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Police in the coastal city of Mombasa reported a 2 a.m. attack by an armed gang. Reports indicated several officers — perhaps four or five — and several attackers were killed. Police didn't immediately confirm a death toll.

Reports emerged of a second deadly attack on police just north of Mombasa. The U.N. restricted the movement of its staff on the coast because of the violence.

Long lines around the country left voters frustrated in the election's early hours. Anti-fraud fingerprint voter ID technology being used for the first time appeared to be greatly slowing the process.

Prime Minster Raila Odinga — one of two top candidates for president — voted at an elementary school and acknowledged what he called voting challenges. He said poll workers were taking action to "remedy the anomalies."

"Never before have Kenyans turned up in such numbers," he said. "I'm sure they're going to vote for change this election."

The country's leaders have been working for months to reduce election-related tensions, but multiple factors make more vote violence likely. The police said late Sunday that criminals were planning to dress in police uniforms and disrupt voting in some locations.

In addition, intelligence on the Somali-Kenya border indicated Somali militants planned to launch attacks; a secessionist group on the coast threatened — and perhaps already carried out — attacks; the tribes of the top two presidential candidates have a long history of tense relations; and 47 new governor races are being held, increasing the chances of electoral problems at the local level.

Perhaps most importantly, Uhuru Kenyatta, the other top presidential candidate, faces charges at the International Criminal Court for orchestrating Kenya's 2007-08 postelection violence. If he wins, the U.S. and Europe could scale back relations with Kenya, and Kenyatta may have to spend a significant portion of his presidency at The Hague. Kenyatta's running mate, William Ruto, also faces charges at the ICC.

Long lines began forming early across the nation. In Kibera, Nairobi's largest slum, some 1,000 people stood in several lines at one polling station before daybreak. Voter Arthur Shakwira said he got in line at 4 a.m. but left the queue over confusion about which line to stand in.

"We should prepare these voting areas sooner," Shakwira said. "Confusion. All the time it's confusion."

Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who is the son of Kenya's founding president, faces Raila Odinga, a Luo whose father was the country's first vice president. Polls show the two in a close race, with support for each in the mid-40-percent range. Eight candidates are running for president, making it likely Odinga and Kenyatta will be matched up in an April run-off, when tensions could be even higher.

Most voters in Kibera —like Amos Achola, who said he arrived at the polling station at 2 a.m. — support Odinga.

"I think he wins but if he doesn't win I'll abide by the outcome," Achola said. "The other guy is also a Kenyan. If Kenyatta wins I'll accept it but I won't like. But I don't want violence."

New technology — in part to prevent the allegations of rigging that haunted the 2007 vote — appeared to slow the voting. At the Mutomo Primary School in Gatundu, where Kenyatta is expected to cast his ballot, voting officials seemed overwhelmed by the finger-print technology. The election worker behind the computer looked nervous and sometimes scratched his head.

The first person to vote, an eldery woman, cast her ballot at 6:25 a.m., 25 minutes after the polls opened.

In Mombasa, police boss Aggrey Adoli said that police were attacked at 2 a.m. by a marauding gang while on patrol. He didn't immediately confirm a death toll but reporters at the scene said police indicated that up to five officers and several attackers were killed.

A late Sunday attack in the city of Garissa, near the Somali border, killed two people — a Red Cross paramedic and a driver. Officials said a candidate for parliament had been the target but was not hit.

Garissa County Commissioner Mohamed Ahmed Maalim said Sunday that officials intercepted communications that indicated terror attacks were planned. Maalim said soldiers are patrolling the region to prevent attacks from al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group. He said 300 specialized troops known as GSU are patrolling the Dadaab refugee camp, where more than 400,000 Somalis live.

In the weeks leading up to Monday's vote, described by Odinga as the most consequential since independence from the British in 1963, peace activists and clerics worked to ensure the election would be peaceful despite lingering tensions.

Odinga's acrimonious loss to President Mwai Kibaki in 2007 triggered violence that ended only after the international community stepped in. Odinga was named prime minister in a coalition government led by Kibaki, with Kenyatta named deputy prime minister.

Some 99,000 police officers will be on duty during an election in which some 14 million people are expected to vote.

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Associated Press reporter Daud Yussuf in Garissa contributed to this report. Rodney Muhumuza reported from Gatunda.

A security guard who opened the gate recently said tigers, bears, lizards and many endangered anteaters called pangolins were inside. He called his boss and handed the cellphone to a reporter seeking permission to enter the compound.

