The ferry, MV Thomas Aquinas, began sinking after hitting the cargo vessel on Friday evening near the central city of Cebu, officials said.

Coastguard and naval vessels were joined by local fishing boats in the rescue effort, which is continuing.

The incident took place around 2km (1.2 miles) from the shore.

The ferry, carrying 692 people, was sailing into the port at Cebu – the country’s second biggest city – when it collided with the cargo ship travelling the other way at about 21:00 local time (01:00 GMT).

Coastguard officials said the ferry began listing. “The impact was very strong,” Rachel Capuno, a spokesperson for the owners of the ferry, told local radio.

Survivors said hundreds of passengers jumped into the ocean as the ferry began taking on water. The crew distributed life jackets.

Darkness

Many of the passengers were asleep and others struggled to find their way in the dark. One survivor, Jerwin Agudong, said he and other passengers jumped overboard in front of the cargo vessel.

PHILIPPINE FERRY DISASTERS

1987: Dona Paz ferry sinks after colliding with a fuel tanker, 4,341 people die.
2008: The ferry MV Princess of the Stars capsizes during a typhoon, killing nearly 800.
“It seems some people were not able to get out,” Mr Agudong told radio station DZBB. “I pity the children. We saw dead bodies on the side, and some being rescued.”

The ferry sank within 30 minutes of the collision, the AFP news agency reports. Cebu coastguard commander Weniel Azcuna told reporters the cargo ship, Sulpicio Express 7, had 36 crew members on board, but it did not sink.

Passengers on the ferry had embarked at Nasipit in the southern province of Agusan del Sur.

Maritime accidents are common in the Philippine archipelago because of tropical weather, badly maintained passenger boats and weak enforcement of safety regulations.

The world’s worst maritime disaster in peacetime occurred in the Philippines in December 1987. More than 4,000 people died when the Dona Paz ferry collided with a tanker.

Philippines: Philippine officials said Monday they will make sure that an increased presence of U.S. troops in the country does not become permanent and is meant to help the Philippines modernize its military, which is being challenged by China in territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Philippine and U.S. officials will open talks Wednesday in Manila on an accord to increase rotations of American troops, said chief government negotiator Carlos Sorreta. Hundreds of American troops already have been stationed in the volatile southern Philippines for counter-terrorism training since 2001. The new agreement is expected to increase their numbers and allow them to preposition equipment, officials said.

At a news conference, Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin presented the Philippines’ negotiators, who will meet with the Americans. They did not mention China by name but have repeatedly stressed in the past that their country needs to upgrade its military to defend its territorial waters in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims virtually in its entirety.

“Our region needs to know that we are steadfastly for peace,” del Rosario said. “But that we stand ready to tap every resource, to call on every alliance, to do what is necessary, to defend what is ours, to secure our nation and to keep our people safe.”

Gazmin said the wider U.S. presence will not be permanent and will comply with the constitution, which bans the basing of foreign troops. It would also mean more resources and training for responding to disasters in a nation often battered by typhoons and earthquakes.

The presence of foreign troops is a sensitive issue in the Philippines, a former American colony. The Philippine Senate voted in 1991 to close down major American bases at Subic and Clark, near Manila. In 1999, it ratified a pact with the United States that allows temporary visits by American forces, paving the way for hundreds of U.S. forces to hold combat exercises with Filipino troops and training them in battling al-Qaida-linked militants in the south.

Simmering territorial tensions in the South China Sea have since shifted the focus on the Philippines’ poorly guarded maritime frontiers. Last year, China took control of a lagoon off the northwestern Philippines, which Manila says falls within its 200-mile (322-kilometer) exclusive economic zone. China also has demanded that the Philippines pull out of another shoal farther south, near Mischief Reef, which Chinese troops occupied in 1995 amid Manila’s protests.

The U.S. says it takes no sides in the disputes but has backed the Philippine approach to seek U.N. arbitration and a wider regional agreement. China has criticized the Philippines for escalating the disputes and warned against any outside intervention. Several of China’s neighbors have been alarmed by Beijing’s recent assertiveness in claiming large areas of the South China Sea.

Manila’s desire to bolster its external defense and security has dovetailed with Washington’s intention to pivot away from years of heavy military engagement in the Middle East to Asia, where it has been fostering closer economic and military alliances with countries such as the Philippines, partly as a counterweight to China’s rising clout.

The realignment of American forces in the Asia-Pacific also involves the deployment of up to 2,500 U.S. Marines in northern Australia and the stationing of U.S. combat vessels in Singapore.

Gazmin has said that additional American troops would only be allowed access to existing Philippine military bases. The two sides have to negotiate the length of any agreement allowing more U.S. troops, planes, ships and other equipment.

