Jakarta - Indonesia and Thailand agreed Friday that the issue of the Myanmar Rohingya boat people should be tackled together by countries in the region, Visiting Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.

The Thai military has been criticized for pushing back about 1,000 Rohingya refugees from Thailand's southern shores last December, leaving them at sea in boats without engines and insufficient food and water.

Jakarta  - Nine people, including eig

Jakarta  - Thick smoke caused by forest fires blanketing Indonesia's Riau province on Sumatra island forced the brief closure of the local airport on Tuesday, an official said.

Five flights were diverted to airports in neighboring provinces after the haze reduced visibility to below 1 kilometre on Tuesday morning, said Dedi Suryana, chief of the Sultan Syarif Kasim airport in Pekanbaru, the provincial capital.

"There were some delays in departures and arrivals but we have reopened now," he said.

Jakarta - About 100 Indonesian Muslims rallied outside the US embassy in Jakarta Monday to protest a planned visit this week by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The protestors from the conservative Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia waved placards denouncing Clinton as a "Zionist agent" in reference to Israel.

"Hillary, you're not welcome here," read a poster held by a woman wearing a white headscarf.

Jakarta - A politician and former separatist rebel was shot dead in Indonesia's Aceh province in the latest attack targeting former separatists, an official said Friday.

Taufik, who headed a district branch of the Aceh Party, was gunned down at his home Thursday, said Ibrahim Syamsuddin, a spokesman for the Aceh Transition Committee, an advocacy group for former separatist fighters in Aceh.

Taufik, whose wife is running in a regional election, was the third former rebel to have been killed in the past two weeks, Syamsuddin said.

Jakarta  - At least 37 people were injured and many buildings damaged when an earthquake measuring magnitude 7.4 on the Richter scale struck early Thursday off the northern tip of Indonesia's Sulawesi island, an official said.

The quake hit Talaud Islands, a small archipelago off Sulawesi near the Philippines, and of the 37 people injured there, nine people were in serious condition, said Rustam Pakaya, head of the Health Ministry's crisis centre.