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People were crowded five deep at the tiny counter of a gun shop near Atlanta, where a pastor from Knoxville, Tenn., was among the customers who showed up in person after the store's Web site halted sales because of low inventory. Emptying gun cases and bare shelves gave a picked-over feel to gun stores in many states. High-capacity magazines, which some state and federal officials want to ban or restrict, were selling briskly across the country: one Iowa dealer said that 30-round magazines were fetching five times what they sold for just weeks ago.

Gun dealers and buyers alike said that the rapid growth in gun sales — which began climbing significantly after President Obama's re-election and soared after the Dec. 14 shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn., prompted him to call for new gun laws — shows little sign of abating.

December set a record for the criminal background checks performed before many gun purchases, a strong indication of a big increase in sales, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group. Adjusting the federal data to try to weed out background checks that were unrelated to firearms sales, the group reported that 2.2 million background checks were performed last month, an increase of 58.6 percent over the same period in 2011. Some gun dealers said in interviews that they had never seen such demand.

"If I had 1,000 AR-15s I could sell them in a week," said Jack Smith, an independent gun dealer in Des Moines, referring to the popular style of semiautomatic rifle that drew national attention after Adam Lanza used one to kill 20 children and 6 adults at a Newtown school. "When I close, they beat on the glass to be let in," Mr. Smith said of his customers. "They'll wave money at me."

Mr. Smith said many people were stocking up on high-capacity magazines in anticipation that they might be banned. Two weeks ago, he said, a 30-round rifle magazine was $12, but it now fetches $60. Popular online retailers were out of many 20- and 30-round rifle magazines.

In Washington, Mr. Biden said the task force he leads is "shooting for Tuesday" to make its recommendations to President Obama about preventing gun violence. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the nation's leading gun control groups, said its top priority was to close the loopholes that currently allow 40 percent of gun sales to be made without background checks.

Some groups that support gun control urged the White House not to focus too much energy on an assault weapons ban, which they said could be hard to persuade Congress to pass. Officials at Third Way, a left-leaning research group in Washington, urged the president to save his political capital for higher-priority goals like universal background checks and cracking down on gun trafficking.

Outside Greta's Guns, a gun store in Simi Valley, Calif., about an hour northwest of downtown Los Angeles, several customers said that they opposed any assault weapons ban, but would support more thorough background checks.

George Gray, 60, who said that he already owned "more arms than arms to bear them," said that he was in favor of more background checks. "If you own a weapon, you should be stable," said Mr. Gray, who said he had come from Los Angeles to buy a gun for his daughter. "You should be accountable for your actions. I don't mind stricter background checks. What we've done with the mental health in this country — these people used to get care and were in facilities. And in most of these instances, it's been people with mental problems."

Jesse Levinson does not much worry about this when he drives his prototype Volkswagen Touareg around the Stanford University campus here. A computer vision system he helped design keeps an unblinking eye out for pedestrians and cyclists, and automatically slows and stops the car when they enter his path.

Someday soon, few drivers will have to worry about car crashes and collisions, whether on congested roads or on empty highways, technology companies and car manufacturers are betting. But even now, drivers are benefiting from a suite of safety systems, and many more are in development to transform driving from a manual task to something more akin to that of a conductor overseeing an orchestra.

An array of optical and radar sensors now monitor the surroundings of a growing number of cars traveling the nation's highways, and in some cases even track the driver's physical state. Pedestrian detection systems, like the one that Mr. Levinson, a research scientist at Stanford's Center for Automotive Research, has helped design, are already available in luxury cars and are being built into some midrange models.

The systems offer auditory, visual and mechanical warnings if a collision is imminent — and increasingly, if needed, take evasive actions automatically. By the middle of this decade, under certain conditions, they will take over the task of driving completely at both high and low speeds.

But the new systems are poised to refashion the nature of driving fundamentally long before completely autonomous vehicles arrive.

"This is really a bridge," said Ragunathan Rajkumar, a computer science professor who is leading a Carnegie Mellon University automated driving research project partly financed by General Motors. "The driver is still in control. But if the driver is not doing the right thing, the technology takes over."

Although drivers — at least for now — remain responsible for their vehicles, a host of related legal and insurance issues have already arisen, and researchers are opening a new line of study about how humans interact with the automatic systems.

