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Mr. Rubio, a Cuban-American in his first term whose star is rising rapidly in his party, has outlined views in recent days that set him apart from many other Republican conservatives, who reject any legalization as a form of amnesty that rewards immigrant lawbreakers. Mr. Rubio said he would not rule out some kind of legal status for immigrants in the United States illegally, although he insists that any measures should not penalize immigrants who have tried to come here through legal channels.

Mr. Rubio described his proposals in interviews last week with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and with The New York Times. By Monday he was already gathering support, as Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, a conservative who was the Republicans' vice-presidential nominee last year, endorsed Mr. Rubio's ideas.

Mr. Rubio laid out three: aside from fair treatment for foreigners who play by the rules, he said, any legislation should also recognize that legal immigration has been a boon to the United States in the past and is "critical to our future." He would also insist on new measures to ensure strict enforcement at the border and within the country.

"We can't have the kind of vibrant growth we need and the economy we want, based on limited government and free enterprise, if we don't have a legal immigration system that works," Mr. Rubio said. "And in order to have a system that works, we have to deal with those people who are already here illegally."

Mr. Ryan, on his Facebook page, wrote that Mr. Rubio was "exactly right on the need to fix our broken immigration system."

"I support the principles he's outlined," Mr. Ryan said, "modernization of our immigration laws; stronger security to curb illegal immigration; and respect for the rule of law in addressing the complex challenge of the undocumented population."

  As one of three Hispanics in the Senate, Mr. Rubio, who won his seat in 2010 with support from the Tea Party, seemed to be trying to set a new tone for his party to discuss immigration. Many Republican leaders have been reconsidering the party's stance on the issue since the November election, when Latinos, the electorate's fastest-growing group, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama.

Strikingly, Mr. Rubio's principles did not sound that different from proposals for an immigration overhaul by Mr. Obama, Democratic leaders and a handful of other Republicans. Aside from work under way at the White House on legislation, a bipartisan group of Senators has been meeting to draft a bill.

Where Mr. Rubio differed significantly with Democrats was on the legal pathway illegal immigrants would follow, with him proposing a long and indirect course before some of those immigrants could apply to become American citizens.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Rubio said a starting point for his plan was recognizing that the current immigration system was "burdensome, bureaucratic, difficult to navigate and sometimes it just doesn't work."

Mr. Rubio said he would seek to reorient the visa system to bring in more educated immigrants with skills in technology and science. As for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, Mr. Rubio said, "We have to understand these folks are here to stay." He added that most of them had not committed serious or violent crimes.

"The right way to deal with them is not amnesty," Mr. Rubio said, "and it is not a special pathway to citizenship." Instead, he said, he would offer a provisional legal status to immigrants who passed criminal background checks, paid fines and passed English and civics tests.

But, he said, "ultimately it's not good for our country to have people permanently trapped in that status where they can't become citizens." After a certain period, he said, immigrants would be allowed to apply to become legal permanent residents, a status that would eventually allow them to become citizens.

The current system is clogged with huge backlogs, with some immigrants waiting as long as two decades to receive visas. Mr. Rubio said that potentially large flaws in his plan would be worked out in negotiations.

Although Mr. Rubio said it would be better for Congress to take up the complex issues in separate pieces of legislation, he said he would not insist on that.

Mr. Rubio said he would offer a faster track to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants who came here as children. Members of Mr. Rubio's staff have been meeting with leaders of United We Dream, the largest organization of those young immigrants.

"To me the most surprising thing was that he was talking about a pathway to citizenship," Lorella Praeli, a leader of the organization, said on Monday. "There has been such a shift in the tone, in his vision."

Some conservative Republicans made it clear they would not support Mr. Rubio. In a statement, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said Mr. Obama had undercut the chances for an overhaul by weakening enforcement. "If the administration had spent the last four years ending illegality instead of abetting it," he said, "we would be in a better position for some kind of agreement."

The announcement, to be made in a speech in New York by the company's president and chief executive, William S. Simon, represents among the largest hiring commitments for veterans in history.

Company officials said they believe the program, which will officially begin on Memorial Day — May 27 this year — will lead to the hiring of more than 100,000 people in the next five years, the length of the commitment.

"Let's be clear: Hiring a veteran can be one of the best decisions any of us can make," Mr. Simon will say in his keynote speech to the National Retail Federation, according to prepared text. "These are leaders with discipline, training and a passion for service."

