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The senators were able to reach a deal by incorporating the Democrats' insistence on a single comprehensive bill that would not deny eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants, with Republican demands that strong border and interior enforcement had to be clearly in place before Congress could consider legal status for illegal immigrants.

Their blueprint, set to be unveiled on Monday, will allow them to stake out their position one day before President Obama outlines his immigration proposals in a speech on Tuesday in Las Vegas, in the opening moves of what lawmakers expect will be a protracted and contentious debate in Congress this year.

Lawmakers said they were optimistic that the political mood had changed since a similar effort collapsed in acrimony in 2010. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and one of the negotiators, said he saw "a new appreciation" among Republicans of the need for an overhaul.

"Look at the last election," Mr. McCain said Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." "We are losing dramatically the Hispanic vote, which we think should be ours." The senator also said he had seen "significant improvements" in border enforcement, although "we've still got a ways to go."

He added, "We can't go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status."

According to a five-page draft of the plan obtained by The New York Times on Sunday, the eight senators — including Mr. McCain; Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York; and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina — have agreed to address the failings of the immigration system in one comprehensive measure, rather than in smaller pieces, and to offer a "tough, fair and practical road map" that would eventually lead to a chance at citizenship for nearly all of the immigrants here illegally.

"We on the Democratic side have said that we are flexible and we want to get a bill," Mr. Schumer told reporters in New York on Sunday. "But there's a bottom line, and that's a path to citizenship for the 11 or so million people who qualify. We've made great, great progress with our Republican colleagues."

Under the senators' plan, most illegal immigrants would be able to apply to become permanent residents — a crucial first step toward citizenship — but only after certain border enforcement measures had been accomplished.

Among the plan's new proposals is the creation of a commission of governors, law enforcement officials and community leaders from border states that would assess when border security measures had been completed. A proposal would also require that an exit system be in place for tracking departures of foreigners who entered the country through airports or seaports, before any illegal immigrants could start on a path to citizenship.

The lawmakers intend for their proposals to frame the debate in the Senate, which is expected to take up immigration this spring, ahead of the House of Representatives. Compared with an immigration blueprint from 2011 that White House officials have said is the basis for the president's position, the senators' proposals appear to include tougher enforcement and a less direct path for illegal immigrants than Mr. Obama is considering.

In a parallel effort, a separate group of four senators will introduce a bill this week dealing with another thorny issue that is likely to be addressed in a comprehensive measure: visas for legal immigrants with advanced skills in technology and science. The bill, written primarily by Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Republican, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, would nearly double the number of temporary visas, known as an H-1B, available each year to highly skilled immigrants. It would also free up more permanent resident visas, known as green cards, so those immigrants could eventually settle in the United States and go on to become citizens.

In a sign of the rapidly changing mood in Washington on immigration, the two groups of senators and the White House have been vying in recent days to see who would unveil their proposals first.

Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat who was one of those negotiating the comprehensive principles, said the senators finally agreed that any legislation should include a pathway to citizenship.

"First of all, Americans support it, in poll after poll," said Mr. Menendez, who was interviewed along with Mr. McCain by Mr. Stephanopoulos on Sunday. "Secondly, Latino voters expect it. Thirdly, Democrats want it. And fourth, Republicans need it."

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, also joined the group of eight senators in recent weeks and endorsed its principles.

Mr. Rubio, a Cuban-American who is a fast-rising figure in his party, had insisted on including the exit tracking system as one of the triggers for opening the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Mr. Rubio cited estimates that as many as 40 percent of immigrants in the country illegally had overstayed their visas.

Mr. Rubio also insisted that any immigrants who gained legal status under the legislation would "be required to go to the back of the line" behind other immigrants who applied to come through legal channels.

Under the senators' proposal, border security would be immediately strengthened with new technology, including aerial drones, for border patrol agents, while the Department of Homeland Security would work to expand the exit control system. The United States currently has some exit controls to track departures of foreigners at most airports and seaports, but it does not track exits by land.

At the same time, immigrants here illegally would "simultaneously" be required "to register with the government." After passing background checks and paying back taxes and fines, those immigrants would receive a "probationary legal status" that would allow them to live and work legally in the United States. Immigrants with that status would not be eligible for most federal public benefits.

The senators also called for a mandatory nationwide program to verify the legal status of new hires, although the details of whether that would include some form of identity card remained vague.