Mr. Vixay (pronounced wee-sai), who spoke politely in a mixture of Thai and Laotian, denied that there were any animals inside or that he was in the wildlife business.

"There's nothing there," Mr. Vixay said of the compound, which is a five-mile drive to the nearest paved road. "Who told you about it?"

Mr. Vixay is notorious among investigators and government officials in several countries fighting to cut off syndicates operating a thriving trade in endangered animals that spans continents and has led to the slaughter of elephants in Africa, the illegal killings of rhinoceroses and the decimation of other species living in Asia's jungles.

Mr. Vixay, says one investigator, is the "Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking."

Interviews with government officials in five countries and a review of hundreds of pages of government and court documents compiled by a counter-trafficking organization provide strong evidence that Mr. Vixay, a Laotian, is a linchpin of wildlife smuggling operations.

South African authorities prosecuting a case of rhinoceros horn smuggling say one of Mr. Vixay's companies, Xaysavang Trading, perpetrated "one of the biggest swindles in environmental crime history," circumventing the law by hiring people to pose as hunters, who are allowed to kill a limited number of rhinos as trophies. In a separate case, Kenyan officials tied the company to the smuggling of elephant tusks for the ivory trade.

But the bulk of Mr. Vixay's wildlife trading operations, investigators say, is the "laundering" of animals.

The ruse, the documents suggest and investigators say, involves smuggling animals from other countries into Laos and then exporting them — with Laotian government paperwork — under the pretense that they were bred there in captivity and therefore, in many cases, could be sold legally.

The case is especially frustrating to those outside Laos, who say Mr. Vixay appears untouchable as long as he remains in his home country, where, they say, officials have refused to do a thorough investigation despite the reams of evidence presented to them. And without stopping him, wildlife officials and investigators say, they have little hope of breaking down a business empire that they say connects the African savanna to the Asian jungles and ultimately to customers of ivory and traditional medicines in Vietnam and China.

"He is the single largest known illegal wildlife trafficker in Asia," said Steven Galster, the executive director of Freeland, a counter-trafficking organization that has been trailing Mr. Vixay for eight years. "He runs an aggressive business, sourcing lucrative wild animals and body parts wherever they are easily obtained. Every country with commercially valuable wildlife should beware."

Freeland has been instrumental in building a case against Mr. Vixay, and was the source of the vast majority of the documents reviewed for this article, including business contracts and Laotian customs documents that attest to the scale of his operations. Founded in Bangkok more than a decade ago, Freeland is staffed by current and former law enforcement officials from Britain, the United States, Thailand and a number of other Asian countries, and is financed partly by the American government.

The nonprofit organization, which works closely with government officials in Africa, Asia and the United States, also provided entree for The New York Times to some of those officials. The Times interviewed authorities from Thailand, China, South Africa, Laos and Vietnam.

The booming trade in exotic wildlife has been fueled by rising wealth in China and Vietnam and the demand there for things like the scales of the pangolin, which are consumed in the unproven belief that they help lactating mothers.

Mr. Vixay, who is in his 50s, has met this growing demand for animals like snakes, lizards and turtles from his base in the impoverished countryside of Laos, a thinly populated country bordering Vietnam and China and known for its widespread corruption.

For years, the inner workings of his syndicate remained somewhat opaque to the Thai investigators trailing him. But in 2011, for the first time, a part of Mr. Vixay's operations was exposed by the arrest and trial of a Thai man who says he was his deputy, Chumlong Lemtongthai, thousands of miles away in South Africa after an investigation of a rhino-horn smuggling operation.

One of the tip-offs for the authorities was Mr. Chumlong's choice of fake hunters: petite Thai women who turned out to be prostitutes. Thai officials who intercepted some of the rhino horns from South Africa could not believe the women had actually bagged the animals.

"It's a very, very big gun," one officer said when questioning Mr. Chumlong, according to a video recording by a representative of Freeland who was at the interview.

Questioned by Laotian officials after a query from South African authorities, Mr. Vixay said he "had no idea about suspects arrested in South Africa." But Thai investigators discovered a photo on Mr. Chumlong's computer that showed him posing with Mr. Vixay, and a certificate at Mr. Chumlong's office outside Bangkok that said he had been appointed a representative of Mr. Vixay's company.

Evidence at the trial, which included airway bills showing that some rhino horns from the hunts were shipped to one of Mr. Vixay's addresses in Laos, raised hopes among investigators that his business would be severely disrupted, if not dismantled.

But more than a year and a half after the arrest of Mr. Chumlong, who has since drawn a 40-year sentence in South Africa, Mr. Vixay remains a free man.

