By Jodi S. Cohen & Melissa Sanchez @ ProPublica.org, July 29

First, parents turn over guardianship of their teenagers to a friend or relative. Then the student declares financial independence to qualify for tuition aid and scholarships.

By Daniel Shoer Roth @ MiamiHerald.com, July 27

More than 23 million people from around the world — the applicants and their family members or “derivatives” — tried this year to legally immigrate to the United States and achieve the American Dream through the visa lottery program, the U.S. State Department statistics show.

Winners were selected through a randomized computer drawing from over 14 million qualified entries received during the 34-day application period last year.

According to the department, the visas were distributed among six geographic regions “with a maximum of seven percent available to persons born in any single country.” [....]

By Liz Alderman from Oyonnax, France @ NYTimes.com, July 27

[....] Jobs are plentiful in Ain, a sprawling manufacturing region in eastern France known as “Plastics Valley.” But companies in this forested frontier across from Switzerland have slowed production because they cannot find enough workers for a production line that increasingly requires computer and digital know-how.

“It’s a brake on competitiveness,” said Georges Pernoud, the president of Groupe Pernoud, whose company makes injection molding for plastic parts for BMW and other automakers. He said he has turned away contracts worth nearly a million euros in the past two years because he couldn’t find skilled people here or anywhere in France who wanted a factory job.

France, like many countries in Europe, has a labor problem. But in a nation where thousands of people took to the streets in the Yellow Vest movement to protest income inequality and a lack of economic opportunity, there is a peculiar twist.

Despite an unemployment rate of over 8 percent — the highest in Europe after Italy, Spain and Greece — over a quarter of a million jobs are unfilled. Businesses can’t find people to work as plumbers, engineers, waiters, cooks. The list goes on.

Nowhere is the challenge as stark as in manufacturing, where nearly 40 percent of companies cite a dearth of manpower. In Ain, which specializes in making plastic goods and machinery parts, at least 18,000 jobs are on offer..

France needs a solution quickly. After recovering from a double-dip recession during the financial crisis, the economy is slowing again [....]

To get a sense of the scale of the problem, The New York Times commissioned an analysis to tally the number of impersonators across social media for the 10 most followed people on Instagram, including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The analysis, conducted by Social Impostor, a firm that protects celebrities’ names online, found nearly 9,000 accounts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pretending to be those 10 people.

A lopsided protest vote in the House showed that the president’s grip on his party is not always as strong as it appears.

By Russell Berman @ TheAtlantic.com, July 26

The two-year, $2.7 trillion budget deal before Congress this week forced Republican lawmakers to answer a tricky question. Which is stronger: their seemingly unswerving loyalty to President Donald Trump, or their equally reflexive opposition to Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

Yesterday, it appeared to be the latter. House Republicans overwhelmingly rejected Trump rather than siding with the Democratic leader, voting by a ratio of 2 to 1 against an agreement that exposes, once again, the president’s disinterest in fiscal restraint. The measure would lift the debt ceiling until 2021 and unlock spending caps in favor of higher funding levels for the military and domestic programs. Out of 197 Republicans, just more than two-thirds—132—voted against the deal, which was negotiated largely by Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin [....]

By Helene Cooper @ NYTimes.com, July 26

An Army colonel described being sexually assaulted in her hotel room at a defense forum by Air Force Gen. John Hyten, an accusation he has denied.
General Hyten was nominated by President Trump to be the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is the country’s No. 2 military post