What the changes will mean to the century-old American romance with the car remains to be seen. But the safety systems, the result of rapid advances in computer algorithms and the drastically falling cost of sensors, are a practical reaction to the modern reality of drivers who would rather talk on the phone and send text messages than concentrate on the road ahead and drive.

Four manufacturers — Volvo, BMW, Audi and Mercedes — have announced that as soon as this year they will begin offering models that will come with sensors and software to allow the car to drive itself in heavy traffic at speeds up to 37 miles per hour. The systems, known as Traffic Jam Assist, will follow the car ahead and automatically slow down and speed up as needed, handling both braking and steering.

At faster speeds, Cadillac's Super Cruise system is intended to automate freeway driving by keeping the car within a lane and adjusting speed to other traffic. The company has not said when it will add the system to its cars.

Already actions like steering, braking and accelerating are increasingly handled by computer software rather than the driver.

"People don't realize that when you step on antilock brakes it's simply a suggestion for the car to stop," said Clifford Nass, a director at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. How and when the car stops is left to the system.

The automobile industry has been motivated to innovate by growing evidence that existing technologies like the antilocking braking systems and electronic stability control have saved tens of thousands of lives.

In November, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommended that all new cars be equipped with collision avoidance technologies, including adaptive cruise control and automatic braking. Two states — California and Nevada — have passed laws making it legal to operate self-driving cars as long as a human being is inside, able to take over.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently reported that one system, electronic stability control, or E.S.C., which digitally detects the loss of traction and compensates automatically, saved 2,202 lives from 2008 to 2010. Federal safety regulations began phasing in electronic stability control on small trucks and passenger vehicles in 2007.

"I think E.S.C. is an amazing piece of technology," said David L. Strickland, the National Highway Traffic Safety administrator. "And I do think there are a number of new technologies that the agency is looking at right now that have tremendous promise."

Innovation and deployment of the crash-resistance technologies accelerated after 2010, with news that Google had a secret program to design self-driving cars. Google has not said whether it intends to sell its vehicles. However, the search engine company has actively lobbied for laws in several states legalizing autonomous automobiles.

Ten automakers have advanced research laboratories based in Silicon Valley. The most recent one was established by Ford Motors in Mountain View, Calif., in June.

Also playing a role in the speed with which safety changes are being made are component suppliers like Bosch and Mobileye, an Israeli company that specializes in cameras mounted to look forward from the car's rearview mirror, and elsewhere on advanced vehicles.

Adaptive cruise control, known as A.C.C., and self driving are now aided by costly radar-based systems, but that will change with the next generation of low-cost video camera technology, said Amnon Shashua, co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer of Mobileye.

"No radar is needed," said Dr. Shashua, who is also a professor of computer science at Hebrew University. "This could bring A.C.C. to the masses."

An emerging communications technology that will give vehicles a much more elaborate and instantaneous view of their surroundings is being tested in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Europe and elsewhere. Called "connected vehicle technology" by Dr. Rajkumar — and nicknamed V2X by the auto industry — it allows a vehicle to detect cars around corners that a human driver would be unable to see.

"V2X offers tremendous opportunities to make for a more efficient and safer driving experience," said Paul Mascarenas, chief technical officer at Ford Motor's Research Division.

The actions of drivers, too, are being rethought. When drivers are no longer required to maintain a constant vigil on the road ahead at all times, it will still be necessary to reclaim their attention in emergencies. Dr. Nass is establishing an automotive industry consortium to develop new computerized systems that make it safer to switch back and forth from human to computer control.

Dr. Rajkumar said he suspected that most Americans were not quite ready for a fully autonomous car.

But, he said, "In time, as society becomes more comfortable and legal concerns are ironed out, full autonomy will become practical, inevitable and necessary."

He, for one, would welcome an automated car for his 30-minute commute home. If the car could drive itself, he said, he would happily take a short nap.

The raid also resulted in the death of 17 Somali fighters, according to the defense ministry.

"Faced with the intransigence of the terrorists, who refused to negotiate for three and a half years and who were holding Denis Allex in inhumane conditions, an operation was planned and carried out," the ministry said. "During the assault, violent combat took place."

