The government will continue to implement the lowest level of public activity restrictions (PPKM) until early next month, assuring the loosened curbs would be enough to contain a recent spike in COVID-19 infections.

Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin has said that his ministry would soon publish new regulations aimed at allowing research on the medicinal benefits of marijuana.

BPJS Kesehatan has started a trial run to eliminate the three-tiered health service system in its National Health Insurance (JKN) program, but some are concerned that this could result in downgraded services across all three classes.

The government has declined an offer from the Saudi Arabian authorities to send an additional 10,000 Indonesians on the holy pilgrimage this year, citing time constraints.

Participating athletes must still fulfill all the requirements for visiting foreigners, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson has said.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo arrived in the United Arab Emirates early on Friday, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday and Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky in Kyiv on Wednesday.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo ended a trip to Ukraine and Russia saying he hoped for progress reintegrating global food and fertilizer supply lines disrupted by the conflict, and offered to be a diplomatic bridge between the two nations.

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.