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The prosecutor, Mark E. Hasse, worked in the Kaufman County district attorney's office in Kaufman, a town of 6,800 people about 35 miles from Dallas. He was shot several times shortly before 9 a.m. as he walked in an employee parking lot about a block from the courthouse.

The authorities said the suspect or suspects got out of a Ford Taurus, opened fire on Mr. Hasse and then returned to the car and drove away. Investigators were trying to determine why Mr. Hasse was targeted and if the shooting had anything to do with cases he had prosecuted.

"I've been doing this 43 years, and I've never seen anything like this," said David A. Byrnes, the Kaufman County sheriff.

Mr. Hasse, 57, was the county's lead felony prosecutor and a well-respected assistant district attorney. He received his law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and in the 1980s served as a prosecutor in the Dallas County district attorney's office, where he had been the chief of the organized-crime section.

Kaufman County prosecutors have been involved in investigations of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas prison gang. In November, federal officials in Houston thanked a number of local agencies for their work — including Kaufman County prosecutors — when more than 30 senior leaders and other members of the gang were indicted on federal racketeering charges.

Officials said they were reviewing Mr. Hasse's current cases — as many as 400 of them — and previous ones for leads.

Lawyers and prosecutors throughout North Texas were stunned by the attack. The Dallas County district attorney, Craig Watkins, sent an e-mail encouraging his employees to exercise caution.

"There's a lot of shock," said David Finn, a criminal defense lawyer in Dallas and former federal prosecutor who knew Mr. Hasse. "Where this happened, it's not New York City or Dallas or L.A. or Chicago. This is a very, very, very small community, and for this to happen out there, it's a huge deal. It's incredibly brazen."

The Kaufman County district attorney, Mike McLelland, said his office had suffered a devastating loss. "Mark was an excellent friend and a spectacular prosecutor," he said.

After the shooting, the Kaufman County Courthouse went into lockdown and then was closed as officers and agents from local, state and federal agencies searched the streets nearby.

Area schools, including the campuses of the Kaufman Independent School District, were also placed on lockdown.

Executives from PepsiCo, ConAgra and about 20 other major food companies, as well as Wal-Mart and advocacy groups that favor labeling, attended a meeting in January in Washington convened by the Meridian Institute, which organizes discussions of major issues. The inclusion of Wal-Mart has buoyed hopes among labeling advocates that the big food companies will shift away from tactics like those used to defeat Proposition 37 in California last fall, when corporations spent more than $40 million to oppose the labeling of genetically modified foods.

"They spent an awful lot of money in California — talk about a lack of return on investment," said Gary Hirshberg, co-chairman of the Just Label It campaign, which advocates national labeling, and chairman of Stonyfield, an organic dairy company.

Instead of quelling the demand for labeling, the defeat of the California measure has spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative proposals in Connecticut, Vermont, New Mexico and Missouri, and a swelling consumer boycott of some organic or "natural" brands owned by major food companies.

Mr. Hirshberg, who attended the January meeting, said he knew of roughly 20 states considering labeling requirements.

"The big food companies found themselves in an uncomfortable position after Prop. 37, and they're talking among themselves about alternatives to merely replaying that fight over and over again," said Charles Benbrook, a research professor at Washington State University who attended the meeting.

"They spent a lot of money, got a lot of bad press that propelled the issue into the national debate and alienated some of their customer base, as well as raising issues with some trading partners," said Mr. Benbrook, who does work on sustainable agriculture.

For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United States — like cereals, snacks and salad dressings — have contained ingredients from plants with DNA that has been manipulated in a laboratory. The Food and Drug Administration, other regulators and many scientists say these foods pose no danger. But as Americans ask more pointed questions about what they are eating, popular suspicions about the health and environmental effects of biotechnology are fueling a movement to require that food from genetically modified crops be labeled, if not eliminated.

Impending F.D.A. approval of a genetically modified salmon and the Agriculture Department's consideration of genetically engineered apples have further intensified the debate.

