World in brief

Dutch arrest 38 in terror sweep

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A nationwide antiterrorism operation netted 38 suspected members of a Kurdish rebel group Friday, including "militant trainees" being prepared at a rural campground for fighting in Turkey and Armenia, officials said.

The detainees are all alleged members of the former Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a rebel group that now calls itself KONGRA-GEL and is branded as terrorist by the United States and the European Union. The group seeks to carve out an independent Kurdish state in the mountains of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

More than 200 police were involved in the second major operation in the Netherlands in a week, after special forces used tear gas to end a standoff with alleged Islamic radicals in The Hague on Wednesday. Prosecutors said the two operations were unrelated.

Nine arrests were made Friday in raids in The Hague, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, and the town of Capelle aan den Ijssel.

Saying the world is nowhere near ready to fight a global epidemic of influenza, a panel convened by the World Health Organization demanded Friday in Geneva that there be greater international cooperation and financing to develop a vaccine.

The drug industry would have to manufacture billions of doses of an influenza vaccine within weeks to counter an epidemic like the one that caused more than 20-million deaths in 1918 and 1919, the participants said. Right now the industry makes just 300-million doses a year for regular influenza seasons.

With the right coordination, international commitment and about $13-million, scientists could deliver within a year a candidate vaccine to combat global flu outbreaks, the WHO said.

COCAINE SEIZED: U.S. authorities working with Jamaican antidrug agents seized 7.5 tons of cocaine off the Caribbean island's coast in the last week, police said Friday.

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