The raid came as France sent troops into the African nation of Mali to help the government beat back advances by Islamic rebels. The Somali raid to get Mr. Allex led to speculation that the French government was trying to prevent reprisals for its actions in Mali.

The Associated Press reported that an official with the Somali militant group al-Shabab confirmed that fighting began after helicopters dropped off soldiers.

"Five helicopters attacked a house in in the town. They dropped soldiers off the ground, so that they could reach their destination," the official said.

In 2009, a French raid to free a yacht that had been captured by Somali pirates resulted in the death of a captive, Florent Lemaçon.

John McCain and Chuck Hagel traveled the world together, popped into each other's neighboring offices on Capitol Hill and played pranks. Mr. Hagel, then a Republican senator from Nebraska, dropped by one Halloween wearing a McCain mask. Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, liked to jokingly fire Mr. Hagel's staff. "Pack up your desks!" he would say. As Vietnam War veterans — Mr. McCain had been a naval officer and a pilot, Mr. Hagel an enlisted infantryman — they forged an even closer bond.

"John would call him sergeant — 'Hey, Sergeant, come in, Sergeant!' " said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is Mr. McCain's closest friend in Washington. "They would salute each other."

But as Mr. Hagel heads into contentious confirmation hearings to be President Obama's secretary of defense, the two remain estranged over policy differences that started with the Iraq War, spread into bitter presidential politics and ultimately damaged, if not ended, a friendship. Some colleagues say the break between two stubborn iconoclasts has been exaggerated in the absolutist world of the capital, but no one disputes that the relationship has cooled dramatically.

"The Iraq war is where the policy differences became pretty difficult to deal with," said Mr. Graham, speaking of Mr. McCain's aggressive push for the 2007 surge of American forces in Iraq and Mr. Hagel's unsuccessful fight against that escalation. "The worldview really began to diverge."

The differences were on full display when Mr. McCain released a statement after Mr. Hagel was nominated on Monday saying he had "serious concerns" about the positions on national security Mr. Hagel had taken over the years. The two spoke the same day by phone in what an aide called a cordial conversation — one of at least 30 calls to senators Mr. Hagel has made this week in preparation for his hearing — but on Tuesday on CNN Mr. McCain had not changed his tone.

While "the friendship, I hope, is still there," Mr. McCain said, he remained worried about Mr. Hagel's "overall attitude about the United States, our role in the world, particularly in the Middle East, and whether we should reduce the Pentagon further."

People who know both men say that at this point Mr. Hagel appears to have the votes for confirmation and that in the end Mr. McCain could well vote yes for the friend who was at his side during his unsuccessful 2000 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. But aides to both acknowledge the dynamic on Capitol Hill could change and that Mr. McCain — and others — will give Mr. Hagel a rough time. At the very least, they say, Mr. McCain remains bruised over Mr. Hagel's decision not to support Mr. McCain when he became the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, and over a trip Mr. Hagel took with Mr. Obama to Iraq the same year.

"He was very angry about it," said one of Mr. McCain's 2008 advisers, who asked not to be identified discussing the complicated dynamics between the two. Mr. McCain "takes policy disputes very, very personally," the adviser added. He described Mr. McCain's current view of Mr. Hagel as one of "profound disappointment."

Mr. McCain, 76, the son and grandson of admirals, and Mr. Hagel, 66, the son of a lumberyard worker who drank heavily and died when Mr. Hagel was in high school, first became political pals in 1996, when Mr. Hagel was running for the first time for the Senate.

Mr. McCain, who by then had been in the Senate nearly a decade and was nationally known, campaigned frequently for his fellow Vietnam veteran in Nebraska, much to the gratitude of Mr. Hagel and his staff. The two had similar personality traits: a sense of humor, brashness, bullheadedness and an aversion to Republican orthodoxy and hierarchy. By 2000, Mr. Hagel had returned the favor to become national co-chairman of Mr. McCain's presidential campaign.

PARIS (Reuters) - Denis Allex, a French soldier held hostage in Somalia since 2009, was killed during a raid on Friday night by French troops trying to rescue him, the French defence ministry said on Saturday.

Two other French soldiers and 17 Somalian fighters were killed in the fighting, the ministry said in a statement.