"We're at a point where, this summer, families could be sitting at their tables and wondering whether the salmon and sweet corn they're about to eat has been genetically modified," said Trudy Bialic, director of public affairs at PCC Natural Markets in Seattle. "The fish has really accelerated concerns."

Mr. Hirshberg said some company representatives wanted to find ways to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to proceed with federal labeling.

"The F.D.A. is not only employing 20-year-old, and we think obsolete, standards for materiality, but there is a general tendency on the part of the F.D.A. to be resistant to change," he said. "With an issue as polarized and politicized as this one, it's going to take a broad-based coalition to crack through that barrier."

Morgan Liscinsky, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, said the agency considered the "totality of all the data and relevant information" when forming policy guidance. "We've continued to evaluate data as it has become available over the last 20 years," she said.

Neither Mr. Hirshberg nor Mr. Benbrook would identify other companies that participated in the talks, but others confirmed some of the companies represented. Caroline Starke, who represents the Meridian Institute, said she could not comment on a specific meeting or participants.

Proponents of labeling in Washington State have taken a somewhat different tack from those in California, arguing that the failure to label will hurt the state's fisheries and apple and wheat farms. "It's a bigger issue than just the right to know," Ms. Bialic said. "It reaches deep into our state's economy because of the impact this is going to have on international trade."

A third of the apples grown in Washington State are exported, many of them to markets for high-value products around the Pacific Rim, where many countries require labeling. Apple, fish and wheat farmers in Washington State worry that those countries and others among the 62 nations that require some labeling of genetically modified foods will be much more wary of whole foods than of processed goods.

The Washington measure would not apply to meat or dairy products from animals fed genetically engineered feed, and it sharply limits the ability to collect damages for mislabeling.

Mr. Benbrook and consumer advocates say the federal agencies responsible for things like labeling have relied on research financed by companies that make genetically modified seeds.

"If there is a documented issue with this overseas, it could have a devastating impact on the U.S. food system and agriculture," Mr. Benbrook said. "The F.D.A. isn't going to get very far with international governments by saying Monsanto and Syngenta told us these foods are safe and we believed them."

Advocacy groups also have denounced the appointment of Michael R. Taylor, a former executive at Monsanto, as the F.D.A.'s deputy commissioner for food and veterinary medicine.

Ms. Liscinsky of the F.D.A. said Mr. Taylor was recused from issues involving biotechnology.

What has excited proponents of labeling most is Wal-Mart's participation in the meeting. The retailer came under fire from consumer advocates last summer for its decision to sell a variety of genetically engineered sweet corn created by Monsanto.

Because Wal-Mart is the largest grocery retailer, a move by the company to require suppliers to label products could be influential in developing a national labeling program.

"I can remember when the British retail federation got behind labeling there, that was when things really started to happen there," said Ronnie Cummins, founder and national director of the Organic Consumers Association. "If Wal-Mart is at the table, that's a big deal."

Brands like Honest Tea, which is owned by Coca-Cola, have written to the association, which estimates 75 percent of grocery products contain a genetically modified ingredient, to protest its "Traitors Boycott," which urges consumers not to buy products made by units of companies that fought Proposition 37. Consumers have peppered the companies' Web sites, Facebook pages and Twitter streams with angry remarks.

Ben & Jerry's, the ice cream company, announced recently that it would remove all genetically modified ingredients from its products by the end of this year. Consumers had expressed outrage over the money its parent, Unilever, contributed to defeat the California measure.

The state Legislature in Vermont, where Ben & Jerry's is based, is considering a law that would require labeling, as is the General Assembly in Connecticut. Legislators in New Mexico have proposed an amendment to the state's food law that would require companies to label genetically modified products.

And this month, a senator in Missouri, home of Monsanto, one of the biggest producers of genetically modified seeds, proposed legislation that would require the labeling of genetically engineered meat and fish.

"I don't want to hinder any producer of genetically modified goods," the senator, Jamilah Nasheed, who represents St. Louis, said in a news release. "However, I strongly feel that people have the right to know what they are putting into their bodies."