MANILA: The Philippines said on Sunday it has clinched a key “wealth-sharing” deal with Muslim rebels, bringing it closer to ending a decades-old rebellion that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Chief peace negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer said the government was cautiously optimistic of a final peace pact within weeks after the compromise deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) late Saturday following six days of gruelling talks.

“This signing indicates that both sides are really committed to finish the peace negotiations. Nobody wants this not to reach its fruition,” Ferrer told AFP after the wealth-sharing formula was signed.

Under the deal, the government has agreed to let the rebels have a 75 percent share of earnings from natural resources and metallic minerals in a proposed autonomous region for the Muslim minority in the southern Mindanao region, Ferrer said.

For energy resources, both sides agreed to split earnings equally following the talks hosted by neighbouring Malaysia.

“We are always optimistic, but that is always guided by a good sense of possibilities and constraints of our situation,” she said.

The government had initially bargained for a bigger share of the wealth, arguing that it wanted a deal that could withstand legal challenge in the Supreme Court.

Ferrer said a final peace deal with the 12,000-MILF could be signed after the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which officially ends at the end of July.

The MILF has waged a guerrilla war for a separate Islamic state in Mindanao since the 1970s that has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives.

President Benigno Aquino’s government and the MILF signed a preliminary deal in October outlining the broad terms for a peace treaty that is expected to be signed before he ends his six-year term in 2016.

Ferrer, however, noted Sunday that both sides still had to agree on a formula over how to disarm the rebels as well as the extent of the powers of the autonomous region.

MILF vice chairman for political affairs Ghazali Jaafar said the group expected a “more contentious” round of negotiations ahead.

“The MILF fighters will not disarm unless clear conditions and terms for their safety are met,” Jaafar told AFP. “There must also be an assurance the fighters will be free from harassment from troops once they are disarmed, if ever.”

He said the rebels had originally wanted at least a 60-40 sharing scheme over energy resources, which include natural gas believed abundant in the south.

The proposed autonomous territory comprises areas the minority Muslims consider their “ancestral domain” in Mindanao, the country’s main southern island believed to have a large chunk of the country’s estimated $840 billion in gold, copper and other mineral reserves.

“Not all of us were totally satisfied with the outcome (of the talks),” Jaafar said.

Meanwhile, Ferrer warned that failure to seize the pact could be used by the small, violent break-away faction Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) as a justification to sow further violence.

“A failure of the agreement can by used by groups like the BIFF who do not want the process to succeed — who say nothing will happen in these negotiations — to agitate for war, and continue use of violence,” she said.

Believed to number less than 200 fighters led by a hard line Islamic militant opposed to talks, the BIFF broke away from the MILF in 2011 and has since been staging deadly attacks to derail the negotiations.

A skirmish Saturday, the latest to hit the region, left two soldiers and five BIFF guerrillas dead.

MANILA, Philippines: Unlike many other Muslim royalties basking in grand palaces and opulent lifestyles, Sultan Jamalul Kiram III’s kingdom sits in a rundown two-story house in a poor Islamic community in Manila, the only hint of power and glory the title attached to his name.

“I’m the poorest sultan in the world,” the ailing Kiram, 74, told The Associated Press in an interview in his residence in Maharlika village in the Philippine capital.

Although largely forgotten and dismissed as a vestige from a bygone era, Kiram’s sultanate, once based in the southern province of Sulu, has sparked the biggest security crisis in Malaysia and the Philippines in decades — early last month, he sent his younger brother with about 200 followers, dozens of them armed, by boat from southern Philippines to a village in Sabah state in neighboring Malaysia to claim the land the sultanate insists belongs to them.

A stunned Malaysia, which runs the frontier resource-rich region of timberlands and palm oil plantations as its second-largest federal state, poured in elite police and army troops and called in airstrikes to quell what it saw as an armed intrusion.

After weeks of sporadic clashes that killed 19 intruders and eight policemen, troops launched a full-scale assault Tuesday, codenamed “Operation Sovereign,” but failed to account for most of the Filipinos, who according to the Kiram family were unhurt.

Malaysian forces shot and possibly killed one of the men, who appear to be trying to escape the area, police said. Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said later Wednesday that security forces combing the area found 12 bodies. However, it was not clear if they died in Tuesday’s strike or in the previous weeks of clashes.

MANILA, Philippines: The Philippine Supreme Court temporarily halted the implementation of a law that provides state funding for contraceptives, legislation opposed by the dominant Roman Catholic Church but supported by reproductive health activists.