An operative in the smuggling operation arrested in South Africa, Puntitpak Chunchom, suggested a possible reason, telling investigators that Laos was a perfect base for Mr. Vixay because he was untouchable in the country.

"He is so well protected that nobody can arrest him in Laos," Mr. Puntitpak said, according to a transcript of an interview by Thai authorities.

Freeland has obtained official Laotian documents that show Mr. Vixay's company is authorized to breed rare and endangered animals and to sell them within Laos and across borders.

But documents suggest he is also trading in endangered animals or animal parts from other countries, which for some species is always prohibited by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. In other cases, the United Nations treaty allows some trade, but only if the animals are bred. (Laos became a signatory to the treaty in 2004.)

A single sales contract from 2009 obtained by Freeland suggests the large volume of animals that Mr. Vixay trades in. Xaysavang Trading, Mr. Vixay's company, agreed to sell 70,000 snakes, 20,000 turtles and 20,000 monitor lizards to a Vietnamese company in a deal worth $860,000.

Experts say the sheer volume of animals is evidence of laundering. Breeding 20,000 of the species of turtle that Mr. Vixay's company commonly sells — the yellow-headed temple turtle — could take a decade, according to Doug Hendrie, an adviser at Education for Nature, a group in Vietnam that conducts investigations into wildlife crime.

In recent years, Thai authorities have intercepted a number of trucks carrying turtles, tiger cubs, tiger carcasses, pangolins and snakes headed for Mr. Vixay's businesses on the other side of the Mekong River, according to Freeland.

In addition, 280 kilograms of ivory — more than 600 pounds — seized by the Kenyan wildlife police was addressed to Mr. Vixay's company.

An item on the seizure on the Kenya Wildlife Service Web site ends with this entreaty, "Kenya's outcry is to totally stop the bloody elephant trade."

Laotian authorities admit that animal smuggling is a problem but say the evidence against Mr. Vixay is not sufficient to investigate him further.

"We found nothing there," said Bouaxam Inthalangsi, a top Laotian official in the forestry department.

But when pressed about the voluminous evidence against Mr. Vixay, Mr. Bouaxam hinted at obstacles. Enforcing the law was "difficult," he said.

"It's about influence," he said. "Trafficking syndicates have links to influential people — this is the main problem."

The executive was Michael Lombardo, and the partner was Vice Media, the Brooklyn media company with something of a daredevil streak. The conversation happened about a month ago, when production was well under way on "Vice," a newsmagazine that will have its premiere on HBO on April 5.

The company's bosses said they were planning a visit to the secretive country, centered on an exhibition basketball game with the flamboyant former N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman and three members of the Harlem Globetrotters. HBO decided to add what Mr. Lombardo said was "a little bit" of extra financing, beyond what it had already agreed to pay for the newsmagazine.

"It felt like something that could be interesting for the show," Mr. Lombardo, HBO's president for programming, said last Friday as he recalled the meeting.

By Friday, the trip wasn't just "interesting," it was international news. Kim Jong-un showed up for the exhibition game in Pyongyang the day before, making Mr. Rodman and Vice's film crew the first Americans known to have met the North Korean ruler since he inherited power from his father in 2011.

On television and online, people were debating which group was benefiting more from the publicity, Vice or the North Korean leadership. At the State Department, reporters wanted to know why the United States government wasn't visibly doing more to debrief Mr. Rodman about his interactions with Mr. Kim, the dictator whom he pronounced his "friend."

The Vice crew remains in North Korea; several more days of filming are scheduled. But Mr. Rodman returned home over the weekend, and in his first interview — on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday — he said Mr. Kim was "a great guy" and said "he wants Obama to do one thing, call him" — which generated even more news headlines.

To say this was all part of Vice's master plan would overstate the matter. The producers and reporters had no assurances that Mr. Kim would attend the game. But when they arranged the trip to North Korea, a rarity in and of itself, they thought like diplomats. To get what they wanted, they considered what they could give — and they came up with Mr. Rodman and the Globetrotters. "We knew he'd be tempted by basketball," said a Vice spokesman, referring to Mr. Kim.

The Kim dynasty's love for the sport, and for the Chicago Bulls in particular, was evident on the Vice co-founder Shane Smith's two previous trips to the country. In a telephone interview, Mr. Smith recalled that when the Bulls would come up in conversation with North Korean handlers, "their eyes would light up." The handlers made sure to show him the basketball signed by Michael Jordan and given to Kim Jong-il by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, now on display at a museum in Pyongyang.

