Jakarta, Apr. 17 : Muslims in Indonesia have been left outraged, following the discovery that Indonesia's popular dry-meat-product-selling companies were substituting beef with pork.

After conducting DNA tests on jerky samples from traditional markets in Java and Sumatra, Indonesia''s National Food and Drug Monitoring Agency BPOM found that five companies were deceiving Muslim sentiments by contaminating their products with pork.

Jakarta - Indonesia's Supreme Court said Thursday that it had overturned its own verdict that awarded ex-dictator Suharto 1 trillion rupiah (93 million dollars) in damages in a lawsuit he brought against the US-based magazine Time.

A panel of three Supreme Court judges accepted that a Time story published in May 1999 that alleged Suharto had stashed billions of dollars abroad was not defamatory, the court said in a statement posted on its website.

Hong Kong  - An Indonesian maid was in a Hong Kong jail Thursday awaiting trial for mixing her menstrual blood in a pot of vegetables she was cooking for her employer.

Indra Ningsih, 26, allegedly told police afterwards she mixed the blood into the meal in a superstitious effort to make her Chinese employer "more amiable and less picky" towards her.

Jakarta  - An undersea earthquake registering 6.4 on the Richter scale struck the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra early Thursday, but there were no immediate reports of injury or damage, the Indonesian seismologist agency said.

The quake struck at 3:01 am (2001 GMT Wednesday) and was centred in the Indian Ocean, 32 kilometres south-west of Mentawai Islands, off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia's National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said in a statement.

Jakarta - Separatist rebels ambushed a police truck in Indonesia's Papua province Wednesday, killing one officer and wounding five others, state media reported.

The officers were travelling in Jayawijaya district to pick up ballot boxes from last week's elections when they were attacked, Papua police chief Bagus Eko Danto said, according to the Antara news agency.

One officer died while being airlifted to the provincial capital Jayapura, Bagus said.

Bali Island, Indonesia - Ministers and officials from 40 countries began a two-day meeting on the Indonesian resort island of Bali Tuesday to discuss people smuggling and the fate of migrants from Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic group. The meeting, co-hosted by Indonesia and Australia, will discuss Asia-Pacific solutions to people smuggling and trafficking and ways to improve border security.