The senators would require that "our proposed enforcement measures be complete before any immigrant on probationary status can earn a green card," according to the draft principles. The group also includes Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, both Democrats, and another Republican, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona.

The proposals would offer major exemptions from the requirements for citizenship to young immigrants here illegally who came to United States as children, giving them a faster path to become Americans.

Immigrant farmworkers would also be given a separate and faster path to citizenship, according to the principles.

Still ahead are difficult negotiations over how long immigrants who gain provisional status would have to wait before they could become citizens. Mr. Rubio's ideas are for a far longer and less direct pathway than Democrats would like. The senators also anticipate a fight over how to bring in low-wage workers in the future. Many labor organizations are skeptical of the temporary guest worker programs that employers favor, and the principles are vague on that point.

Considerable resistance remains among Republicans in the House of Representatives to granting any kind of legal status to illegal immigrants.

Mr. Rubio was also a sponsor of the bill to offer more visas to highly educated technology workers, along with Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. Senator Klobuchar, also a sponsor, said on Sunday that she expected the bill would become part of the comprehensive measure the other senators were preparing.

The federal debt was climbing quickly. The Treasury Department was using "extraordinary measures" to keep paying the nation's debts, even if, technically, the government had blown past its borrowing limit. President Obama, he said, would set the day the government would go into default, and Republicans balking at raising the debt limit had no real idea when that day would be. The Republican Party was not in control of the situation.

For Mr. Cantor, the majority leader, the goals during the ensuing week — from Williamsburg to the House vote last Wednesday to suspend the debt limit until May — were to make sure the government did not default on its debt in the coming weeks and to get House Republicans beyond an endless, and politically fruitless, discussion about debt, deficits and green-eyeshaded austerity.

"We are in a town run by Democrats, and we cannot win the hearts and minds of Americans if we are just talking about numbers, day in and day out," said a Cantor aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his boss's plans. "There are a lot of things Republicans care about."

After lying low for several months, Mr. Cantor is reasserting his presence in the Capitol, even as Speaker John A. Boehner continues his struggles to maintain Republican unity. In the coming weeks, the majority leader plans to lay out a second, softer track for his party beyond the constant cycle of budget showdowns and deficit talks.

Notably, that track will include a new push for private-school vouchers for underprivileged children, health care options beyond the old fight over the president's health care law, new work force training initiatives and a renewed push for science, technology and engineering visas for would-be immigrants.

After successfully engineering the latest debt ceiling vote last week, Mr. Cantor flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he road-tested those themes as the lone House Republican leader rubbing elbows with the international elite.

Citing a struggling single mother with a gifted child in a poor city neighborhood, he told Davos attendees, "We need to create some type of competitive mechanisms" to help her escape the bad schools she is stuck with. Between meetings with King Abdullah II of Jordan; President Shimon Peres of Israel; the International Monetary Fund director, Christine Lagarde; and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, he spoke of "sane immigration policies," unemployed youths and a German model for economic output.

Mr. Cantor is expected to lay out his domestic vision on Feb. 5 at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right research group.

His latest moves follow two episodes this month that attracted wide notice and new questions about Republican unity. He publicly broke with the speaker early this month over the deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, voting against the agreement even as Mr. Boehner voted for it. He then deftly maneuvered to secure passage of a Hurricane Sandy disaster relief package that Mr. Boehner had initially been cool to, bowing to pressure from financial donors in New York and engineering a complex process that satisfied both Northeastern Republicans and fiscal conservatives.

On the train ride to the House Republican retreat in Williamsburg, Mr. Cantor, who represents a district in Virginia, walked the aisles and worked the back bench, asking members about their legislative interests and promising attention.

Mr. Cantor's actions lack what many saw in 2011, the first year of Republican House control, as overt disloyalty to Mr. Boehner. Instead, lawmakers and aides say, his eye may be on an emerging potential rival for the speakership, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the party's 2012 vice-presidential nominee.

Mr. Ryan has given no sign that he wants the job, but House Republicans say that if anyone can challenge Mr. Cantor for the job, it is Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman. Mr. Cantor appears to be shoring up his power before Mr. Boehner's retirement, which many believe will come in four years, if not two.

"I have never felt that there was any real reason to believe Eric is plotting and scheming against the speaker," said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member who remains close to the leadership. "But when you're in the leadership, you're always looking over your shoulder, using your peripheral vision to see who might be coming up on you. That's the nature of leadership."

