Security

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy Wednesday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

It took 12 years for Ojwang Santino to feel safe enough to begin rebuilding his home. Each morning before the sun gets too hot, he makes the trek to his ancestral land to smooth new mud walls and work on the thatched roof. But now he doesn't know whether he'll have the courage to move in. He's afraid the Lord's Resistance Army will come back. Santino, a father and grandfather, is one of the 1.

Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby wants to bar the Sheriff's Department from handling security in the Hall of Administration after an investigator used a security camera to zoom in on Norby's notes and a colleague's BlackBerry messages during a board meeting. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors asserted control over security in the board chambers and weighed whether to hire a private firm or a local police department to provide security in the Hall of Administration.

A leading journalists association on Tuesday ranked Mexico among the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters, as news media workers increasingly become targets of organized crime groups. Five Mexican reporters were killed in 2008 and seven have disappeared in the last three years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organization.

Some of the nation's most sophisticated military submarines are based in the chilly waters of Puget Sound, an inlet of islands, peninsulas and harbors that is worryingly vulnerable to terrorist attack from a furtive diver or brazen suicide swimmer. But the Navy's plan to use a squadron of highly trained dolphins and sea lions to patrol and protect the submarine fleet is running into opposition from those who fear the glacier-fed waters of the sound are too frigid for warm-water dolphins.

The people of Villanueva said they'd had enough. Men in cowboy hats, women with hand-scrawled signs, children on bikes -- they gathered outside town and blocked the main interstate highway. "If you can't do it, quit!" they told their police force. They demanded that the army take over. The army rolled into this town in Zacatecas state last month and ordered the police to stand down and surrender their weapons. They did. Things only got worse.

The residents of this city of cafes, culture and good food always thought they were different. Even when a few suicide bombers targeted the metropolis starting a couple of years back, most considered themselves relatively insulated from the worst of Pakistan's problems, the violence over the horizon in outlaw country near the Afghan border. Residents consider Lahore the arts capital of Pakistan and feel proud of its free, open atmosphere, its tolerance, sense of fun and vibrant street life.

Buried under two months of winter in Buffalo, N.Y., Kim Kramer could take no more. "I came home and said, 'I've got to get out of here,' " said Kramer, a 44-year-old teacher. Two weeks later, she was awash in sunshine here on Mexico's Caribbean coast, sipping a midday Hurricane and looking pleasantly thawed. Before Kramer got on the plane to Cancun, though, she made sure to check: Was it dangerous to go there?

The head of the nation's cyber security center has resigned amid persistent turf battles and confusion over the control and protection of the country's vast computer networks and systems. Rod Beckstrom's decision to step down as director of the National Cyber Security Center comes as the White House is conducting a broad 60-day review of how well the government is using technology to protect everything from classified national security data to key financial systems and air traffic control.

The United Nations took over command from a European Union protection force in eastern Chad on Sunday, and there were growing fears of more rebel violence and the possible arrival of tens of thousands more refugees from Sudan's Darfur region. The European Union formally handed over command to the U.N. mission in Chad and Central African Republic after a yearlong mandate expired. The hand-over, which sees about 5,000 U.N.