Martha Kande's family lived with her greying, shrivelled corpse at their home in Indonesia for seven months, as they prepared an elaborate funeral that is central to the Toraja people's centuries-old death rituals."We keep the body in a coffin at home," Meyske Latuihamallo, the 81-year-old woman's granddaughter, told AFP.

Nearly 1,400 people are now known to have died in the quake-tsunami that smashed into Indonesia's Sulawesi island, with United Nations (UN) officials warning needs are "vast" for both desperate survivors and rescue teams still searching for victims.Almost 200,000 people want urgent help, the UN's humanitarian office said, among them tens of thousands of children, with an estimated 66,000 homes destroyed or damaged by the 7.5-magnitude quake and the tsunami it spawned.Survi

Mass graves were being readied for hundreds of victims of an Indonesian quake and tsunami on Monday as authorities battled to stave off disease and reach desperate people still trapped under shattered buildings.

Nearly 400 people were killed when a powerful quake sent a tsunami barrelling into the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, officials said Saturday, as hospitals struggled to cope with hundreds of injured and rescuers scrambled to reach the stricken region.The national disaster agency put the official death toll so far at 384, all of them in the tsunami-struck city of Palu, but warned the toll was likely to rise.Some 540 people were badly injured, it added.In the city - home to around 350,000 peopl