Suspected Islamic militants detonated a powerful bomb that killed at least three people and wounded 27 others in a budget hotel packed with wedding guests in the southern Philippines, officials said Monday.

Investigators believe the blast and ensuing fire that gutted the two-story Atilano Pension House in downtown Zamboanga City late Sunday was a terrorist strike and that it was not linked to the wedding, city police director Edwin de Ocampo said.

With a taste for tropical fruit and a reputation as thieves, a herd of giraffes on a remote Philippine island is one of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos's most intriguing legacies.

The 20 giraffes, along with dozens of zebra and antelope, are descendants of a boatload of animals imported from Africa in the 1970s -- supposedly in a Noah's Ark-style effort to save them from extinction.

Twin 2-year-old girls who were joined at the chest and abdomen were separated Tuesday during a lengthy, complex procedure at Stanford University's children's hospital.

The operation that gave Philippines-born sisters Angelina and Angelica Sabuco their independence took more than nine hours and a team of more than 40 people.

The world welcomed its symbolic seven billionth baby Monday amid a stark warning from U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon of the need to tackle inequality on a planet where almost a billion people go hungry.

"Our world is one of terrible contradictions," Ban told a press conference to mark the U.N. declaration that the world population has reached seven billion.

About 10,000 people have fled their homes amid fighting between Muslim rebels and government forces in the southern Philippines, a civil defense official said Tuesday.

The displaced accounts for about one in seven residents of the towns of Payao, Alicia and Talusan on Mindanao Island, home of a decades-old Muslim insurgency, said provincial disaster monitoring Chief Adriano Fuego.

The Philippines on Monday launched its first air strikes in three years against Muslim separatist rebels in the restless south, after a series of attacks that left 35 people dead, the military said.

Two OV-10 attack planes bombed a remote village on the edge of Payao town on Mindanao island, where Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels have been entrenched since last week, army spokesman Major Harold Cabunoc said.

As grime-covered men emerge from deep shafts on the Philippines' "golden mountain", Norie Palma eagerly prepares to haggle for her share of ore from the weary miners.

The former laundrywoman turned gold buyer directs the procession to her small milling shack amid grunts from the miners whose backs are stooped under the weight of their hauls from the dangerous honeycomb tunnels of Mount Diwata.

The Philippine military accused Muslim rebels Wednesday of killing 19 soldiers on a remote southern island in one of the worst outbreaks of violence between the two sides in years.

The fighting further complicated efforts to end one of Asia's longest insurgencies, with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the military trading accusations of breaking a ceasefire in place to promote peace talks.

Deep inside the Philippines' largest marshland, tribespeople who once revered crocodiles as mystical creatures say they now feel terrorized by them.

Reports of attacks on people and livestock have become more frequent and tensions reached a peak last month when a three-week hunt netted what is believed to be the world's biggest crocodile ever captured.

Two powerful explosions believed to be from home-made bombs ripped through a motel and a cock-fighting arena in the southern Philippines on Sunday, wounding 11 people, police said.

The first explosion at noon tore through the ground floor of the two-story Red Palm inn in Zamboanga, a port city in the troubled southern island of Mindanao, where Islamist militants operate.