Seven store employees were killed in the southern Philippines when a paint shop burned down while they were sleeping inside, the provincial police chief said Friday.

The fatalities -- three men and four women -- died when the Palomares Paint Store in the rural town of Manay in Mindanao island caught fire late Thursday, said Senior Superintendent Jose Carumba.

A reporter with the Pan-Arab Al-Arabiya news channel has walked free from the southern Philippines jungle 18 months after he was abducted by Islamist militants, Filipino police said late Wednesday.

Bakr Atyani, a Jordanian, was found by a police patrol on the remote southern Philippine island of Jolo, more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of Manila, police in nearby Patikul town said.

Thousands of women and children in the Philippines risk falling prey to human traffickers in the aftermath of last month's catastrophic typhoon, lawmakers and the chief U.S. aid agency warned Tuesday.

A U.S. congressman returning from a visit to the storm-ravaged island nation said that while Filipino authorities and U.S. forces were helping vast numbers of storm victims, more attention was needed to thwart criminal opportunists taking advantage of the chaos after Super-typhoon Haiyan roared ashore.

The United Nations refugee agency has launched a fresh appeal for emergency aid for survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, which smashed into the Philippines last month, leaving nearly 7,500 people dead or missing.

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said it now needs $19.2 million to address "primary protection issues" for devastated communities, more than double the $8.3 million it has raised so far.

About a thousand traumatized survivors of the Philippines' deadliest typhoon fled their homes in one central province following false rumors of a tsunami, civil defense officials said Sunday.

Officials in the province of Antique were visiting upland villages where people had fled overnight to convince them there was no danger and it was safe to return to their coastal homes, said Broderick Train, the civil defense chief for the province.

Rebuilding areas devastated by a super typhoon that killed thousands in the Philippines will take up to five years and cost more than two billion dollars, officials said Saturday.

The comments came as the death toll from Haiyan, one of the most powerful typhoons to ever hit the country, continued to rise.

The Philippine economy expanded 7 percent in the third quarter, but growth is expected to slow because of devastation from the super typhoon that hit eastern and central regions earlier this month.

Statistics agency chief Jose Ramon Albert said Thursday that growth in the latest quarter was driven by services and industry.

A mass vaccination program has been launched in Philippine communities that were devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan to protect children against measles and polio, U.N. agencies said Wednesday.

The campaign began this week with 30,000 children being vaccinated in Tacloban city, one of the places hardest hit when Haiyan claimed thousands of lives nearly three weeks ago, the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF and World Health Organisation said.

Kuwait's supreme court upheld Monday a death sentence against a woman for murdering her Filipina maid after torturing her, and confirmed a 10-year sentence on her disabled husband.

The ruling is final and cannot be challenged but could be commuted to a life term by the ruler of the Gulf emirate. Executions in Kuwait are carried out by hanging.

The swift U.S. humanitarian response to the devastation of Super Typhoon Haiyan highlights the need to expand America's military presence in the Philippines, Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said Monday.

He said a proposed agreement to strengthen the U.S. military presence, which was being negotiated as the storm struck on November 8, would allow for the easier delivery of relief aid by U.S. forces in the future.