Maumere, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency said Monday that at least six people have died as a series of volcanic eruptions widens on the remote island of Flores.

The eruption at Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki just after midnight on Monday spewed thick brownish ash as high as 2,000 meters (6,500 feet) into the air and hot ashes hit a nearby village, burning down several houses including a convent of Catholic nuns, said Firman Yosef, an official at the Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki monitoring post.

The Disaster Management Agency lowered the known death toll from an earlier report of nine, saying it had received updated information from local authorities. It said that information was still being collected about the extent of casualties and damage, as local media reports said more people were buried in collapsed houses.

Authorities also raised the danger level and widened the danger zone for Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki on Monday, following a series of eruptions that began last week.

The country’s volcano monitoring agency increased the volcano’s alert status to the highest level and more than doubled the exclusion zone to a 7-kilometer (4.3-mile) radius after midnight on Monday as eruptions became more frequent.

The agency said at least 10,000 people have been affected by the eruption in Wulanggitang District, in the six nearby villages of Pululera, Nawokote, Hokeng Jaya, Klatanlo, Boru and Boru Kedang.

In Ile Bura District, 4 villages were affected, namely Dulipali Village, Nobo, Nurabelen and Riang Rita, while in Titehena District it affected four villages, namely Konga Village, Kobasoma, Bokang Wolomatang and Watowara.

He said volcanic material was thrown up to 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from its crater, blanketeing nearby villages and towns with tons of volcanic debris and forcing residents to flee.

A nun in Hokeng village died and another was missing, said Agusta Palma, the head of the Saint Gabriel Foundation that oversees convents on the majority-Catholic island.

“Our nuns ran out in panic under a rain of volcanic ash in the darkness,” Palma said.

Photos and videos circulated on social media showed tons of volcanic debris covering houses up to their rooftops in villages like Hokeng, where hot volcanic material set fire to houses.

It’s Indonesia’s second volcanic eruption in as many weeks. West Sumatra province’s Mount Marapi, one of the country’s most active volcanos, erupted on Oct. 27, spewing thick columns of ash at least three times and blanketing nearby villages with debris, but no casualties were reported.

A smog-choked province in eastern Pakistan has issued a rare plea for cross-border collaboration with India, as major cities in both countries endure severe air pollution that risks the health of millions.

Officials in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province of 127 million people, have drafted a letter to the Indian government to open a dialogue on the issue, Punjabi Secretary for Environment and Climate Change Raja Jahangir Anwar said on Monday.

“We are suffering in Lahore in a way due to the eastern wind corridor coming from India,” he said. “We are not blaming anyone, it’s a natural phenomenon.”

Pollution in northern India and eastern Pakistan ramps up each winter, when an ominous yellow haze blankets the skies due to a combination of farmers burning agricultural waste, coal-fired power plants, traffic and windless days.

India and Pakistan have for decades navigated fraught and at times hostile relations, but as the issue of toxic air worsens, the neighbors are being forced to confront their shared responsibility – and fate – when it comes to the climate.

Lahore, home to more than 14 million people, saw its air quality index surpass a record 1,900 in one part of the city on Saturday, according to IQAir, which tracks global air quality. That’s more than six times the level considered hazardous to health.

The extreme pollution prompted Lahore officials to close primary schools for one week and place restrictions on barbecue restaurants, motorcycle rickshaws, and construction activities.

In India, air quality in Delhi – which frequently trades places with Lahore as the most polluted city in the world – hit hazardous air quality levels above 500 Saturday and Sunday, partly due to people disregarding a local fireworks ban as they celebrated Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. However, warmer, breezier weather helped to mitigate the smog.

Breathing polluted air leads to increased risk of a host of diseases, including lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. Experts say India’s air pollution is so bad that smog could take years off the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

“This is not just a political issue, this is a humanitarian issue,” Punjab’s Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz said last week. “The winds don’t know there’s a border in the middle.”

Air quality worsens in the winter because colder and drier air traps pollution, rather than whisking it away, as warm air does.

The beginning of winter also coincides with stubble burning season, a time when farmers intentionally set fire to crop debris to clear their fields, sending smoke billowing in the skies.

Both India and Pakistan have tried to clamp down on the practice, but it is still widespread.

Last month, India’s Supreme Court condemned the governments of India’s Punjab and Haryana states for failing to crack down on illegal stubble burning. Local officials claim they have reduced the practice significantly in recent years.

Pakistan’s Punjab is providing subsidized super-seeders to farmers to offer alternative methods for disposing of crop residue.

A poorly maintained and overcrowded bus veered off the road and plunged into a deep gorge in northern India on Monday, killing at least 36 people and injuring several others, officials said.

The accident occurred in Almora district in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand. The bus was carrying around 60 people, and more than 20 have been injured, said Deepak Rawat, a senior state government official.