In a statement, the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has led a campaign by the White House to encourage businesses to hire veterans, called the Wal-Mart plan "historic," adding that she planned to urge other corporations to follow suit.

"We all believe that no one who serves our country should have to fight for a job once they return home," Mrs. Obama said in the statement. "Wal-Mart is setting a groundbreaking example for the private sector to follow."

The unemployment rate for veterans of the recent wars has remained stubbornly above that for nonveterans, though it has been falling steadily, dropping to just below 10 percent for all of 2012. That was down from 12.1 percent the year before. The year-end unemployment rate for nonveterans was 7.9 percent in 2012.

Reducing the veteran unemployment rate was among the few veterans' issues discussed by the presidential candidates last year. It has also been central to the work of Mrs. Obama's campaign to assist veterans and military families, Joining Forces. Last August, her office said that private companies working with Joining Forces had hired or trained 125,000 veterans or their spouses in a single year, surpassing the group's goal of 100,000 a full year early.

Wal-Mart's foundation has consistently been among the most generous contributors to veterans' charities, committing to donate $20 million to veterans' causes by 2015. "I take this one personally," Mr. Simon, a Navy veteran, says in his prepared text.

But the company has also been aggressive about hiring veterans because it views them as good employees, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of the book "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business."

About 100,000 of the company's 1.4 million employees in the United States are veterans, company officials said.

"They like military people because they have a sense of hierarchy and a commitment to the organization they are in," said Professor Lichtenstein, who has been a critic of Wal-Mart's management practices. "And that's important to Wal-Mart." In recent years, Wal-Mart has been the target of lawsuits by women, accusing the company of discrimination in salaries and promotions.

Gary Profit, a retired Army brigadier general who is senior director of military programs at Wal-Mart, said the company might not be able to guarantee that every veteran who wants a full-time job will be able to get one. But he said that because of the size of Wal-Mart's retail operation and supply chain, it is almost certain that the company could find a job — even a part-time one — close to any veteran who wanted one.

"If you're a veteran and you want a job in the retail industry, you have a place at Wal-Mart," he said.

That is the problem Apple faces. Analysts say it must decide whether to keep catering to the high end of the phone market, reaping fat profits from relatively fewer sales, or offer something cheaper to compete with lower-cost alternatives like Samsung's phones.

Worries about low-cost competition weighed on Apple's stock on Monday after reports that the company had reduced orders of screens for the iPhone 5, suggesting that demand for the phone could be weaker than expected. The company's shares dropped 3.6 percent for the day to close at $501.75; they have slid 29 percent from their high in September.

The long slump in the stock price has increased the pressure on the company to produce a solid earnings report on Wednesday, when investors will be looking closely to see how strong iPhone sales were.

The iPhone is still a top seller in the American market. But it has a tougher time competing in other markets, where consumers buy phones without a subsidy from a wireless carrier. In countries like Brazil, Germany and Spain, the iPhone 5 can cost $650.

And even the cheaper iPhones, like the 4 and 4S, are more expensive than the cheapest Android phones, said Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst and vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps people manage their cellphone bills.

"The people buying their first smartphones now are lower-income households," Mr. Kuittinen said. "They don't have enough money to have $650 to pay for a smartphone."

Analysts say that in the earnings report, they will pay special attention to the average selling price of iPhones to determine whether the iPhone 5 is still the hot seller or whether cheaper models are making up a majority of sales. The trend might help determine whether Apple will eventually introduce a new lower-end iPhone.

Apple does appear to be cutting back on orders for its latest iPhone from its manufacturing partners, as Nikkei of Japan and The Wall Street Journal reported earlier. Paul Semenza, an analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, a research firm that follows the display market, said that for January, Apple had expected to order 19 million displays for the iPhone 5 but cut the order to 11 million to 14 million. Mr. Semenza said these numbers came from sources in the supply chain, the companies that make components for Apple products.

The reduction in orders for screens could be related to excess inventory, or because consumer demand for the iPhone 5 just was not as strong as Apple had predicted, Mr. Semenza said. "Certainly, demand from Apple to the display makers seems to have been corrected pretty significantly," he said.

Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Laurence I. Balter, an analyst at Oracle Investment Research, said one reason Apple's stock had been hurting was that analysts often overshoot with their predictions for how many devices Apple will sell each quarter. He said that might explain some of Monday's sharp drop: "Everybody got a little too aggressive and optimistic."