Mr. Cantor's supporters say his moves have nothing to do with leadership intrigue and everything to do with leadership — and with shaping the direction of the party after last year's electoral defeats.

After more than two years of budget fights, the majority leader, more than anyone else in the leadership, is said to want to broaden the discussion. His mantra behind closed doors is "How do we make life work better?" aides say, and he would like the next two years to be at least as much about job creation and economic opportunity as about spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs.

Mr. Cantor's votes — against the fiscal cliff deal but for $60 billion in disaster aid — may have lacked ideological consistency, but they do contain a common thread. All have been good for Mr. Cantor.

The work he did for the aid package put him in a small minority of his party. The bill passed 241 to 180, but only 49 Republicans voted yes; 179, including Mr. Ryan, voted no. But its passage pleased rich New York donors like the venture capitalist Kenneth G. Langone and the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, who pushed him hard for a vote after the speaker backed off the bill on the last day of the 112th Congress.

Those donors, in turn, help keep Mr. Cantor's two political action committees, the YG Action Fund and the Every Republican Is Crucial PAC, flush so he can spread largess to the young House Republicans who make up the core of his support. Goldman Sachs was the second-largest donor to ERIC PAC in the 2012 political cycle.

"I certainly asked a good number of people in New York who he has relationships with to call him and ask for his support," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

Mr. Cantor stayed on the right side of House conservatives — and against Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan — when he shocked Republicans and opposed the last-minute deal that allowed taxes to rise on incomes over $400,000 while averting much broader tax increases that could have put the economy back into recession.

The deal passed 257 to 167, but this time Mr. Cantor was with the majority of his conference. Just 85 Republicans voted for it, including Mr. Boehner, who rarely votes; 151 voted against.

"This is all about the longer term," one House Republican said. "Get rid of the image of being too grasping and ambitious. Cooperate with Boehner where it's not going to hurt him, but don't run risks in the short term."

Mr. Cantor is in a tricky position. If he becomes too closely associated with Mr. Boehner, he could be swept aside in the event of a broad leadership upheaval. But he cannot look like the architect of upheaval and risk losing the gavel in the melee.

Mr. Cantor declined to be interviewed for this article. But Doug Heye, a Cantor spokesman, dismissed any talk of disunity. The top leaders are working well together, he said, but sometimes their beliefs will diverge.

"When it comes to the cliff, when it comes to Sandy, he voted his conscience and what he thought was right," Mr. Heye said of his boss.

But even the hint of division is coming at a bad time, with Mr. Obama fresh off a convincing electoral victory and staking out uncompromising positions as the government careers toward the next fiscal deadlines: March 1, when nearly $1 trillion in across-the-board defense and domestic spending cuts begin; March 27, when the stopgap law financing the government expires; and May 16, when the new debt ceiling reprieve expires.

"This is an unprecedented time for House Republican leadership," said Ron Bonjean, who was an aide to J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, a former Republican speaker. "Never before have we lacked a consistent message due to the results of an election, with such high stakes ahead."

Scientists showed Mr. Sharon, 84, pictures of his family, had him listen to a recording of the voice of one of his sons and used tactile stimulation to assess the extent of his brain's response.

"We were surprised that there was activity in the proper parts of the brain," said Prof. Alon Friedman, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team that carried out the test. "It raises the chances that he hears and understands, but we cannot be sure. The test did not prove that."

The activity in specific regions of the brain indicated appropriate processing of the stimulations, according to a statement from Ben-Gurion University, but additional tests to assess Mr. Sharon's level of consciousness were less conclusive.

"While there were some encouraging signs, these were subtle and not as strong," the statement added.

The test was carried out last week at the Soroka University Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba using a state-of-the-art M.R.I. machine and methods recently developed by Prof. Martin M. Monti of the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Monti took part in the test, which lasted approximately two hours.

Mr. Sharon's son Gilad said in October 2011 that he believed that his father responded to some requests. "When he is awake, he looks at me and moves fingers when I ask him to," he said at the time, adding, "I am sure he hears me."

Professor Friedman said in a telephone interview that the test results "say nothing about the future" but may be of some help to the family and the regular medical staff caring for Mr. Sharon at a hospital outside Tel Aviv.

"There is a small chance that he is conscious but has no way of expressing it," Professor Friedman said, but he added, "We do not know to what extent he is conscious."