"Faced with the intransigence of the terrorists, who refused to negotiate for three and half years and who were holding Denis Allex in inhumane conditions, an operation was planned and carried out," said the ministry.

"During the assault, violent combat took place. Denis Allex was killed by his captors."

(Reporting by John Irish; writing by Leila Abboud; editing by Andrew Roche)

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else's.

"My work?" Ms. Mitchell said. "No, no, no, not my work."

Earlier, the city medical examiner's office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner's office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. "It couldn't be me because your work gets checked," she said. "You have supervisors."

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. "I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer," she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner's office so long. "Then it was time to leave."

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city's poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner's office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and "false negatives" might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

"The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event," said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

"Up to this point," Mr. Banks said, "they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there's an injustice that's been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases." He added, "If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?"

The medical examiner's office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city's district attorneys' offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of "trust us."

"Given what's happened," he said, "that's cold comfort."

The agents knocked on Erika Andiola's door shortly after 9 p.m., asking for her mother, Maria Arreola.

Ms. Arreola had been stopped by the police in nearby Mesa last year and detained for driving without a license. Her fingerprints were sent to federal immigration officials as part of a controversial program called Secure Communities, which the Obama administration has been trying to expand nationwide.

That routine check revealed that Ms. Arreola had been returned to Mexico in 1998 after she was caught trying to illegally cross the border into Arizona with Erika and two of her siblings in tow. As a result, she was placed on a priority list for deportation.

After being seized on Thursday, she could have been sent back to Mexico in a matter of hours, but Obama administration officials moved quickly to undo the arrests. Officials had been pressured by the robust response from advocates — through phone calls, e-mails and online petitions, but primarily on Twitter, where they mobilized support for Ms. Andiola, a well-known advocate for young illegal immigrants, under the hashtag #WeAreAndiola.

The reaction offered the Obama administration a taste of what it might expect when it gets into the thick of the debate over an immigration overhaul, which Congress is expected to tackle this year. President Obama has already been under harsh criticism for the number of illegal immigrants deported since he took office — roughly 400,000 each year, a record unmatched since the 1950s.

Ms. Andiola, 25, posted a tearful video on YouTube shortly after her mother and brother were handcuffed and driven away. "I need everybody to stop pretending that nothing is wrong," she said in the video, "stop pretending that we're all just living normal lives, because we're not. This could happen to any of us anytime."

She is the co-founder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, one of the groups pushing for a reprieve for immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children, as she was. She has been arrested while camped in front of Senator John McCain's office here, protested outside the United States Capitol, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in June under the headline, "We are Americans — just not legally."

In November, Ms. Andiola got a work permit under a program begun by the Obama administration last year that gives certain young illegal immigrants temporary reprieve from deportation. She graduated from Arizona State University in 2009.

On Friday afternoon, her mother returned home from a detention center in Florence, 70 miles southeast of Phoenix and usually the last stop for certain illegal immigrants before they are deported. Her brother, Heriberto Andiola Arreola, 36, who had been kept in Phoenix, was let go earlier, at 6 a.m.

Their swift releases underline the power of the youth-immigrant movement and their social media activism, which was critical in spreading Ms. Andiola's story overnight.

In a statement, Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said a preliminary review of the case revealed that it contains some of the elements outlined in the agency's "prosecutorial discretion policy" and would "merit an exercise of discretion." Advocates have long argued that the policy has done little to keep families from being broken apart by deportations.

Ms. Andiola said in an interview that she told her mother to go to her room before opening the door Thursday night; she suspected the men standing outside worked for immigration. By the time the men came in, her brother, who was outside talking to a neighbor, was already in handcuffs, she said.

"Where's Maria?" the men asked her, she recalled.

Ms. Arreola walked out of the room and, in Spanish, the men asked her to accompany them outside, where they placed her under arrest.

Though she and her son are free, their future is uncertain, as they could be arrested again while their cases are under review or deported should the eventual ruling go against them, said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups helping the family.

Stories like this, Ms. Hincapié went on, "happen every day, in every state," outside of the media spotlight. What made it different this time is that Ms. Andiola had connections and wasted no time mobilizing them. There are others, she said, whom "you never hear about."