all unilateral actions in the Aegean and wider Mediterranean. “We once again emphasise that attempts to instrumentalise universal values such as environmental protection for political purposes are futile and will in no way affect our country’s established legal position,” foreign ministry spokesperson Oncu Keceli told state-run Anadolu Agency at the time. Keceli added that international maritime law explicitly encourages cooperation between coastal states in enclosed and semi-enclosed seas, including on issues related to environmental protection, rather than unilateral action.

Kalin, a long-time close confidant of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, took over leadership of MIT in June 2023, following the appointment of his predecessor Hakan Fidan as Turkey’s foreign minister. Prior to leading the intelligence agency, Kalin spent years serving as a senior foreign policy advisor to Erdogan, making him one of the most influential figures shaping Turkey’s current strategic posture. Notably, despite decades of deep political and strategic disagreements between Athens and Ankara, the two countries have consistently maintained open lines of communication between their intelligence and law enforcement agencies, creating a quiet channel for dialogue even when formal diplomatic relations have been strained.