Authorities said earlier they believed there were 42 passengers, which was how many people the bus could accommodate.

Teams of rescue and relief workers were deployed to the site and officials feared the death toll may rise further, especially as seven passengers in hospital were in critical condition.

Television footage showed parts of the bus mangled and destroyed as it lay overturned on a rocky slope, close to a stream. Rescuers were seen working to pull out passengers and carrying bodies on stretchers.

The state’s chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami earlier said rescue teams were working to quickly evacuate the injured passengers to nearby hospitals and that authorities have been instructed to airlift those seriously hurt.

The state government has opened an investigation into the accident, said Vineet Pal, another official in the state. He added that preliminary information suggested that the dilapidated bus skidded before tumbling down a 60 meter- (200-foot-) -deep gorge.

A number of passengers managed to escape or were thrown out by the impact, and then alerted authorities about the accident. Two transport officials have been suspended for approving a bus that was in poor condition, Pal said.

India has some of the highest road death rates in the world, with hundreds of thousands of people killed and injured annually. Most crashes are blamed on reckless driving, poorly maintained roads and aging vehicles.

In July, at least 18 people died after a double-decker passenger bus collided with a milk truck in Uttar Pradesh state. In May, a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims skidded and rolled into a deep gorge on a mountainous highway in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing at least 21 people.

In late August, a container vessel sailed out of Angola’s Port of Lobito carrying railway operator Lobito Atlantic Railway’s first shipment of copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the US.

It was a milestone moment for the Lobito Corridor, an initiative backed by a US and Europe that aims to create an efficient transport link from Africa’s mineral-rich interior to the port on its west coast for export, by rejuvenating and expanding old railways.

It took the copper six days to travel from the city of Kolwezi in the DRC – home to some of the world’s largest copper and cobalt reserves – across more than 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) of rail lines to the Port of Lobito.

That’s about 30 days faster than a road journey, according to Francisco Franca, the CEO of Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR), a consortium of firms that took over operations of the railway in January. Franca says LAR is investing $250 million to improve the rail lines and telecommunications infrastructure in Angola, and add 1,500 wagons to its fleet.

Momentum behind the corridor connecting Africa’s so-called Copperbelt to the Atlantic Ocean comes as Beijing and Washington jostle for supremacy in green technology, driving demand for critical minerals like copper, lithium and cobalt.

US financing

In recent decades, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has bankrolled railways, highways, communications infrastructure, ports and mines across the developing world. That includes loans to refurbish the 100-year-old Benguela Railway in Angola which was badly damaged during a 27-year civil war that ended in 2002.

China has also invested heavily in the DRC, and its access to minerals in Africa has given it a lead in industries like electric vehicle battery production, according to analysts.

That hasn’t gone unnoticed in Washington. In 2022, the US and its G7 allies formally launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI), which is aiming to mobilize $600 billion in global infrastructure funding by 2027, to act as an alternative to the BRI.

The US is providing hundreds of millions of dollars of financing for the Lobito Corridor, a flagship of the PGI, which is built on the bones of the Benguela Railway.

“This first-of-its kind project is the biggest US rail investment in Africa ever,” US President Joe Biden said during a late 2023 visit by Angola’s president to Washington. “A partnership between Angola and America is more important and more impactful than ever,” he added.

Today, most of the minerals leaving the Port of Lobito go to Asia, said David Reekmans, the managing director of AGL Lobito Terminal, which in March took over the port’s operations. AGL is investing more than $100 million to improve the port, which Reekmans hopes will lead to increased volumes flowing through it – and it may also act as a conduit for new trade flows.

In the future, Reekmans expects a “diversion of minerals that are now going to Asia” to the US and Europe.

Feasibility studies are under way for a second, more ambitious phase of the project, which will expand the railway 800 kilometers (500 miles) to Zambia. And the US hopes to one day extend the line to the Indian Ocean through Tanzania, connecting the east and west of the continent, although these plans could change under a Trump administration.

In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted delegations from dozens of African countries at a summit seeking to strengthen ties amid pressure from the west. On the sidelines of the event, Beijing signed an agreement to redevelop a railway between Zambia and a Tanzanian port.

“Economic development along the corridor”

About 30% of Angola’s 37 million people live below the poverty line, and youth unemployment is widespread. Across the border in Zambia and the DRC, the proportion of the population living in poverty is closer to 60%.

Critics say that the corridor’s focus on extracting and exporting raw materials will bring limited financial benefit to these countries. They argue that more focus should be put on developing local value-added processing.

But project proponents say that the corridor will create thousands of jobs and catalyze the growth of myriad sectors.

“Lobito Corridor is not just a railway line, but is the economic development along the corridor,” said Franca, the CEO of LAR.

For companies like his, the benefits of the Lobito Corridor are clear. “It’s very important in terms … of efficiency, of costs,” said Catarro.

