In the World

ANKARA, Turkey - Police detained three retired generals and dozens of others in raids across Turkey yesterday, as they broadened their investigation into an alleged plot by secularists to overthrow Turkey's Islamic-rooted government.

In was the 10th time in about a year that police targeted prominent secularists, who are accused of trying to destabilize Turkey with a string of attacks ahead of a planned coup.

Eighty-six people - including former army officers, journalists, a former university dean, and a lawyer - already are on trial in the case. They have pleaded not guilty.

The case is widely perceived as being part of a power struggle between Turkey's secular establishment, including parts of the military, and the democratically elected and religiously conservative government.

- AP

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea announced yesterday it would hold long-overdue elections in March amid indications that the impoverished regime planned to fill parliament with finance-savvy legislators.

With foreign aid drying up amid a global economic crisis and a diplomatic standoff with South Korea, North Korea is turning inward to find a way out of economic hardship, analysts said.

Elections for seats in the Supreme People's Assembly - postponed last year amid speculation about leader Kim Jong Il's health - will be held March 8, state-run media said. The poll, held every five years, last took place in August 2003 and was due again last year - around the time Kim, who is 66, reportedly suffered a stroke.

Mismanagement and natural disasters shattered North Korea's economy in the mid-1990s, forcing the country to rely on foreign aid to feed its people.

- AP

DUBLIN, Ireland - The Irish government ordered a new investigation yesterday of alleged obstruction by a Roman Catholic bishop in an inquiry about sexually abusive priests in his diocese.

Children's Minister Barry Andrews' decision put pressure on Bishop John Magee to resign. Instead, he vowed to cooperate with the inquiry, the third involving his diocese of Cloyne. Magee apologized last month after a church investigator found he didn't inform police promptly or fully of allegations against two priests since 1995.

Andrews said the bishop also had offered misleading accounts to investigators from a second audit of how each Catholic diocese in Ireland polices its priests.

Andrews ordered a government panel investigating the church's handling of 400 abuse cases in Dublin to also investigate Magee's diocese.

- AP

U.S.-led forces raided

a Taliban bomb-making cell in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing 32 insurgents in a battle with scores of armed militants who shot at them from rooftops and alleyways, the military said yesterday.