• Report finds global agency missed chance to halt Ebola

LONDON - The World Health Organization bungled efforts to halt the spread of Ebola in West Africa, an internal report revealed Friday, as President Barack Obama named a trusted political adviser to take control of America's frenzied response to the epidemic.

The stepped-up scrutiny of the international response came as U.S. officials rushed to cut off potential routes of infection from three cases in Texas, reaching a cruise ship in the Caribbean and multiple domestic airline flights. Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration debated the value of restricting travelers from entering the U.S. from countries where the outbreak began, without a resolution.

But with Secretary of State John Kerry renewing pleas for a "collective, global response" to a disease that has already killed more than 4,500 people in Africa, the WHO draft report pointed to serious errors by an agency designated as the international community's leader in coordinating response to outbreaks of disease.

The document - a timeline of the outbreak - found that WHO, an arm of the United Nations, missed chances to prevent Ebola from spreading soon after it was first diagnosed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea last spring, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information. Its own experts failed to grasp that traditional infectious disease containment methods wouldn't work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems, the report found.

"Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," WHO said in the report, obtained by The Associated Press. "A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force."

• Activists say Islamic State group may have fighter jets

BAGHDAD - Syrian activists say the Islamic State militant group has captured some MiG fighter jets and is test-flying the warplanes in Syria with the help of former Iraqi air force pilots.

Friday's account by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights could not be independently confirmed, and U.S. officials said they had no reports of the militants flying jets in support of their fighters in Iraq and Syria.

The Observatory said the planes, seen flying over the Jarrah air base in the eastern countryside of Syria's Aleppo province this week, are believed to be of the MiG-21 and MiG-23 variety. Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Observatory, said the planes have been flying at a low altitude, "apparently to avoid being detected by Syrian military radar in the area."

He described the flights as a "moral victory" for the Islamic State, saying "the jets could not fly much further without being knocked down" by the U.S. led-coalition that is conducting airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.

The group is known to have seized fighter jets from at least one air base it captured from the Syrian army in Raqqa province earlier this year. Militant websites had posted photos of IS fighters with the warplanes, but it was unclear if they were operational.

• United Nations starts training Ebola survivors to help with care

UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations has begun training Ebola survivors to help respond to the soaring number of cases in West Africa, because people who've lived through the experience are now immune to the disease, UNICEF's crisis communications chief told reporters Friday.

Sarah Crowe said the U.N. is training the survivors to work with children in Liberia and Sierra Leone who've had contact with infected people, often family members, and require 21 days of isolation.

"Ebola has hijacked every aspect of life" in these hardest-hit countries, Crowe said, and it has left an estimated 3,700 orphans across the region. With the number of Ebola cases tripling every three weeks, she said, the number of orphans will grow.

Survivors of Ebola can offer the love and attention a small child needs, without the fear that has made life "a very unhuman experience," she said.

Ebola has turned large parts of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea into a no-touch culture, which has been especially hard on children.

• Kobani more of a strategic prize than U.S. will admit

WASHINGTON - Dusty and remote, the Syrian city of Kobani has become an unlikely spoil in the war against Islamic State militants - and far more of a strategic prize than the United States wants to admit.

Perched on Turkey's border, the city of about 60,000 has been besieged for weeks by IS fighters. Kobani is now a ghost town: the U.N. estimates that fewer than 700 of its residents remain as its people flee to safety in Turkey.

The Obama administration has declared Kobani a humanitarian disaster, but not a factor in the overall strategy to defeat the Islamic State group.

"Kobani does not define the strategy of the coalition with respect to Daesh," Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Cairo earlier this week, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. "Kobani is one community, and it's a tragedy what is happening there, and we don't diminish that." But, Kerry said, the primary U.S. military focus is in neighboring Iraq.

But this week, the U.S. dramatically upped its air power strikes against IS in and around Kobani, including 59 strikes over the last four days alone, as of Friday. Several hundred IS fighters were killed, the Pentagon said.

• 16 people dead after ventilation grate collapses at concert

SEOUL, South Korea - Sixteen people watching an outdoor pop concert in South Korea fell 60 feet to their deaths Friday when a ventilation grate they were standing on collapsed, officials said.

Photos of the scene in Seongnam, just south of Seoul, showed a deep concrete shaft under the broken grate. Seongnam city spokesman Kim Nam-jun announced the deaths in a televised briefing and said 11 other people were seriously injured.

A man who was involved in planning the concert was found dead early Saturday in an apparent suicide.

Fire officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of office rules, said the victims were standing on the grate while watching an outdoor performance by girls' band 4Minute, which is popular across Asia.

- The Associated Press