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The article focuses on conspiracy theories in social media such as connection between coronavirus and 5G technology. It mentions conspiracies include claims that Bill Gates is using the pandemic as "a cover to launch a broad vaccination program to facilitate a global surveillance", "the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese. It also mentions researchers had examined key factors contributing to the spread and stickiness of conspiracy theories.

This article offers a three-prong approach to investigating the emergence of contemporary Indonesian radical Islamism in the post-Suharto era (from 1998 onward). First, it places it within the historical context of radical Islamism in Indonesia, its past connection to colonialism, as well as a more contemporary one to Middle Eastern Islamism. Second, it puts this resurgence within the larger context of global jihad movements; it traces the origins of the ideology of radicalism itself, which is the global jihad meta-narrative that dominates much of the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Arab countries. Third, it discusses the dissemination of radicalism in society, including how the media, particularly the internet, plays an important role in spreading the jihad meta-narrative and its stylized version of contemporary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city is a site where the meaning of buildings, monuments, open spaces and behaviour interweave, and where ideologies and power relations between three agents (the state, civil society and the market) are inscribed in the urban iconography and everyday life, forming interlacing triangles of relationships. This article studies the networks of actors involved in the transformation of the Masjid Raya (Grand Mosque) and alun-alun (the traditional Javanese central urban square) in Bandung, Indonesia. It explores the complexity and the shifting nexus of power relations, and examines the merging and distancing practices between agents, and the blurring of boundaries. Civil society is of central importance in placemaking, yet it is diverse and plural. Thus a particular group's identity politics can dominate the production of space with ideologies influencing interactions and the social construction of space. Individual actors and their social relations play important roles in producing and appropriating urban spaces, as well as constructing and reconstructing spatial meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]