Mr. Smith described his staff's chats about the trip: "We said to ourselves, 'Well, if we go through normal channels, it's almost impossible to get in. But what if we put together a sort of exhibition basketball team to go over there?' " It has been called "basketball diplomacy" in the press since Mr. Rodman and company arrived — "and that was the actual idea," Mr. Smith added.

Vice has a reputation for stunt journalism, having dispatched people in the past to war zones and hot spots overseas. On its main Web site over the weekend, an immersive article from India was sandwiched between a first-person essay titled "My Month Without Sex" and another essay about marijuana. The company also publishes magazines, records and YouTube videos, among other things.

For HBO, the newsmagazine partnership — announced last spring — was a leap, something Mr. Lombardo acknowledged in an interview. But "the whole idea of Vice is to take you places where other organizations are not going," he said.

That's North Korea in a nutshell, since access to the country is so tightly controlled. To get in, a liaison between North Korea and Vice suggested that the company donate basketball hoops and scoreboards to North Korean schools — a good-will gesture of sorts at the beginning of discussions about a visit.

Vice employees based in China did so. The company also contacted Mr. Rodman and the Globetrotters, and paid them an undisclosed amount to take the trip, which began last Tuesday. Mr. Smith, apparently unwelcome in the country because of his previous documentaries, has stayed in touch with his crew there through brief sessions on Skype.

Mr. Lombardo indicated that the apparent nuclear test by North Korea two weeks ago, widely condemned by the international community, did not change the producers' thinking about the trip. He noted that Vice was an independent producer, like many of HBO's partners.

"This was not, and Vice is not, about going in and doing the definitive story on North Korea and arms," Mr. Lombardo said. "This was always intended to be, 'You know what, let's get our camera into an isolated country that we hear about, we read about and yet is hard for us to even picture.' "

Mr. Lombardo said he was in awe when he saw the photos of Mr. Rodman and Mr. Kim. Mr. Smith felt similarly: "It's kind of blowing us away," he said Friday.

While aware that past visits by American celebrities have become propaganda material for North Korean officials, Mr. Smith said he was a "firm believer in dialogue." He was also aware, he said, that "the last 50 years of diplomacy between North Korea and the U.S. has failed." But then he quickly added: "We're not trying to save the world. We're not politicians. We're trying to show people something that they won't see anywhere else."

Vice and HBO have not determined when the footage from North Korea will be broadcast. The first few episodes of the newsmagazine are mostly finished; there will be eight in total, so it could be saved for the season finale.

Company officials and American intelligence agencies then grappled with a fundamental question: Why had the Chinese done it?

Was the People's Liberation Army, which is suspected of being behind the hacking group, trying to plant bugs into the system so they could cut off energy supplies and shut down the power grid if the United States and China ever confronted each other in the Pacific? Or were the Chinese hackers just trolling for industrial secrets, trying to rip off the technology and pass it along to China's own energy companies?

"We are still trying to figure it out," a senior American intelligence official said last week. "They could have been doing both."

Telvent, which also watches utilities and water treatment plants, ultimately managed to keep the hackers from breaking into its clients' computers.

At a moment when corporate America is caught between what it sees as two different nightmares — preventing a crippling attack that brings down America's most critical systems, and preventing Congress from mandating that the private sector spend billions of dollars protecting against that risk — the Telvent experience resonates as a study in ambiguity.

To some it is prime evidence of the threat that President Obama highlighted in his State of the Union address, when he warned that "our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems," perhaps causing mass casualties. Mr. Obama called anew for legislation to protect critical infrastructure, which was killed last year by a Republican filibuster after intensive lobbying by the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.

But the security breach of Telvent, which the Chinese government has denied, also raises questions of whether those fears — the subject of weekly research group reports, testimony and Congressional studies — may be somewhat overblown, or whether the precise nature of the threat has been misunderstood.

American intelligence officials believe that the greater danger to the nation's infrastructure may not even be China, but Iran, because of its avowal to retaliate for the Stuxnet virus created by the United States and Israel and unleashed on one of its nuclear sites. But for now, these officials say, that threat is limited by gaps in Iranian technical skills.

There is no doubt that attacks of all kinds are on the rise. The Department of Homeland Security has been responding to intrusions on oil pipelines and electric power organizations at "an alarming rate," according to an agency report last December. Some 198 attacks on the nation's critical infrastructure systems were reported to the agency last year, a 52 percent increase from the number of attacks in 2011.

