ASSOCIATED PRESS: The immigration debate in Arizona reached a boiling point in 2007 when the state passed a groundbreaking law targeting those often blamed with fueling the nation's border woes: Employers who hire immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

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POLITICO: It took him a day or two to get started, but President Barack Obama this week signaled that he is going to follow the conventional Washington playbook for trying to tamp down scandal. He has furrowed his brow, sacked an agency head, pledged transparency and cooperation with official inquiries and piously declared that no one is more troubled than him about any wrongdoing.

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POLITICO: A hearing on the IRS rarely has so much potential for drama. Steven Miller, the agency’s ousted acting commissioner, will spend several hours on Friday morning in the ornate House Ways and Means Committee room explaining his role in a scandal that has captivated Washington for a week.

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POLITICO: Senate Democrats are in such a bind over addressing gay rights under immigration reform that they’re turning to President Barack Obama for help. They’re increasingly uneasy about risking Republican support but reluctant to tell gay rights advocates that an amendment allowing American citizens to seek green cards for their same-sex foreign partners may not get a vote in the Judiciary Committee.

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POLITICO: The standoff over high-tech visas in the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill will drag into next week, as negotiators try to lure a key GOP senator without upsetting the bipartisan compromise. Even with the delay, the bill is expected to clear the Senate Judiciary Committee this month. Majority Leader Harry Reid wants it on the floor in June. But Thursday’s slowdown reinforces the influence both Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the tech industry wield in the broader debate.

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THE HILL: The woman who ran the office accused of targeting Tea Party groups is now running the office tasked with implementing ObamaCare. ABC News reported Thursday that Sarah Hall Ingram, the former director of the office that oversaw tax-exempt organizations during the alleged targeting of conservative groups, now leads the office in charge of the Affordable Care Act.

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THE HILL: The House voted to repeal ObamaCare on Thursday for the third time since Republicans took over the chamber in 2011. Only two Democrats sided with Republicans in the party-line 229-195 vote — Jim Matheson (Utah) and Mike McIntyre (N.C.). All Republicans voted in favor of repeal.

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THE HILL: The Interior Department unveiled a revised proposal Thursday to regulate the oil-and-gas development process known as fracking when it occurs on federal and Indian lands. It’s Interior’s second swing at the delayed rules after the department in January pulled back a proposal from mid-2012.

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THE HILL: Eight members of Congress raised privacy fears about Google's wearable computer, Google Glass, expressing concern the device could allow users to identify people on the street and look up personal information about them.

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THE HILL: President Obama met with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the Joint Chiefs on Thursday to discuss military sexual assault as lawmakers in Congress geared up to address the issue. Obama and Vice President Biden sat down at the White House with Hagel, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and the heads of the services on Thursday afternoon, a week after the president urged the military to take aggressive steps against sexual assault.

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THE HILL: The official ousted this week as acting chief of the IRS will testify Friday on his former agency’s targeting of conservative groups as Republicans bear down on an issue that is keeping President Obama on his heels. Steven Miller, forced out by President Obama after a quarter century at the IRS, is scheduled to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee, in the first congressional hearing over actions that claimed the job of a second senior agency official on Thursday.

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THE HILL: House Republicans say they will not overreach on probing the Obama administration, having learned lessons from investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the Clinton administration.

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WASHINGTON POST: Last June, President Obama invoked executive privilege to withhold documents related to the botched “Fast and Furious” gun operation, and the House of Representatives acted by citing Holder for criminal contempt of Congress. The Justice Department quickly responded by saying Holder would not be prosecuted, citing similar decisions by Justice Departments in Democratic and Republican administrations.

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WASHINGTON POST: The Obama administration may strip Bangladesh of import breaks following deadly accidents in the country’s textile industry, another sign of the pressure building on the southeast Asian nation to improve labor conditions. The move was prompted partly by a fire late last year that killed 112 people and gained momentum after the recent factory collapse that claimed more than 1,100 lives.

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WASHINGTON POST: For ADHD, the definition is being broadened, meaning the disorder could be diagnosed in more children. In the case of autism, the opposite is true. The new criteria are among the changes that will be released with the publication this weekend of the long-awaited guidebook that psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians use to diagnose mental disorders. It’s the first major update in nearly 20 years. The 947-page tome by the American Psychiatric Association adds some new disorders, broadens criteria for existing ones and tightens them for other illnesses.

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WASHINGTON POST: The General Services Administration doled out cash awards to senior executives based on votes of confidence by colleagues who recognized their efforts at grooming talent and running “terrific and productive meetings,” a new report reveals.

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WASHINGTON POST: This Atlantic port is the heart of France’s shipbuilding tradition, where the British came to have the Queen Mary 2 built a decade ago and where Royal Caribbean recently ordered a $1.5 billion floating palace for island-hopping by the masses. When the St. Nazaire STX Shipyards’ majority shareholders in South Korea announced that they were selling out, therefore, the reflex here was almost automatic.

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WASHINGTON POST: A recent tide of sectarian tensions that erupted into the worst violence seen in Iraq in five years is testing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose ability to contain the crisis could hinge on a conflict raging beyond his control in Syria. The prospect of a regional power shift driven by the bloody civil war next door, where a mostly Sunni rebel movement is struggling to topple the Shiite-dominated regime, has emboldened Iraq’s Sunni minority to challenge its own Shiite government and amplified fears within Maliki’s administration that Iraq may soon be swept up in a spillover war.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that President Obama violated the Constitution when he made a recess appointment to the National Labor Relations Board, marking the second panel to rebuke the administration and making the issue even more likely to draw Supreme Court scrutiny.

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WASHINGTON TIMES: The tragedy of Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed, seemed a cut-and-dried story in the days after a mob attacked the State Department’s mission in eastern Libya. From President Obama on down, the recap was simple: A crowd of demonstrators angry over an obscure YouTube video that denigrated Islam’s Prophet Muhammad spontaneously stormed the complex.

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REUTERS: President Barack Obama on Friday will seek to turn the spotlight from controversies threatening to swamp his agenda to the economic issues by announcing he will make it easier to get federal building projects off the ground.

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REUTERS: The leader of South Africa's biggest platinum mining union threatened on Friday to bring Africa's No. 1 economy "to a standstill" and demanded a meeting with President Jacob Zuma, ramping up the rhetoric in an 18-month labor crisis.

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REUTERS: More than 1.5 million people have fled Syria as conditions there deteriorate rapidly, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday. The exodus has accelerated over the past four months and the agency estimates that nearly 1 million refugees have registered since January, U.N. officials said.

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REUTERS: Nigerian forces used jets and attack helicopters to bombard Islamist militant camps in the northeast on Friday, killing a number of insurgents, the defense headquarters spokesman said.

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REUTERS: A House of Representatives panel on Friday opens the first in a series of investigative hearings in Congress on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny, as the political storm over the scandal shifts to Capitol Hill.

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REUTERS: Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. will be called back to the British parliament to clarify how its activities in the UK justify its low corporate income tax bill, two lawmakers told Reuters.

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