Yet conflict, drama and wrenching change occurred within its walls, too: In the church founded by Irish immigrants who fled the famine of the 1840s, the pews were in turn occupied by Poles, Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans. The church played a role in the clashes in nearby Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s and in this century was nearly demolished itself before a mystery donor stepped forward with millions of dollars to rescue it.

On Sunday, worshipers, including descendants of some of the original Irish parishioners, gathered as Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan consecrated and dedicated the newly renovated building. After 12 years and nearly $15 million, the church, on Avenue B and Eighth Street, was once again a parish church.

"You don't believe in miracles, and then something like that happens," said Peter Quinn, an author whose grandparents were married at St. Brigid's in 1899. "It seemed so hopeless."

From the altar, Cardinal Dolan praised his predecessor, Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who also took part in the Mass, for making the decision to restore the church.

"It was your dream, your trust, your daring at a time when so many dioceses were cutting back and closing," he said. "You wanted something brand-spanking new." 

But in 2001, the parishioners and the Archdiocese of New York were on opposite sides when the archdiocese announced that it would close the church because of structural defects.

"The back wall was literally pulling away from the rest of the building," said Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese. "The back wall was six inches from the floor and walls. We had engineers in there who said: 'Literally, the roof can fall at any moment. You cannot have people in this church.' "

Masses were moved to the church school. Parishioners formed a committee to restore the building, which was built in 1848, and raised about $100,000 of what they believed was the $300,000 cost.

"A ridiculous number, which I think was made up," Mr. Zwilling said of that estimate, adding that the archdiocese's estimate was closer to $8 million.

Then one day in 2006, demolition crews arrived. A painted glass window was smashed, pews were removed and an eight-foot-by-eight-foot hole was punched through a wall.

"We had to change the Committee to Restore St. Brigid to the Committee to Save St. Brigid," said Edwin Torres, the committee's leader.

Mr. Torres said parishioners felt that the archdiocese had strung the congregation along, letting it raise money knowing all along that a wrecking crew was coming: "I kept thinking: If we lived on Park Avenue or Madison Avenue, they would not be treating us like this."

Mr. Zwilling insists that the archdiocese had no choice but to close the church, because the price tag to keep it open was too steep. With 375 parishes, he added, the archdiocese simply could not pour so much of its resources into one.

Undaunted, the committee hired lawyers and went to court, where it lost.

Then in 2008, the anonymous donor appeared and offered $20 million to restore St. Brigid and start a fund to help the parish school.

"We had lost at every step of the way, and now we're going to the 5 p.m. Mass," said Marisa Marinelli, a lawyer who handled the case on a pro bono basis. "Usually when you lose, you lose. We lost, but in the process kept the church standing."

The archdiocese hired Michael F. Doyle of the Acheson Doyle Partners architecture firm to supervise the renovations. He said he found daunting structural problems.

He explained that St. Brigid's, like much the rest of the neighborhood, was built on marshland, and with each flood over the years, the wood pilings it stood on had deteriorated.

"We had to underpin the entire church," he said.

"The architecture and engineering that went into it is mind-boggling. People say: 'How could you spend $15 million?' We had to do all that work, otherwise it would have come down."

The pews were replaced and the exterior restored to resemble the original brownstone. Stained glass windows were brought from St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, which closed in 2003.

Mr. Doyle also restored an elaborate inscription along the top of the east wall that had been painted over in the 1960s, although there was not enough money to put the original bell back in the tower.

The parish has been merged with St. Emeric's nearby, and the parish and the church are now known as St. Brigid and St. Emeric.

"It's so gorgeous, I hardly recognize it," said Sister Theresa Gravino, who taught at St. Brigid's school from 1955 to 1959 and had not seen the church in half a century. "It was Puerto Rican and Polish children who were very poor, whose parents sacrificed a lot to send them here. There was something special here, something they felt willing to donate money to fix."

"I spend my day chasing my daughter around, so I don't have the luxury of sitting at my computer," said Ms. Hughes, 29, of Reading, Mass. Many sites "have sales every other day, but I don't have time to go on and see if the things I actually want have made it onto the sale yet."

Now she doesn't have to.

With retailers' Internet prices now changing more often — sometimes several times within the space of a day — a new group of tools is helping shoppers outwit the stores. Rather than requiring shoppers to do the work by entering an item into price-comparison engines throughout the day, the tools automatically scan for price changes and alert customers when the price drops.