Researchers at McAfee, a security firm, discovered in 2011 that five multinational oil and gas companies had been attacked by Chinese hackers. The researchers suspected that the Chinese hacking campaign, which they called Night Dragon, had affected more than a dozen companies in the energy industry. More recently, the Department of Energy confirmed in January that its network had been infiltrated, though it has said little about what damage, if any, was done.

But security researchers say that the majority of those attacks were as ambiguous as the Telvent case. They appeared to be more about cyberespionage, intended to bolster the Chinese economy. If the goal was to blow up a pipeline or take down the United States power grid, the attacks would likely have been of a different nature.

In a recent report, Critical Intelligence, an Idaho Falls security company, said that several cyberattacks by "Chinese adversaries" against North American energy firms seemed intended to steal fracking technologies, reflecting fears by the Chinese government that the shale energy revolution will tip the global energy balance back in America's favor. "These facts are likely a significant motivation behind the wave of sophisticated attacks affecting firms that operate in natural gas, as well as industries that rely on natural gas as an input, including petrochemicals and steelmaking," the Critical Intelligence report said, adding that the attack on Telvent, and "numerous" North American pipeline operators may be related.

American intelligence experts believe that the primary reason China is deterred from conducting an attack on infrastructure in the United States is the simple economic fact that anything that hurts America's financial markets or transportation systems would also have consequences for its own economy. It could interrupt exports to Walmart and threaten the value of China's investments in the United States — which now include a new, big investment in oil and gas.

Iran, however, may be a different threat. While acknowledging that "China is stealing our intellectual property at a rate that qualifies as an epidemic," Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, added a caveat in an interview on Friday. "China is a rational actor," he said. "Iran is not a rational actor."

A new National Intelligence Estimate — a classified document that has not yet been published within the government, but copies of which are circulating for final comments — identifies Iran as one of the other actors besides China who would benefit from the ability to shut down parts of the American economy. Unlike the Chinese, the Iranians have no investments in the United States. As a senior American military official put it, "There's nothing but upside for them to go after American infrastructure."

While the skills of Iran's newly created "cybercorps" are in doubt, Iranian hackers gained some respect in the technology community when they brought down 30,000 computers belonging to Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil producer, last August, replacing their contents with an image of a burning American flag.

The attack did not affect production facilities or refineries, but it made its point.

"The main target in this attack was to stop the flow of oil and gas to local and international markets and thank God they were not able to achieve their goals," Abdullah al-Saadan, Aramco's vice president for corporate planning, told Al Ekhbariya television.

President Obama has been vague about how the United States would respond to such an attack. No one in the administration argues that the United States should respond with cyber- or physical retaliation for the theft of secrets. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has made clear that would be dealt with in criminal courts, though the prosecutions of cybertheft by foreign sources have been few.

But the question of whether the president could, or should, order military retaliation for major attacks that threaten the American public is a roiling debate.

"Some have called for authorizing the military to defend private corporate networks and critical infrastructure sectors, like gas pipelines and water systems," Candace Yu, who studies the issue for the Truman National Security Project, wrote recently. "This is unrealistic. The military has neither the specialized expertise nor the capacity to do this; it needs to address only the most urgent threats."

But the administration has failed to convince Congress that the first line of defense to avert catastrophic cyberattack is to require private industry — which controls the cellphone networks and financial and power systems that are the primary target of infrastructure attacks — that it must build robust defenses.

A bill containing such requirements was defeated last year amid intense lobbying from the United States Chamber of Commerce and others, which argued that the costs would be prohibitive. Leading members of Congress say they expect the issue will come up again in the next few months.

"We are in a race against time," Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of homeland security, said last week. "Most of the infrastructure is in private hands. The government is not going to be able to manage this like the air traffic control system. We're going to have to enlist a large number of independent actors."

The administration's cybersecurity legislation last year failed despite closed-door simulations for lawmakers about what a catastrophic attack would look like.

During one such simulation that the Department of Homeland Security allowed a New York Times reporter to view at a department facility in Virginia, a woman played the role of an "evil hacker" who successfully broke into a power plant's network. To get in, the hacker used a method called "spearphishing," in which she sent a message to a power plant employee that induced the employee to click on a link to see pictures of "cute puppies."

When the employee clicked on the link, it surreptitiously allowed the hacker to gain access to the employee's computer, enabling her to easily turn the switches to the plant's breakers on and off.

Although the officials providing the briefing acknowledged that the simulation was a bit simplistic, their message was clear: with so many vulnerable critical infrastructure systems across the country, such an attack could easily occur, with huge consequences. No one rules out that scenario — whatever the current motivations and abilities of countries like China and Iran.