The error was found during an extensive review undertaken after the office learned that one of its laboratory technicians had missed detecting DNA evidence in at least 26 rape cases — an embarrassing oversight for an agency at the forefront of forensic technology, but one that the office said at the time was isolated and unprecedented.

The new discovery has led to the firing of the office's deputy director of quality assurance in the lab and the suspension of the director of the office's department of forensic biology, Dr. Mechthild Prinz.

The suspension of Dr. Prinz was made "pending further review of her management practices," according to a statement from Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office. The name of the deputy director could not be immediately determined.

In some 55 instances, the medical examiner's office had entered DNA samples taken from crime scenes into a database maintained by the city, but did not do the same for the state database, according to the statement, which did not account for how the lapse occurred.

Although the city is able to compare DNA it has collected from suspects against samples taken from local crime scenes, the city's database is much smaller than the statewide database, which is linked to a national network of other states' records as well. As a result, the 55 samples were not searched against a larger pool of profiles of convicted offenders.

Once the 55 DNA profiles were uploaded, there was apparently one instance of a DNA hit. Ms. Borakove said that a DNA sample from a 2006 burglary resulted in an "investigative lead" after it was entered into the statewide system. The remaining 54 samples did not supply any new evidence for a criminal prosecution, she said.

"While 55 represents a minuscule percentage of the overall total of 25,000 profiles entered since 2000 (when the system was implemented), all profiles must be uploaded and the failure is not acceptable for a world-class DNA lab that prides itself on accuracy and attention to detail," the statement said.

Ms. Borakove said that there was a delay between when the cases were first discovered and when the executive management of the medical examiner's office was alerted to the lapses.

But Ms. Borakove said that the office would retain an outside expert to review the lab's management and that several new procedures had been put in place. Those procedures include requiring supervisors to be present in evidence exam rooms at all times, as well as the automatic uploading of all eligible DNA profiles to the state database.

The latest disclosure comes as the medical examiner's office is concluding a nearly two-year review of its handling of 800 rape cases. That review began after supervisors discovered that a longtime technician had overlooked DNA evidence on items from at least 26 rape kits, incorrectly reporting that they contained no relevant evidence. In addition, the technician is believed to have misplaced 16 pieces of evidence, returning them to the wrong rape kit, according to documents describing the office's review.

On Monday, a City Council hearing is scheduled to examine the former technician's errors.

"We want to know why it happened, what they have done to fix the problem, and how quality control procedures have been improved," a spokesman for Speaker Christine C. Quinn said.

There were reports that people remained trapped in the debris — as many as 30 according to civil protection and local media — from the explosion, which occurred in the basement of an administrative building next to the iconic, 52-story tower of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex.

Ana Vargas Palacio was distraught as she searched for her missing husband, Daniel Garcia Garcia, 36, who works in the building. She last heard from him at 1 p.m.

"I called his phone many times, but a young man answered and told me he found the phone in the debris," Vargas. The two have an 11-year-old daughter. His mother, Gloria Garcia Castaneda, collapsed on a friend's arm, crying "My son. My son."

There was no immediate cause given for the blast, which also damaged the first and second floors of the auxiliary building in a busy commercial and residential area. But in a Tweet, Pemex said it had evacuated the building as a precautionary measure because of a problem with the electrical system.

The company later tweeted that experts were analyzing the explosion and any reports of a cause were speculation.

"It was an explosion, a shock, the lights went out and suddenly there was a lot of debris," employee Cristian Obele told Milenio television, adding that he had been injured in the leg. "Co-workers helped us get out of the building."

The tower, where several thousand people work, was evacuated. The main floor and the mezzanine of the auxiliary building, where the explosion occurred, were heavily damaged, along with windows as far as three floors up.

"Right now they're conducting a tour of the building and the area adjacent to the blast site to verify if there are any still trapped so they can be rescued immediately," Interior Ministry spokesman Eduardo Sanchez told Milenio.

A reporter at the scene saw rescue workers trying to free several workers trapped. Television images showed people being evacuated by office chairs, and gurneys. Most of them had injuries likely caused by falling debris.