Some tools, including one from Citibank's Citi Card, even scour sites for lower prices after a purchase and help customers get a refund for any price difference.

Web sites that help shoppers compare prices and track online deals have existed as long as e-commerce itself. But rapid changes in pricing at many major retailers have made it more difficult for shoppers to keep on top of it all.

The research company Dynamite Data, which follows prices on behalf of retailers and brands, tracked hundreds of holiday products at major retailers in 2011 and 2012. During a two-week period around Thanksgiving, Amazon and Sears were changing prices on about a quarter of those products daily, a significant increase from the previous year. Walmart, Toys "R" Us, Kmart and Best Buy also changed prices more frequently in 2012.

Even the Web browser a customer uses can make a difference. The Web site Digital Folio, which shows consumers price changes, did side-by-side comparisons of televisions. On Newegg using the Chrome browser, the firm was offered a $997 price on a Samsung television. Using Firefox and Internet Explorer, the price was $1,399.

The firm found a difference on another Samsung television model at Walmart.com, where using Firefox yielded a $199 price and Chrome and Internet Explorer $168.

"A lot of times the price will have a big difference on consumer behavior," said Larry S. Freed, chief executive of ForeSee, which analyzes customer experiences.

One of the new price-tracking tools is Hukkster, introduced last year by two former J. Crew merchants. It asks shoppers to install a "hukk it" button on their browsers. Then, when a shopper sees an item she likes, she clicks the button, chooses the color, size and discount she is interested in, tells Hukkster to alert her when the price drops, and waits for an e-mail to that effect.

"We wanted a way to know, on a specific style we want, when it goes on sale," said a co-founder, Erica Bell. Hukkster also looks for coupon codes that apply to specific items, so a J. Crew nightshirt that was originally $128 came out to $62.99 after a site markdown combined with a 30 percent discount code that Hukkster found.

Currently, Hukkster makes money from referral traffic — it is paid a fee when shoppers buy something via a link from its e-mails. The founders say they are approaching retailers about ways of working with them by, for instance, offering personalized discounts based on shoppers' "hukks."

"Retailers are forced to do, say, 30 percent off all sweaters when what they're really trying to move is the green merino sweater. This provides them the option to do that on a one-to-one basis," a co-founder, Katie Finnegan, said.

Ms. Hughes, the Massachusetts mother, "hukks" items in specific sizes and colors, and then waits for the notification, like one on a Boden sweater she recently bought for her daughter.

"Now, of course, I'm hukking everything under the sun, including diapers, which I don't think is their target audience," she said.

Digital Folio charts the 30-day price history on electronics items at a number of retailers so shoppers can see not only where the lowest price is, but also whether that price might go lower still.

Angry and almost screaming, Mohammed Morsi vowed in a televised address on Sunday night that he would not hesitate to take even more action to stem the latest eruption of violence across much of the country. But at the same time, he sought to reassure Egyptians that his latest moves would not plunge the country back into authoritarianism.

"There is no going back on freedom, democracy and the supremacy of the law," he said.

The worst violence this weekend was in the Mediterranean coastal city of Port Said, where seven people were killed on Sunday, pushing the toll for two days of clashes to at least 44. The unrest was sparked on Saturday by a court conviction and death sentence for 21 defendants involved in a mass soccer riot in the city's main stadium on Feb. 1, 2012 that left 74 dead.

Most of those sentenced to death were local soccer fans from Port Said, deepening a sense of persecution that Port Said's residents have felt since the stadium disaster, the worst soccer violence ever in Egypt.

At least another 11 died on Friday elsewhere in the country during rallies marking the second anniversary of the anti-Mubarak uprising. Protesters used the occasion to renounce Morsi and his Islamic fundamentalist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which emerged as the country's most dominant political force after Mubarak's ouster.

The curfew and state of emergency, both in force for 30 days, affect the provinces of Port Said, Ismailiya and Suez. The curfew takes effect Monday from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day.

Morsi, in office since June, also invited the nation's political forces to a dialogue starting Monday to resolve the country's latest crisis. A statement issued later by his office said that among those invited were the country's top reform leader, Nobel peace Laureate Mohammed ElBaradei, former Arab League chief Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist politician who finished third in last year's presidential race.

The three are leaders of the National Salvation Front, an umbrella for the main opposition parties.