"There are 12 countries developing offensive cyberweapons; Iran is one of them," James Lewis, a former government official and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said at a security conference in San Francisco. Those countries have a long way to go, he said, but added: "Like nuclear weapons, eventually they'll get there."

Cardinal O'Brien, the head of the church in Scotland, is the highest-ranking figure in the church's recent history to make such an admission.

"I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal," Cardinal O'Brien, 74, said in a statement issued by church officials in Scotland.

The statement stunned many in the Scottish church and beyond. Some said his acknowledgment may mean it is possible that the cardinal, who faces an internal investigation by the Vatican, was admitting that the undefined sexual activities he acknowledged may not be restricted to the known allegations, the earliest of which relates to 1980. Ordained in 1965, he became an archbishop in 1985, but was not named cardinal until 2003.

Last weekend, The Observer newspaper reported the accusations of impropriety with accounts from the four men. The first was a seminarian when Cardinal O'Brien, then a priest, served as a powerful supervisory figure in two Scottish seminaries that prepared teenagers and young men for the priesthood. The other three were young priests; it is not clear exactly when in the 1980s they say they were subject to his unwanted advances.

Initially, Cardinal O'Brien contested the allegations and said he was seeking legal advice. But on Sunday, he offered a sweeping apology that was, however, bereft of detail. "To those I have offended, I apologize and ask forgiveness," he said. "To the Catholic Church and the people of Scotland, I also apologize. I will now spend the rest of my life in retirement. I will play no further part in the public life of the Catholic Church in Scotland."

Many analysts saw the cardinal's resignation and absence from the conclave as a result of papal pressure, and British newspapers have cited unidentified Vatican officials as saying Pope Benedict — who stunned the world with his own announcement on Feb. 11 that he would step down — had ordered the cardinal to remove himself.

Benedict's own resignation, which he attributed to ill health and exhaustion, took effect on Thursday, bringing an end to an eight-year papacy overshadowed by scandals involving cover-ups of pedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics.

The Vatican and more than a billion Catholics worldwide now await the papal conclave this month, in which 115 cardinals will choose one among their number as Benedict's successor. He will inherit a crisis over church governance that Vatican experts have described as one of the legacies of the 85-year-old Benedict, a widely respected theologian with a devoted following whose critics faulted him with failing to deal conclusively with the sexual abuse scandals in the church.

Analysts said that Cardinal O'Brien's apology was bound to place a shadow over the process. Even before his announcement on Sunday, it was already seen as a rare development that Cardinal O'Brien would not attend the conclave, and several other cardinals accused of protecting abusive priests are under pressure not to participate from advocates for abuse victims. Among them are Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles; Angelo Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals; and Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of the church in Ireland.

The differing approaches across the Catholic world to handling the sex abuse crisis are expected to be evident at the conclave. Bishops' conferences in English-speaking countries have tended to adopt a more aggressive, zero-tolerance policy in recent years, while more traditionalist cardinals inside the Vatican and elsewhere in the Catholic world have often closed ranks to defend fellow prelates.

Cardinal O'Brien was a powerful voice of the conservative orthodoxy on homosexuality that characterized the papacies of John Paul II, who elevated him, and Benedict. Abandoning the relatively tolerant approach to the issue he had adopted in the years before he donned a cardinal's red hat, he condemned homosexuality as immoral, and as a "grotesque subversion" — a stand that won him a "Bigot of the Year" award last year by a British gay rights group, Stonewall.

His sudden downfall is a major crisis for the church in Scotland, where most of the country's 750,000 Catholics are of Irish ancestry and live in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As migrants or their descendants, they suffered decades of discrimination.

"It's possibly, in terms of the internal history of the Church, the biggest crisis in the history of Scottish Catholicism since the Reformation," said Tom Devine, a professor at Edinburgh University and a prominent historian. "The Catholic Church has always been subject to, for the last several hundred years in Scotland, a range of tribulations. But this is different because this crisis has come from the heart and soul of the Church."

The archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, was appointed on Wednesday to take over Cardinal O'Brien's responsibilities, but what role he will have in any inquiry into the accusations remains unknown.

On homosexuality, Archbishop Tartaglia appears to be at least as uncompromising as the cardinal. Last year, he created an uproar by linking the death at 44 of a former priest and member of Parliament, David Cairns, to homosexuality.

On Friday, when this wizard and his hot air balloon land in theaters, the Walt Disney Company hopes ticket buyers won't think the same thing.