"We were talking and all of sudden we heard an explosion with white smoke and glass falling from the windows," said Maria Concepcion Andrade, 42, who lives on the block of Pemex building. "People started running from the building covered in dust. A lot of pieces were flying."

Police landed four rescue helicopters to remove the dead or injured. About a dozen tow trucks were furiously moving cars to make more landing room for the helicopters.

Streets surrounding the building were closed as evacuees wandered around, and rescue crews loaded the injured into ambulances.

"I profoundly lament the death of our fellow workers at Pemex. My condolences to their families," President Enrique Pena Nieto said via his Twitter account.

Shortly before the explosion, Operations Director Carlos Murrieta reported via Twitter that the company had reduced its accident rate in recent years. Most Pemex accidents have occurred at pipeline and refinery installations.

A fire at a pipeline metering center in northeast Mexico near the Texas border killed 30 workers in September, the largest-single toll in at least a decade for the company.

The jury, deliberating for one day, rejected the claim by the defendant, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, that he had been entrapped and induced into a terrorist act by undercover F.B.I. agents posing as radical Islamic militants. His lawyers argued that the undercover operatives, having invested huge resources and time into the case, manipulated Mr. Mohamud into a plot he would never have undertaken on his own.

"We're disappointed," said Stephen R. Sady, Mr. Mohamud's lead defense lawyer, who said the verdict would be appealed. "We obviously thought he was entrapped."

Mr. Sady said he hoped Senior Judge Garr M. King, who set sentencing for May 14, would consider mitigating evidence that came out in the trial. Mr. Mohamud showed little obvious emotion as the verdict was read by Judge King, or as he was led from the courtroom, where the sound of shackles applied to his hands could be heard from the benches inside.

The case gripped Oregon and seized national attention in November 2010, partly through a glimpse of undercover antiterror policing, in the sting operation that ensnared Mr. Mohamud, but perhaps even more because of the setting — a downtown Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland's premier open-space oasis, packed on the night of the attack with an estimated 25,000 people.

What had loomed large and global at the time with its hints of international terrorist intrigue, ultimately became, through the two weeks of testimony, a smaller, more intimate story of psychology. The jury, in assessing hours of secretly recorded conversations and evidence as well of what seemed a typical college student's life at Oregon State University, was asked to decide whether the thin young man sitting with lawyers was a romantic hate-filled fantasist who just wanted to strike a pose, or a genuine jihadist nipped in the bud before violence could be done.

Whether Portland was ever actually threatened became part of the debate at the trial.

Undercover F.B.I. agents testifying for the prosecution said that they feared Mr. Mohamud could have connected with real terrorists and bombmakers had they not intervened with a sting operation. Mr. Mohamud's lawyers, by contrast, argued to the jury that the case was all about the character of a callow, immature young man. They called witnesses, including friends and family members of the defendant who called him goofy and fun-loving, and a threat-assessment expert who said that the bellicose bluster about radical Islam — in written articles, journal entries and comments recorded by the F.B.I. — was adolescent chest-thumping and nothing more.

"This case is a tragedy," Mr. Sady said in his summation to the jury on Wednesday, one day before the guilty verdict.

Portland residents interviewed on Thursday in the square where the attack was to have occurred mostly said they had paid little attention to a trial about what might have been.

"Guns are more of a concern to me," said Dana Odling, a retired food service worker for the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. She said that especially since the shootings in Newtown, Conn., and at a shopping mall just outside Portland — both in December — she had been much more conscious of the potential mayhem that one person with a store-bought weapon could create. "Something like that can happen anytime, anywhere," she said.

Matthew Brown, a property manager who lives near the square, said that after an arrest was made in the 2010 case, he considered the matter settled.

"So many things happening all over the world — if you start getting yourself weighed down with every little thing you'd be one depressed individual," he said.

Mohamud was accused of leading a plot to detonate a bomb at Portland's 2010 Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. But the device he thought was a bomb was a fake, supplied by undercover FBI agents posing as members of al-Qaida.