Khaled Dawoud, the Front's spokesman, said Morsi's invitation was meaningless unless he clearly states what is on the agenda. That, he added, must include amending a disputed constitution hurriedly drafted by the president's Islamist allies and rejected by the opposition.

He also faulted the president for not acknowledging his political responsibility for the latest bout of political violence.

"It is all too little too late," he told The Associated Press.

In many ways, Morsi's decree and his call for a dialogue betrayed his despair in the face of wave after wave of political unrest, violence and man-made disasters that, at times, made the country look like it was about to come unglued.

A relative unknown until his Muslim Brotherhood nominated him to run for president last year, Morsi is widely criticized for having offered no vision for the country's future after nearly 30 years of dictatorship under Mubarak and no coherent policy to tackle seemingly endless problems, from a free falling economy and deeply entrenched social injustices to surging crime and chaos on the streets.

Reform of the judiciary and the police, hated under the old regime for brutality, are also key demands of Morsi's critics.

Morsi did not say what he plans to do to stem the violence in other parts of the country outside those three provinces, but he did say he had instructed the police to deal "firmly and forcefully" with individuals attacking state institutions, using firearms to "terrorize" citizens or blocking roads and railway lines.

There were also clashes Sunday in Cairo and several cities in the Nile Delta region, including the industrial city of Mahallah.

Egypt's current crisis is the second to hit the country since November, when Morsi issued decrees, since rescinded, that gave him nearly unlimited powers and placed him above any oversight, including by the judiciary.

The latest eruption of political violence has deepened the malaise as Morsi struggles to get a grip on enormous social and economic problems and the increasingly dangerous fault lines that divide this nation of 85 million.

In an ominous sign, a one-time jihadist group on Sunday blamed the secular opposition for the violence and threatened to set up vigilante militias to defend the government it supports.

Addressing a news conference, Tareq el-Zomr of the once-jihadist Gamaa Islamiya, said:

"If security forces don't achieve security, it will be the right of the Egyptian people and we at the forefront to set up popular committees to protect private and public property and counter the aggression on innocent citizens."

His threat was accompanied by his charge that the opposition was responsible for the deadly violence of the past few days, setting the stage for possible bloody clashes between protesters and Islamist militiamen. The opposition denies the charge.

In Port Said on Sunday, tens of thousands of mourners poured into the streets for a mass funeral for most of the 37 people who died on Saturday. They chanted slogans against Morsi.

"We are now dead against Morsi," said Port Said activist Amira Alfy. "We will not rest now until he goes and we will not take part in the next parliamentary elections. Port Said has risen and will not allow even a semblance of normalcy to come back," she said.

The violence flared only a month after a prolonged crisis — punctuated by deadly violence — over the new constitution. Ten died in that round of unrest and hundreds were injured.

In Port Said, mourners chanted "There is no God but Allah," and "Morsi is God's enemy" as the funeral procession made its way through the city after prayers for the dead at the city's Mariam Mosque. Women clad in black led the chants, which were quickly picked up by the rest of the mourners.

There were no police or army troops in sight. But the funeral procession briefly halted after gunfire rang out. Security officials said the gunfire came from several mourners who opened fire at the Police Club next to the cemetery. Activists, however, said the gunfire first came from inside the army club, which is also close to the cemetery. Some of the mourners returned fire, which drew more shots as well as tear gas, according to witnesses. They, together with the officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation in the city on the Mediterranean at the northern tip of the Suez Canal.

A total of 630 people were injured, some of them with gunshot wounds, said Abdel-Rahman Farag, director of the city's hospitals.

Also Sunday, army troops backed by armored vehicles staked out positions at key government facilities to protect state interests and try to restore order.

There was also a funeral in Cairo for two policemen killed in the Port Said violence a day earlier. Several policemen grieving for their colleagues heckled Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim, who is in charge of the force, when he arrived for their funeral, according to witnesses.

The angry officers screamed at the minister that he was only at the funeral for the TV cameras — a highly unusual show of dissent in Egypt, where the police force maintains military-like discipline.

Ibrahim hurriedly left and the funeral proceeded without him, a sign that the prestige of the state and its top executives were diminishing.

In Cairo, clashes broke out for the fourth straight day on Sunday, with protesters and police outside two landmark, Nile-side hotels near central Tahrir Square, birthplace of the 2011 uprising. Police fired tear gas while protesters pelted them with rocks.