The Responsible Parenthood Law was passed by lawmakers late last year despite the church’s opposition but petitioners questioned its legality on several grounds, saying it offends religious beliefs and fosters abortion, which remains illegal in the country.

Voting 15-5 in favor of 10 separate petitions Tuesday, the justices stopped the implementation of the law until June 18, when both sides will argue their cases before the court, said Theodore Te, spokesman for the Supreme Court.

Catholic leaders consider the law an attack on the church’s core values and say it promotes promiscuity and destroys life. The government says it helps the poor manage the number of children they have and provides for maternal health care.

Nearly half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unwanted, according to the U.N. Population Fund, and a third of those end up aborted in back-alley clinics.

The Philippines has a population of 94 million and one of Asia’s highest birth rates.

Edwin Lacierda, spokesman for President Benigno Aquino III, said that the government was confident it will be able to defend the merits of the law.

Aquino risked the clash with the church and church-backed politicians to sponsor the law and lobby for its passage. Aquino signed the law in December, and the Department of Health last week drafted and approved its implementing rules, setting it into motion.

The law mandates government health centers to provide universal and free access to nearly all contraceptives to everyone, particularly the country’s poorest, who make up a third of the population. So far, such access has been patchy, expensive, and hinged on the political will of local governments. In the past, for instance, some mayors banned free distribution of condoms in their areas.

The law also makes sexual education compulsory in public schools.

The government made some concessions in deference to the church, according to Mellisa Upreti, regional director for Asia at the U.S.-based Center for Reproductive Rights.

It failed to legalize all contraceptives, including emergency contraception, and the law contains a measure that allows private and religious-affiliated hospitals to deny reproductive health services based on their moral and theological objections, Upreti wrote in Tuesday’s Guardian newspaper.

Private-run Catholic hospitals are among the leading providers of health care in the Philippines.

A commander with the Moro National Liberation Front, which has an autonomy deal with the government, said his group battled Abu Sayyaf gunmen Sunday after the Abu Sayyaf refused to free several foreign hostages it has held in jungle lairs for months, including a Jordanian TV journalist and two European men. The militants did release two Filipino hostages who were found by police Saturday.

Eight Moro rebels and at least 13 Abu Sayyaf militants were killed in the clashes in in the jungle-clad mountains of Sulu province’s Patikul town, where hundreds of armed fighters of the Moro National Liberation Front have encamped in the last three weeks to pressure the extremists to free their kidnap victims and end other acts of banditry.

There has been no word on what happened to the Abu Sayyaf’s captives amid the fighting, Sulu provincial police chief Senior Superintendent Antonio Freyra said.

The fighting subsided Monday after Abu Sayyaf gunmen split into smaller groups, with a large group seen fleeing from Patikul to an adjacent town. But the clashes could erupt again, Freyra said.

It was the first major bloody confrontation between the two insurgent groups, which have coexisted for years and at times were suspected of collaborating on kidnappings and backing each other in clashes against government troops in predominantly Muslim Sulu.

Moro National Liberation Front commander Khabir Malik said his group had taken the initiative to seek the freedom of the hostages to help the government clean up the image of Sulu, where the Abu Sayyaf has carried out deadly bombings, kidnappings and beheadings, primarily in the early 2000s.

Over the weekend, Abu Sayyaf militants freed two Filipinos who worked for veteran Jordanian journalist Baker Abdulla Atyani. But the militants kept Atyani himself and other foreign hostages, including two European bird watchers, a Japanese treasure hunter and a Malaysian man. At least one Filipino resident of Sulu remains with the Abu Sayyaf, police said.

Cameraman Ramel Vela and audio technician Roland Letriro, who had spent eight months in captivity, told the police that they last saw Atyani five days after they were taken into Abu Sayyaf custody, when the militants separated him from them. Atyani traveled with the two in June to Sulu, a predominantly Muslim province 950 kilometers (590 miles) south of Manila, to do a documentary on the country’s volatile south.

Atyani has gained prominence for having interviewed Osama bin Laden and his aides in Afghanistan about three months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Abu Sayyaf is an extremist offshoot of a Muslim rebellion that has been raging in the predominantly Catholic nation’s south for decades. U.S.-backed military offensives have crippled it in recent years, but it remains a national security threat. Washington has listed the group, which has about 380 armed fighters, as a terrorist organization.

Moro National Liberation Front rebels signed a peace deal with the government in 1996 that did not require them to disarm. They have settled back to their Sulu communities but have clashed with government troops periodically while negotiating for more concessions.

The group’s stature has been overshadowed in recent years by the larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which is currently engaged in Malaysian-brokered talks with the government to expand and seek more power and resources for an existing Muslim autonomous region in the south.