No movie studio would have the nerve to remake "The Wizard of Oz," the beloved 1939 musical ranked by the Library of Congress as the most-watched film in history. But "Oz the Great and Powerful," a Disney-produced prequel, is nearly as intrepid. The company is betting that a new twist on a story moviegoers already love will result in a hit on par with "Alice in Wonderland," which took in more than $1 billion in 2010.

It's a breathtaking gamble. "Oz," at turns goofy and dark (and not a musical), cost about $325 million to make and market, according to people who worked on the movie who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with Disney. Mr. Franco has never anchored a mainstream movie before. Because of copyright constraints Disney was not able to reproduce certain iconic imagery from the "The Wizard of Oz," which is owned by Warner Brothers.

And audiences have already rallied around a "Wizard of Oz" prequel: "Wicked" has been a Broadway hit for nearly 10 years.

Disney's marketers have not been cowed by the huge shadow cast by the original "Oz" — indeed, their ads for the new film invite comparisons to the classic. But the popularity of the original may ultimately represent the studio's biggest challenge. Is there room for a new cinematic vision of Oz, as Disney believes? Or will movie audiences (and critics) be reluctant to embrace an Oz that does not look a certain way, have a certain tone and feature a certain set of slippers?

Hollywood is confronting issues like these with greater regularity. Studios, ever-desperate for source material that is both familiar and comfortable to consumers, have leaned more heavily toward sequels and prequels.

But nostalgic properties are tricky. There are liberties you can take and ones you cannot, producers say, and the lines are blurry.

Sean Bailey, Disney's president of movie production, said in an interview that he was "cautiously optimistic" about the box-office prospects for "Oz the Great and Powerful," which was loosely based on the novels of L. Frank Baum.

"Going in, we certainly talked a lot about these iconic books, the iconic movie and the iconic musical," Mr. Bailey said. "We felt there was room for a new story. We felt this great land was worthy of exploration and that it could be creatively exciting."

Mr. Bailey and Alan F. Horn, Disney's new studio chairman, are under pressure to deliver a hit. "John Carter," which opened a year ago, forced the company to take a $200 million write-down, one of the largest in movie history. Since "John Carter," releases on the Disney label have included "The Odd Life of Timothy Green," which took in a ho-hum $51.9 million, and "Frankenweenie," a critical success but a box office failure, which sold just $35.3 million in tickets in North America.

Disney is betting that going big is the key to a turnaround — hiring marquee directors and stars with serious acting credentials for pictures with giant budgets. After "Oz" comes "The Lone Ranger," a comedic Western starring Johnny Depp as Tonto. In July 2014 Disney plans to release "Maleficent," starring Angelina Jolie as the evil sorceress from "Sleeping Beauty."

Tackling such well-known material risks stepping on memories, however. Oz itself has proved difficult in that regard over the years. Audiences recoiled from "The Wiz," a 1978 adaptation of the stage musical. The response to "Return to Oz," a 1985 Disney effort that found Dorothy in an asylum, was equally dismal.

For "Oz the Great and Powerful," directed by Sam Raimi, Batman offers one positive point of comparison; that character, which coincidentally first appeared in a 1939 comic book, has been successfully reincarnated at the multiplex for several generations, noted Bob Gazzale, president of the American Film Institute.

The 2005 remake "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is a more cautionary example. What seemed like a good idea on paper — Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, with lots of digital imagery — was ultimately a disappointment, with a fey Mr. Depp and his computer-generated Oompa Loompas striking moviegoers as a tad creepy.

"Yes, there is definitely room for Disney's version of Oz, without question," Mr. Gazzale said. But upon learning about the absence of Dorothy's famous footwear (Warner holds the copyright), he grew more tentative. "Wait, hold everything — there are no ruby slippers?" he said. "Disney didn't tell me that in the trailer."

Mr. Gazzale was joking, but his point is a valid one. According to surveys that track advance interest, "Oz" could take in $80 million or more in North America in its first weekend, a huge debut. But movies this expensive need intense audience support; in the Twitter and Facebook age, films can fall off a cliff almost overnight if early attendees don't like what they see.

Reviews have only started to trickle in, but so far the critical response has been fairly warm. Two actresses who play witches — Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz — have been received with particular enthusiasm. Still, The Hollywood Reporter, which RottenTomatoes.com considers a "top critic," called the movie "sadly unimaginative" and "stillborn from its opening minutes."

Mr. Bailey of Disney said "Alice in Wonderland" was a reference point as the studio did a cost-benefit analysis. But he also said Disney tried not to overthink it.

