- World Report 2024: Indonesia (hrw.org)
Indonesia, a multiparty democracy, continued to fall short in protecting and promoting basic civil and political rights. President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo began the last year of his two terms in office, during which he did little to advance human rights protections in the country. Politically, Jokowi made his son, Gibran Raka, the running mate to presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto after the Constitutional Court—headed by Anwar Usman, Jokowi’s brother-in-law—had controversially ruled that 36-year-old Gibran was eligible to join the presidential ticket because he is an elected mayor, despite the statutory age requirement of 40.
- History of the alphabet (Wikipedia)
The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician, Paleo-Hebrew (closely related and initially virtually identical to the Phoenician alphabet or even derived from it) and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet), four closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
- Indonesia (Wikipedia)
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guinea. Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state and the 14th-largest country by area, at 1,904,569 square kilometres (735,358 square miles). With over 280 million people, Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country and the most populous Muslim-majority country. Java, the world’s most populous island, is home to more than half of the country’s population.
