At least seven people were killed as Typhoon Nesat smashed the Philippines on Tuesday, authorities said, with the capital Manila enduring waist-deep floods, blackouts and dramatic storm surges.

The Philippines is hit by about 20 major storms annually, many of them deadly, but the government said Nesat was one of the largest the country had faced this year, with its rain and wind path twice as big as average.

Fugitive Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi has told his supporters that he is still fighting on the ground and is ready to die a martyr, a loyalist website reported on Tuesday.

"Heroes have resisted and fallen as martyrs and we too are awaiting martyrdom," the website of the defunct Allibiya state television channel quoted Gadhafi as saying in a speech broadcast on local radio in Bani Walid, one of his last remaining bastions.

Three men suspected of plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper that printed controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005 will go on trial in Norway next month, a state prosecutor said Tuesday.

The three suspects, who were arrested in July 2010, have been charged with "conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack in northern Europe," the prosecutor Geir Evanger told Agence France Presse.

A walkabout in central Cairo by Egypt's military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi donning civilian clothes has unleashed a torrent of questions about his political intentions.

Tantawi took a stroll in Cairo's Downtown area on Monday night wearing a business suit and with no personal security in tow.

More than 150 Spanish police raided a suspected al-Qaida financing ring Tuesday, arresting five Algerian men and seizing computer material, the government said.

Police suspected the men sent money to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which has its roots in Algeria and carries out attacks and kidnappings in north Africa, the interior ministry said in a statement.

Yemeni Defense Minister Mohammad Nasser Ahmad Ali escaped an assassination bid by a suicide bomber Tuesday in the southern port city of Aden but 10 of his party were wounded, a security official said.

"A suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives drove into the minister's motorcade as he was driving out of a tunnel," the official told Agence France Presse, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The foreign ministers of Bahrain and Iran met in New York late Monday for their first talks since the two countries withdrew their ambassadors in a row over the crushing of Shiite-led protests in Manama, Iran said on Tuesday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told his Bahraini counterpart that the Sunni minority government should open a dialogue with the Gulf kingdom's Shiite majority, his ministry quoted him as saying.

Two metro trains collided in Shanghai on Tuesday, injuring more than 240 people, the system operator said, just months after a deadly high-speed rail crash that shocked China.

The firm blamed the accident on a signal failure -- the same cause as a July train crash that killed at least 40 people and shook public confidence in China's vast rail network.

A group of 38 women and seven girls arrested last week during a protest against Bahrain's parliamentary by-elections have reportedly been tortured or ill-treated, Amnesty International said.

"They were apprehended without lawyers present and some of them reportedly tortured or otherwise ill-treated," the London-based advocacy group said in a statement late on Monday.

Iraq has signed an agreement with the United States to buy 18 F-16s and has already made an initial payment as part of the deal, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Tuesday.

"Iraq has signed with Washington to buy the F-16s," Ali Mussawi said.