"Creativity by analogy is something that studios do a lot, and sometimes it's a scary thing," he said. "We just felt this was a good idea." (The "we" in that sentence included Rich Ross, Mr. Horn's predecessor, who put "Oz the Great and Powerful" into production before getting fired as studio chairman last April. If "Oz" does well, Mr. Ross will get some of the credit.)

Like most movies of its size, "Oz" had production difficulties. Based on feedback from test audiences, Disney at the relative last minute had Mr. Raimi expand the presence of a talking, computer-generated monkey as a comedic buddy for the antihero wizard. Robert Downey Jr. and Mr. Depp both turned down the central role; Mr. Franco has lately become known for explicit art house films.

And Mr. Bailey and Mr. Horn battled with Mr. Raimi over how scary "Oz" could be. Mr. Raimi generally wanted more terror and Disney less.

Disney marketers have been trying to pull off a delicate balancing act. They have been using familiar imagery not covered by copyright — the wizard's hot air balloon, Glinda's flying bubble — to generate interest. But stirring too much nostalgia might result in disappointed audiences. To that end, Disney has used the slogan, "The land you know, the story you don't" in some ads.

The goal is to keep the audience reaction from mirroring the movie's story line. Mr. Franco's circus magician, a selfish cad, is sucked via tornado to Oz, where the residents mistake him for a wizard who will free them from the wicked witches. But he starts to wither under the expectations. "I'm just not the man you wanted me to be," he says.

"It's still conditional," said Gen. Oumar Bikomo, speaking from the mountainous area of northern Mali where dozens of radical Islamist fighters are believed to be holed up. "I can't confirm it." The region, the Adrar des Ifoghas, has been the scene of tough combat in the past few days, spokesmen for the French and Chadian armies said, and it was in one of those engagements that Mr. Belmokhtar may have been killed.

Chad's soldiers attacked and destroyed a major base of the Islamist fighters on Saturday morning, General Bikomo said, killing about 60. One of them might have been Mr. Belmokhtar, the man who commanded a deadly raid on the gas-processing complex in the Algerian desert in January.

"We can't really identify who was who," said General Bikomo, speaking of the raid. "It is certain that some leaders were killed. But I can't confirm that Mokhtar Belmokhtar was killed. I can't tell you that he's been killed."

He said he was unsure why the death of Mr. Belmokhtar, who was for years a principal leader in Al Qaeda's regional franchise in the Sahel until he formed a breakaway group last year, had been announced by another general on Chadian television in the capital, Ndjamena.

"A lot of people died, and I can't tell you if he's one of them," General Bikomo said. "Even this morning people died. We've been fighting, we reached their base, and we destroyed it. It was our main objective."

General Bikomo was more certain about the death of another Qaeda leader, Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, announced by the president of Chad on Friday. "He should be dead, yes," the general said. "One of the prisoners of war we took told us that he is dead."

The combat has been particularly intense over the past several days in the rugged, rocky mountains at the border with Algeria, where French and Chadian troops are seeking to kill as many of the jihadists as possible.

On Saturday night a French parachutist was killed in a firefight, the third French soldier killed since the start of France's Mali offensive in January. He was in a rugged valley with other French troops and "most of the fighting is occurring at very close range," the French military spokesman, Col. Thierry Burkhard, told reporters in Paris on Sunday.

The soldier, Sgt. Cédric Charenton, 26, was killed "in one of the most violent engagements" since the start of the French intervention, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on his Twitter account.

Sergeant Charenton's unit was assaulting an enemy position, Colonel Burkhard said, and "a certain number of terrorists were dug in, and it's from that position that the shots were fired." About 15 Islamist fighters were killed in the operation, the colonel said.

French losses have been small compared with those of Chad, which has already lost several dozen men. But military experts on the region say Chadian forces have a history of taking heavy losses in their operations.

"They charge in, and take a lot of casualties," said a Western defense attaché in Bamako, Mali's capital. "But they kill a lot. And they have killed a hell of a lot. "The bad guys have been there since 2001," the attaché said. "They have trenches, defensive positions, bunkers, stored food."

They know the terrain "inside and out," he said, and are "continuing to engage the French and the Chadians on the battlefield."

Mali's forces, meanwhile, are well to the rear and are not engaged in the fierce combat in the northern mountains. The Tuareg rebel movement, which currently exercises de facto political control over Mali's north and fiercely opposes the Bamako government, has demanded that Malian troops stay out of the region. Although that demand has provoked considerable grumbling among the Malians, the French have tacitly accepted it.