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Jakarta  - Indonesia's central bank cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to 7.5 per cent Friday to stimulate growth amid the slowing global economy.

Bank Indonesia has reduced the rate by 175 basis points so far this year and has cut it for five-straight months.

"The global economy is still grappling with uncertainty even though there has been positive sentiment related to the G20 agreement to push for improvement in the global capital and financial markets," Bank Indonesia said in a statement.

Jakarta -

Jakarta - Mental hospitals across Indonesia are prepared to treat politicians who may need psychiatric therapy after they lose next month's legislative elections, the Health Ministry said Thursday.

More than 600,000 candidates are vying for some 18,000 seats in national, provincial and district legislatures in the April 9 elections, the third democratic polls since the fall of former autocratic president Suharto in 1998.

, April 2 : Archaeologists, in Indonesia, have recovered a rare 12th-century stone statue of Lord Ganesha, which is the only one in the country in which the elephant-headed deity is depicted as riding atop a mouse.

According to a report in the Jakarta Post, a research team from the Mpu Purwa Historical Object Preservation Center in Malang, East Java, recovered the statue.

Jakarta  - An undersea earthquake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale struck the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra Wednesday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, the Indonesian seismology agency said.

The quake struck at 1:29 pm (0629 GMT) and was centred in the Indian Ocean, 227 kilometres south-west of Bintuhan in Bengkulu province, Indonesia's National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said.

It occurred 30 kilometres beneath the seabed, but the statement did not say if the quake was a tsunami threat.