At least nine people were injured when a home-made bomb strapped to a bicycle exploded in a commercial area of a city in the southern Philippines, officials said today.

With funeral companies overwhelmed, a flood-hit Philippine city has organised the first mass burial of some of nearly 700 people killed in one of worst calamities to strike the region in decades.

Pounding rain from a tropical storm swelled rivers and sent walls of water crashing into two southern Philippine cities in the thick of night, killing at least 436 people, many caught in their beds, officials said today.

Police safely defused a powerful bomb that may have been intended to be set off in a Roman Catholic cathedral in a southern Philippine city where suspected Muslim militants killed two people in bombings last week.