News stories by Sandra Siagian

JAKARTA, May 13 (IPS) - Every afternoon, Wahyu sets up his wooden food cart by the side of a busy road in Central Jakarta to sell sweet buns, known as ‘bakpao', to people passing by. In a good month, the street vendor can make around 800,000 rupiah, which amounts to roughly 62 dollars.

JAKARATA, May 02 (IPS) - In a populous archipelago nation like Indonesia, where 250 million live spread across some 17,500 islands, speaking over 300 languages, the question of development is a tricky one.

, Mar 26 (IPS) - When Indonesia's law and human rights minister visited one of the country's prisons in December last year, he met a Nigerian convict on death row for drug trafficking, who performed songs for him before leaving him with a parting gift.

JAKARTA, Jul 02 (IPS) - As the world's third-largest democracy heads to the polls next week to elect a new president, environmental activists remain sceptical of the candidates' commitment to tackle climate change.

JAKARTA, May 27 (IPS) - Comprised of over 17,000 islands that are highly susceptible to rising seas, Indonesia is taking stock of its position as the world's third leading emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and China.

JAKARTA/NEW YORK, May 31 (IPS) - Standing in front of the two-metre concrete wall, barbed wire and corrugated iron fence that surrounds his mosque, Muhammad Iqbal says he feels like a second-class citizen in his own country.

While athletes around the world enter their final stages of training for the 30th Olympic Games in London this July, Saudi Arabia stands alone as the only country who has banned females from participating.

A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neoliberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It happens every day across the globe, with many of its young victims lured by false promises into the world's third most profitable criminal activity. This is human trafficking.

Since it launched in 1997, the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women (U.N. Trust Fund) has distributed more than 78 million dollars to 339 projects around the world, but even these resources fall far short, meeting less than five percent of demand.