Mohamud sat still, giving no visible reaction as Thursday's verdict was read. His attorney, Steve Sady, later said an appeal was being planned for after the scheduled May 14 sentencing.

"We are disappointed with the verdict," Sady said. "We obviously though he was entrapped."

Prosecutors argued that Mohamud was predisposed to terrorism as early as 15 years old.

Mohamud, now 21, traded emails with an al-Qaida lieutenant later killed in a drone strike. He also told undercover agents he would pose as a college student while preparing for violent jihad.

Mohamud was never called to testify. Instead, the jurors saw thousands of exhibits and heard hours of testimony from friends, parents, undercover FBI agents and experts in counterterrorism, teenage brain development and the psychology of the Muslim world.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight told the jury earlier this week that the decision would be easy. Mohamud pressed a keypad button on a black Nokia cellphone and intended to kill people. Whatever else they might think about the methods of undercover agents or the government's decision to investigate a teenager, the underlying decision was Mohamud's and the motivation was hatred of the West.

Sady had argued that Mohamud wasn't radicalized by online recruiters or friends with jihadist leanings, but rather by a Justice Department hungry for convictions that ignored every caution sign along the way. Undercover agents manipulated Mohamud's faith and plied him with praise and the promise of a life leading other jihadis, Sady said.

Mohamud could be ordered to serve life in prison.

The 64-to-34 vote ended for now a showdown that had threatened the full faith and credit of the United States government. The Treasury Department has been shuffling federal accounts for a month to make sure it could pay interest to its creditors even after the government officially breached its borrowing limit. By mid-February, the Obama administration warned, the Treasury would have exhausted such "extraordinary measures" and would have been forced to default for the first time.

The deal "sets an important precedent," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, "that the full faith and credit of the United States will no longer be used as a pawn to extract painful cuts to Medicare, Social Security or other initiatives that benefit the middle class. A clean debt ceiling increase that allows the United States to meet its existing obligations should be the standard."

The legislation, written by House Republican leaders, passed the House last week 285 to 144, with most Republicans voting for it. In the Senate, most Republicans — and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia — voted no.

Mr. Reid's hope for an end to such showdowns on the debt ceiling may prove to be optimistic. The next budget fight will come March 1, when across-the-board military and domestic spending cuts totaling $1 trillion over 10 years would begin to go into force. House Republicans say they would entertain proposals to shift those cuts to other programs but will not back down on the spending reduction.

On March 27, the current stopgap law financing the government will expire, raising the specter of an Easter government shutdown. Then on May 18, the debt ceiling will come back into force unless a broader deficit reduction deal can be reached before then.

"We're going to be back here in a few months with the same impasse," said Senator Patrick Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania.

The final vote on the debt limit deal came only after Mr. Reid and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, reached agreement on an orchestrated path to passage. To get there, the Senate voted on four Republican amendments. One would have added spending cuts to the deal. One would have mandated that in the event of a debt ceiling impasse, the Treasury would wall off incoming tax receipts to pay interest on the federal debt, Social Security benefits, and active military pay.

Senator Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Finance Committee, compared that to "The Hunger Games," saying it would pit all other federal programs against one another, just as the fictional games pitted children against children in a fight to the death.

"It'd be total chaos," he said.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, was given a vote to stop the sale of F-16 fighter jets and Abrams tanks to Egypt, the most recent of a series of votes Mr. Paul has forced to cut off aid to Egypt in the wake of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Senators of both parties said the amendment would cut off all military assistance and end American leverage in Egypt.

Under the Reid-McConnell agreement, all of those amendments would have required 60 votes, and all failed by design.

Mr. McConnell expressed Republican hopes that passage would begin tough but fruitful negotiations on the deficit that would include proposals to control the growth of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are being propelled by an aging population.

"The president and his allies have had four years to put their ideas into practice. Those policies have failed," Mr. McConnell said. "It's time for a new approach. And, if Democrats are ready to finally get serious — to end the blame game and pursue real pro-growth policies — then Republicans are here to show them the way forward."