Six people were injured when two buses were bombed on a southern Philippines highway, police and the military said Sunday.

Improvised explosives set the vehicles ablaze one after the other as they were being driven near the town of Isulan on Saturday, said the provincial police chief, Senior Superintendent Rolen Balquin.

The ghetto called Aroma reeks of putrefying trash collected by its residents for recycling. Half-naked children with grimy faces play on muddy dirt roads lined by crumbling shanties of tarpaulin walls, cracked tin roofs and communal toilets. 

From this Manila slum of garbage collectors emerged an unlikely Cinderella: ballerina Jessa Balote who at the age of 10 was plucked out of her grubby life by a ballet school to prepare her for a life on stage. 

Eight people were killed and thousands left homeless as two fires struck the Philippine capital on Christmas Day, with one of the blazes sparking a riot in a slum, officials said.

Seven charred bodies, all believed to be from one household, were recovered after a blaze razed a row of old apartments in northern Manila at dawn, fire officer Francisco Mabunga told Agence France Presse.

Two German tourists and an Australian have been rescued following two days in the sea in the central Philippines after their boat capsized while they were island hopping, the coast guard said Friday.

Ralf Harald Auer, 54, his son Thomas Auer, 20, and Australian family friend, Joshua Marsh, were taken to hospital and treated for bruises and dehydration before being released, said Chief Petty Officer Venerando Celis.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino on Wednesday signed into law a 2.005 trillion-peso ($49 billion) budget for 2013, vowing to use higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol to boost programs to reduce poverty.

Education, health, agriculture and a cash-transfer scheme for the poor are the key priorities of the appropriations, which are 10.5 percent higher than the 2012 national budget, he said during the signing ceremony.

Philippine Catholic church leaders vowed Tuesday to overturn a birth control bill after lawmakers passed landmark legislation to make sex education and birth control more widely available.

The Senate and the House of Representatives approved the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill late Monday, putting it on course to be signed into law by President Benigno Aquino within a week, after its final wording has been decided.

The death toll from a typhoon that devastated the southern Philippines earlier this month has topped 1,000 as hundreds more remain missing, the government said on Sunday.

Typhoon Bopha killed 1,020 people, mostly on the southern island of Mindanao where floods and landslides caused major damage on December 4, civil defense chief Benito Ramos said.

Coca-Cola FEMSA of Mexico is to take control of the U.S. soft drink firm's bottling operations in the Philippines in a $688.5 million cash deal, the buyer announced on its website Friday.

The transaction gives the Mexican company, the world's largest Coca-Cola bottler, 51 percent of Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines Inc., with an option to acquire the remainder within seven years of the deal's close.

The Philippines moved closer to a controversial birth control law Thursday as lawmakers passed a version of the bill after a long debate over an issue that has deeply polarized the largely Catholic nation.

The bill paving the way for sex education in schools and the provision of free contraceptives in a country with one of Asia's fastest-growing populations was passed by the lower house of parliament after a five-hour vote.

The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year has climbed above 900, with hundreds still missing, the government said Thursday.

Typhoon Bopha killed 902 people mostly on the southern island of Mindanao, where floods and landslides caused major damage in nearly 2,000 villages on December 4, the civil defense office said.