President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo met with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Mariinsky Palace, Kyiv, on Wednesday, in a visit to the war-ravaged country to talk of peace and the impact the war has had on the global food supply chain.

The presidential press bureau has announced that President Joko Widodo is en route to Moscow via Poland to continue his peacebuilding mission to bring an end to the war and help ease global pressures.

As Idul Adha approaches, the government is taking a variety of measures to try and bring the FMD outbreak under control.

A Rp 6 billion (US$402,000) annual reward will be given as seed funding for every new endowment fund successfully established, although the sum could change depending on an institution’s academic performance.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo was on a train bound for Kyiv on Tuesday evening, nearing an active war zone under high security, as he seeks to broker peace talks between Russia and Ukraine amid an escalation of violence in the beleaguered country – including the capital.

The recent government crackdown on hardline Muslim mass organization Khilafatul Muslimin, which is thought to have either funded or is affiliated with a number of educational institutions throughout the country, has sown fresh concerns over the threat of intolerant education in schools.

Health experts and medical professionals have urged the government to impose stricter curbs as Indonesia continues to record an increase in new COVID-19 infections.

In a bid to help attain Indonesia’s Group of 20 (G20) presidency priority issues and to spur global climate action, environment ministers of the G20 will adopt a joint communiqué in August.

The Group of 20 nations are finalizing a financial intermediary funding (FIF) initiative intended to ensure that the world is better prepared for future pandemics, and they expect it to come into effect in June, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani has said.

A regular symposium hosted by the Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII) seeks to shore up more research on political Islam in Indonesia.

Mitsuhiro Taniguchi, who was arrested by the National Police in Lampung earlier this month, boarded a Narita-bound flight from Jakarta, Indonesian immigration official Douglas Simamora said in a statement.

In celebration of World Refugee Day, the UNHCR hosted a cooking event where refugees and locals relished in each others’ cuisines amid long-standing rights issues for the former.

With the government and lawmakers seemingly dragging their feet in providing better protection for Indonesian domestic workers, activists have set out to fight for their rights on the international stage.

G20 countries have provisionally agreed to set up a multi-billion dollar fund that health officials have said will finance efforts like surveillance, research, and better access to vaccination for lower-to-middle income countries, among others.

The government has pledged to push for a swift ratification of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPED) in the House of Representatives, after more than a decade of delays.

Health authorities are bracing for the possibility of another wave of COVID-19 infections following the detection of the country’s first local transmissions of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron.

A new bill initiated by House lawmakers has won unanimous endorsement from Baleg, with several landmark provisions supporting pregnant women, especially working women.

Of 17 government agencies, local administrations and city-owned companies selected for top performance, BPOM and the East Java provincial government won the outstanding achievement award for their responses to public complaints, their use of technology to improve the responses as well as for providing legal framework that would allow the response system to be sustainable.

Indonesia is edging closer to becoming a vaccine hub, as a number of locally developed COVID-19 vaccines enter advanced stages of clinical trials and are expected to be mass-produced in the next few months.

Indonesia announced on Friday its first cases of the highly contagious Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 as the country starts to see an uptick in transmission following the Idul Fitri holiday season last month, which saw tens of millions of people traveling across the archipelago.

The government has continued to ease COVID-19 curbs throughout the country but has refuted any plans of scrapping the four-tiered public activity restriction (PPKM) system anytime soon, saying it will monitor the health situation before making any decisions.

Indonesia has committed to chipping in US$50 million to a financial intermediary fund (FIF) recently established by the Group of 20 nations that aims to address financing gaps for pandemic preparedness.

Mitsuhiro Taniguchi, 47, was arrested in Lampung late Tuesday and flown to the capital Jakarta, national police spokesman Insp. Gen. Dedi Prasetyo told journalists.

“We are doing this to preserve the history and cultural heritage of the archipelago,” minister Luhut Panjaitan said on Sunday.

Indonesia has joined in the chorus of Muslim majority countries condemning Indian politicians whose remarks are deemed to have insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

Scientists say that the government needs to go beyond human in preparing for the next pandemic, including sustainable development and the One Health approach.

West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil's family has announced the death of his eldest son who has been reported missing since May 26 after he was swept away by strong currents while swimming in the Aare River in Bern, Switzerland.

Albanese and his cabinet members are scheduled to visit Jakarta from Sunday to Tuesday in what experts see as Australia’s reprioritizing Indonesia in its diplomacy while remaining anchored to its Western allies.

Many parents believe that two years of living with the COVID-19 pandemic have taught their children the importance of health protocols in school.

Rights groups bemoan the insufficient protection afforded to women in the revision of the Criminal Code, which the government has promised to strengthen after the newly enacted Sexual Violence Law watered down points on coerced abortion and rape.