Ash grounds Jakarta, and Amazon loses a 767 in Miami

Soekarno-Hatta, Jakarta's main international gateway, has now had its closure extended at least five times since Sunday as ash from Mount Anak Krakatau drifts over Java, Lampung and South Sumatra. Indonesia's transport ministry counts 964 disrupted flights at that airport alone, with roughly 150,000 to 170,000 passengers stranded across eight affected airports, as Reuters reports. Ports have imposed a 3km exclusion zone around the volcano and some local authorities have suspended free school meal programmes where ash has closed schools. AirNav Indonesia is running paper tests on runway surfaces every few hours rather than working to a fixed schedule, which means every reopening estimate published so far has proven wrong.

A Boeing 767-300 flying as 21 Air Flight 7598 for Amazon Prime Air overran the runway on landing from San Juan on Sunday afternoon, struck vehicles beyond the airfield and caught fire, according to Reuters. Five people died and five were injured. Miami International shut its runways and imposed a three-hour ground stop before reopening. The FAA has opened an investigation, and the immediate question for Amazon is less about the aircraft than about 21 Air, the third-party carrier that actually flew it, and what that means for oversight of the contract carriers underpinning Amazon's air freight network.

APPEC opens in Singapore this week with traders who spent 2024 and 2025 fretting about oversupply now managing the fallout from what the IEA calls the largest oil supply disruption in history, a 10.1 million barrel-a-day hit that dragged global output down to 97 million barrels a day in March. High-sulphur bunker fuel in Singapore is up more than 40% since the Iran conflict began, low-sulphur fuel oil more than 30%, as Reuters details, forcing Southeast Asian refiners to cut output for lack of Middle East crude. The traders arriving this year already survived the pandemic and Russian sanctions rerouting; Hormuz risk is just the next line item. What's changed is that nobody at this year's conference is talking about a 2026 glut anymore.

The AfD won 44.6% in Saxony-Anhalt on Saturday, more than double its 2021 share, giving it 39 of 84 seats and putting it three short of an outright majority, according to ARD's Infratest dimap projections. Friedrich Merz's CDU collapsed to under 19%, its worst result in the state's history. Every mainstream party still refuses to govern with AfD, so expect a fragile three-way coalition rather than an AfD government, but the arithmetic keeps getting worse for the parties trying to hold that line. For a Merz chancellorship built partly on the promise of containing the far right, this is the clearest evidence yet that the strategy is failing east of the old border.

Bathla Group, a western Sydney developer with 15,000 homes planned or under construction, went into voluntary administration owing roughly A$3.4 billion, A$3.08 billion of it to private credit lenders spread across more than 40 funds and 100 land sites, according to administrator Teneo's preliminary figures reported by the ABC. Morgan Stanley's Australia investment banking chief called it a hammer blow that will hit consumer spending well beyond construction. ASIC chair Sarah Court has already framed the collapse as the first real stress test of Australia's roughly A$200 billion private credit market. One mortgage REIT, 360 Capital, halted trading to assess its exposure before disclosing losses.

Tokyo spent a record 15.4 trillion yen, roughly $96.5 billion, defending the yen between late July and late August, and Fed data show it never touched the FIMA repo facility designed to let central banks raise dollars without selling bonds outright. That leaves reserve drawdowns or non-rollover of maturing Treasuries as the likely funding source, a pattern Bloomberg has tied to prior interventions in 2022 and 2024. Japan holds around 70% of its reserves in Treasuries. Adding official-sector supply into a market where 30-year yields already touched 5.27%, the highest since 2007, is not a footnote for US rates desks.

China's Ministry of Finance is funding more than 80% of a 357 billion yuan capital injection across eight institutions, including 130 billion yuan into Agricultural Bank of China and 70 billion yuan into ICBC via share placements, according to Reuters. China Life gets 35 billion yuan, PICC up to 15 billion. This is the third recapitalisation wave since early 2025, following a $69 billion round for four big banks and a separate $44 billion bond programme for Tier-1 capital. The scale tells you how worried Beijing is about credit capacity heading into a slowdown, not confidence in the sector's health.

Tim Moe is holding his target for an 80% rally in Korean stocks even after a violent unwind in leveraged retail products briefly hammered the index. His case rests on 2026 Kospi earnings growth of 300 to 360%, the strongest profit expansion in any Asian market since 1999, driven by a memory chip shortage he expects to last through 2030 as hyperscalers push AI infrastructure capex past $1.2 trillion next year. Samsung and SK Hynix make up 50 to 60% of the index by weight, so this is effectively a leveraged wager on DRAM pricing dressed up as an equity call. Moe's own valuation math puts the target at just 7.5 times forward earnings, which is either deeply conservative or a sign the market still doesn't believe the earnings numbers will show up.