Mr. Balter said there was plenty of room left for Apple to grow and China was a particularly important market. The iPhone is available there for China Unicom, a major wireless network. But Apple has yet to strike a deal with China's bigger cellphone carrier, China Mobile, which has a whopping 600 million subscribers — about six times as many as AT&T. That is Apple's opportunity for huge growth, Mr. Balter said.

"In China, the Apple brand on the iPhone is a status symbol," he said. "You're going to have the Samsung device, which is a nice phone, or you'll show your friends you have an Apple device. It's like wearing a pair of Levi's versus a Costco brand."

Mr. Balter said he thought Apple's strategy for growth would be to go after more price-conscious consumers, because once they become customers, they are likely to keep buying other Apple products. Perhaps the key to that strategy will be a cheaper iPhone, he said.

But even if Apple were to offer a cheaper iPhone, it is unlikely it would be dirt cheap, Mr. Kuittinen said. If it chose to play more aggressively in foreign markets, Apple would more likely introduce a midprice model that is cheaper than the newest iPhone but more expensive than the cheapest phones on the market, he said. That would be similar to its approach with the iPad Mini, which is more expensive than the smaller tablets sold by Google and Amazon but much cheaper than the full-size iPad.

Five months after San Bernardino filed for bankruptcy — the third California city to seek Chapter 9 protections in 2012 — residents here are confronting a transformed and more perilous city.

After violent crime had dropped steadily for years, the homicide rate shot up more than 50 percent in 2012 as a shrinking police force struggled to keep order in a city long troubled by street gangs that have migrated from Los Angeles, 60 miles to the west.

"Lock your doors and load your guns," the city attorney, James F. Penman, said he routinely told worried residents asking how they can protect themselves.

This is one of the prices that cities often pay for falling into bankruptcy: the police force is cut, crime skyrockets and residents are left trying to ensure their own safety.

A little over a year ago, this city's falling crime rate was a success story. An aggressive gang intervention effort helped cut the homicide rate by nearly half since the 2005 peak, and in 2011 the program was held up by the National League of Cities as a model for other cities to follow.

But nearly all that progress was erased last year as San Bernardino collapsed under the weight of the same forces that have hit cities all over California and threaten to plunge still more of them into insolvency: high foreclosure rates that eroded the city's tax revenue, stubborn unemployment, and pension obligations that the city could no longer afford.

Stockton, Calif., which filed for bankruptcy in June, has followed a similarly grim path into insolvency, logging more homicides last year than ever before. In Vallejo, Calif., which filed for bankruptcy in 2008, cuts left the police force a third smaller, and the city became a hub for prostitution.

In San Bernardino, dozens of officers have been laid off since the bankruptcy filing, leaving the police force with 264 officers, down from 350 in 2009. Those who remain call in sick more often, said the police chief, Robert Handy. Emergency response times are up. Nonemergency calls often get no response.

At the same time, as part of a plan to reduce the state prison population, nearly 4,000 criminals who would once have been sent to state prison have been put in the custody of San Bernardino County law enforcement authorities. Some have been released, putting more low-level criminals back on the streets of San Bernardino, Chief Hardy said, and adding to the challenges already faced by the police.

"All of our crime is up, and the city has a very high crime rate per capita anyway," Chief Handy said. "I can't police the city with much less than this. We're dangerously close as it is."

As lawyers wrangle in court over San Bernardino's plan to cut $26 million from its budget and defer some of its pension payments, city officials say there is little more they can do to turn back the rising tide of violence.

Mayor Patrick J. Morris said he was even looking into eliminating the Police Department entirely, and relying on the county Sheriff's Department for law enforcement, which could save money. Many other city services, he said, have already been cut "almost into nonexistence."

"The parks department is shredded, the libraries similarly," Mr. Morris said. "My office is down to nobody. I've got literally no one left." (Mr. Morris's son now serves as a volunteer chief of staff for the mayor's office.)

With the city unable to provide, residents have begun to take more responsibility. Volunteers help with park maintenance, work at the city animal shelter and, in some cases, even replace broken streetlights.

Neighborhood watch groups have also grown in number in the last year, as they did in Vallejo and Stockton after those cities filed for bankruptcy. There are now more than 100 groups and counting, up from 76 last year. Chief Handy said the groups would play a "huge part" in fighting crime, especially given the cut to the police.

In less affluent parts of the city, though, community groups have had less influence. On the West Side, traditionally a gang-controlled area, one resident, Elisa Cortez, said that almost all the neighbors on her block had recently moved in, and that she did not know them.