“If we don’t have this logistic infrastructure installed in a country, it’s impossible to grow in the future,” he added.

Israeli police have arrested a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media.

Opposition leaders say the intelligence was “faked,” and part of a ruse to thwart a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza.

The investigation centers on allegations that the prime minister’s office promoted to foreign media the claim that Hamas was planning on smuggling hostages out of Gaza over the Egyptian border and creating divisions in Israeli society to pressure Netanyahu into a hostage release and ceasefire deal.

Eliezer Feldstein, who has been named by opposition politicians as an aide to Netanyahu, is among several people being interrogated over the leak of “classified and sensitive intelligence information,” according to court documents. A court order made public on Sunday said that information taken from the Israeli military’s systems and “illegally issued” may have damaged Israel’s ability to free hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

A spokesperson for Netanyahu denied that there have been leaks from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and that the “person in question never participated in security-related discussions,” apparently referring to Feldstein.

The PMO also downplayed the possibility that the leak impacted negotiations with Hamas over the release of hostages from Gaza, calling the claim “ridiculous.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid on Sunday accused the prime minister’s office of leaking “faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal – to shape a public opinion influence operation against the hostages’ families.”

Families of hostages held in Gaza have accused Netanyahu of repeatedly thwarting an agreement with Hamas, believing that an end to the Gaza war would force the prime minister to hold elections. Netanyahu is alleged to have, in the past, torpedoed agreements with 11th hour demands – something he denies.

The alleged leaks were the basis of two articles published in September, one in the Jewish Chronicle, in the United Kingdom, and another in Germany’s Bild, both citing Israeli intelligence sources and supporting a narrative being pushed by Netanyahu at the time.

The articles were published as ceasefire and hostage release negotiations were ongoing, but also as thousands of Israelis demonstrated almost daily calling on the government to strike a deal with Hamas and bring Israeli hostages home.

Those demonstrations intensified after the Israeli military announced on September 1 that six Israelis were killed in Gaza – four of them were due to be released in a first wave of the potential deal.

The next day, Netanyahu held a news conference and presented an alleged Hamas document he said was found in a tunnel in Gaza. The document, he said, showed that Hamas was trying to divide Israelis. “I am not going to surrender to this pressure,” Netanyahu said, and reiterated his demand that Israel control the Gaza-Egypt border, also known as the Philadelphi corridor. Doing so would “prevent the smuggling of our hostages to Sinai,” he said. “They can pop up in Iran or Yemen.”

Just days later, Jewish Chronicle published an article claiming that intelligence sources said “Sinwar’s plan was to smuggle himself and the remaining Hamas leaders along with Israeli hostages through the Philadelphi corridor to Sinai and from there to Iran.”

The article said that the information was gleaned “during the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official, as well as by information obtained from documents seized on Thursday, August 29, the day the six bodies of the murdered hostages were retrieved.” It has since been deleted, but an archived version is still available.

The prime minister’s son, Yair Netanyahu, promoted the article on his social media.

During a news conference on September 10, the Israeli military’s spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told a reporter: “I don’t know the kind of information you mentioned regarding Sinwar and the hostages in Philadelphi.”

During that same period, an article in the German newspaper Bild said a Hamas document it alluded was written by Yahya Sinwar allegedly showed how the group was drawing out the war and was trying to create divisions within Israel and build pressure on the families of the hostages’ families so they in turn could pressure the government. Bild cited an intelligence document and echoed the claims Netanyahu had made in his September 2 news conference.

In a statement on September 8, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the document cited by Bild was not written by Sinwar and that it was an old document found five months ago and “written as a recommendation by middle ranks in Hamas and not by Sinwar.”

The information did not “constitute new information,” the IDF said, adding that it was “presented to the decision makers several times, even before the document in question was located.” The statement added it is investigating the leak of the document, which “constitutes a serious offence.”

Following the court’s lifting of a gag order on Sunday, families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza pointed their fingers at the prime minister’s office, saying “suspicions indicate that people associated with the prime minister acted to carry out one of the biggest deceptions in the history of the country.”

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – who quit Netanyahu’s wartime cabinet earlier this year – have seized on the alleged leaks as a failure at the very top of government, with Gantz calling it a “national crime.”

Both have blamed Netanyahu’s office for the leak, with Gantz accusing Netanyahu of leveraging the leaks for political gains. Lapid also questioned whether the leak might have been intentional as hostage negotiations with Hamas foundered earlier in the year, according to a joint statement by the two opposition leaders on Sunday.

“It is suspected that Netanyahu’s team published secret documents and faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal,” Lapid said in a statement. “This affair came out of the Prime Minister’s own office, and the investigation must examine if it wasn’t at the Prime Minister’s orders.”

Dana Karni and Mike Schwartz contributed to this report.