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.

Manila - The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Wednesday it has expanded its trade finance facilitation programme to 1 billion dollars to help ease a "dramatic reduction" in funding caused by the global financial crisis.

The Manila-based ADB said the programme's expansion could generate up to 15 billion dollars in much-needed trade support by the end of 2013.

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.

Jakarta  - Two Sumatran elephants have been shot and killed in Indonesia's Bengkulu province, a conservation official said Tuesday.

The elephants were killed last week in the Kerinci Seblat National Park, said Dudy Wuryanto, head of the nature conservation agency in the neighbouring province of Jambi.

He said the motive for the killings was unclear.