Chip and AI names in Tokyo and Seoul extended gains after Friday's US tech rally, even as Iran claimed it hit three oil tankers and several US-linked vessels using unauthorised Hormuz routes. Brent has moved in a wide band through August, from $88.50 to a September 1 settle near $94.65, a 4.6% single-day jump on fears of fresh supply disruption. Roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG normally transits the Strait, and traffic has at points slowed close to a standstill under threat of a US blockade. Equity investors are betting the AI capex cycle outruns the Gulf risk; commodity desks are pricing the opposite.

The Chancellor will tell Parliament the UK economy is turning a corner while debt interest alone costs an estimated 135 billion pounds in 2026/27, about 50% more than the entire defence budget, according to figures cited by the BBC. His flagship measure is a 150 million pound British Business Bank fund for fast-growing northern firms, unveiled alongside claims that borrowing has fallen to a six-year low as a share of GDP. July still produced an unexpected 1.8 billion pound deficit as spending outpaced receipts. Healey inherited roughly 23.6 billion pounds of fiscal headroom and has reportedly already burned through 9 billion pounds of it before his first Budget on 28 October, leaving little room for the growth measures he is promising today.

Germany formally blamed Moscow for an explosive-laden drone aimed at a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle Airport last month, breaking with its earlier caution, as the Guardian reports. German defence chief General Carsten Breuer put it bluntly: Europe deters Russia conventionally but is not deterring enough in the hybrid domain. The EU's top military officer, General Sean Clancy, now calls the hybrid campaign, spanning drones, cyberattacks and migrant pressure, the bloc's most significant strategic threat. Von der Leyen and NATO's Mark Rutte have promised a stronger response, but no sanctions package or counter-drone doctrine has actually been announced yet, leaving airports and logistics operators to absorb the risk in the meantime.

X says it found roughly 200,000 inauthentic accounts pushing anti-AI-infrastructure content, but only about 200 were actually focused on data centre messaging, a fraction that undercuts the scale of opposition now blocking projects worth over $150 billion, per Data Center Watch. Trump has said China drives a significant portion of the backlash; OpenAI separately flagged Chinese-linked accounts blaming data centres for power bills. NPR's reporting and independent researchers say the evidence for a coordinated campaign is thin next to genuine local grievances over water, noise and electricity costs. A University of Pennsylvania survey found 61% of Americans now oppose new data centres in their area, up 12 points since March, a domestic political problem no amount of blaming Beijing will fix.

Fresh off Japan's biggest IPO of 2026, an 88.6 billion yen raise that pushed Go's market value to roughly 200 billion yen, president Hiroshi Nakajima is putting proceeds into robotaxi partnerships and acquisitions rather than defending against Uber, which he told Bloomberg he doesn't see as a serious threat in Japan's tightly regulated taxi market. Go won't build its own autonomous driving stack; it plans to license the technology and operate the platform layer, aiming eventually to run driverless rides once regulators sign off. The next move is expansion into other Asian markets that share Japan's taxi-first regulatory structure rather than the private-hire model Uber built its business on.

Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds has ruled out state support for Jaguar Land Rover even as the automaker confirms thousands of job losses are coming and prepares to meet ministers this week. The line matches the government's approach elsewhere in manufacturing this year: intervene on infrastructure and skills, not on individual carmakers absorbing the cost of the EV transition and weaker export demand. For JLR's Midlands supply chain, the burden falls on the company's own restructuring plan rather than any Treasury cushion.

A motorcyclist accelerated into a crowd of Teamsters picketing an Amazon warehouse in Riverside County on Wednesday, injuring three people; police booked the rider, Jesus Salcido Perez, on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, according to the New York Post. The protest was an unfair labour practice strike aimed at forcing recognition without an NLRB secret-ballot vote, following a June ruling that Amazon must bargain with Teamsters at a San Francisco delivery station under the Cemex precedent. Amazon says it called the Riverside sheriff's department repeatedly during the blockade before officers intervened. The union is simultaneously pushing New York City's Delivery Protection Act, which would force Amazon to directly employ delivery drivers and effectively kill its third-party DSP contracting model.

Recruitment indicators are improving for the first time in months, a small but welcome data point for a Chancellor about to tell Parliament the economy has turned a corner.

Around a million people, mostly women, missed pension tax relief because their workplace scheme used net pay arrangements rather than relief at source; HMRC is now sending unsolicited top-up payments worth roughly 70 pounds a year, verified through gov.uk's Low Earner's Pension Payment guidance, starting this year and running into early 2027.

The British Business Bank vehicle for fast-growing northern firms is the concrete deliverable behind today's broader growth speech, a small down payment against a much larger fiscal headroom problem.

Two more regional US papers have joined the copyright fight over AI training data, adding to a growing queue of publisher litigation that OpenAI now has to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously.

A privately funded German rocket reached orbit on a fully commercial flight, breaking Europe's dependence on state-run launchers and Arianespace for at least one category of payload.