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When a private firm failed to meet its promise of providing enough guards for the Olympics, the British military was called in to "mind the gap" in security.

But even though the government is bringing in those troops — as well as RAF Typhoon combat jets, surface-to-air missiles on rooftops, and an aircraft carrier on the River Thames — organizers say it will still look like the Summer Games, and not war games.

Mitt Romney stuck to his guns in interviews with the major news networks, this afternoon.

"I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999," Romney told CNN.

Visa and Mastercard have announced that they will pay retailers more than $6 billion to settle several class-action and individual lawsuits retailers have filed since 2005.

According to a Wall Street Journal story from earlier this month, the settlement stems from complaints that Visa and MasterCard, the largest card-payments networks in the world, prohibited retailers from imposing surcharges to customers using those credit cards.

Mitt Romney faces new scrutiny over his time at the helm of Bain Capital, the private equity shop he ran from 1984 until — well, that's exactly the question.

The political fight of the moment is just when Romney stopped running Bain Capital, which specialized in buying troubled companies and turning them around.

Richard Zanuck, the Oscar-winning producer of films like Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy, died today from a heart attack.

Yes, Virginia, you are this election year's Santa Claus.

And it could be your bag of 13 presidential electoral votes that will be the key to deciding who occupies the White House in January.

Proof of Virginia's gathering importance?

President Obama is in the midst of a two-day Virginia campaign swing. Republican candidate Mitt Romney dispatched former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to counterattack Friday.

The airwaves are awash in campaign ads, and there's a veritable who-has-more-campaign-offices arms race well under way.

The nation's governors — well, many of them, anyway — are gathering in Colonial Williamsburg, Va., for their annual summer meeting this weekend.

It's no easy trick for the National Governors Association to get Republican and Democratic chief executives on the same page, or even the same room.

This year, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, it's even harder.

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. It's Friday and we'll begin the hour with the week in politics. The presidential campaigns are trading barbs over Republican Mitt Romney's role at his private equity firm Bain Capital, specifically when did he stop managing the company. SEC filings appear to contradict Romney's claim that he ended his active management role in 1999 when he left to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

The fate of Texas' new voter ID law is now up to a three-judge federal panel in Washington, D.C.

Lawyers for Texas and the Justice Department wrapped up five days of arguments in U.S. District Court Friday, with each side accusing the other of using deeply "flawed" data to show whether minorities would be unfairly hurt by a photo ID requirement.

In Germany, the past few weeks have been marked by an intense debate over religious liberties.

Today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel jumped into the fray saying her administration would work to protect religious circumcision.

"It is absolutely clear to the federal government that we want Jewish, we want Muslim religious life in Germany. Circumcisions carried out in a responsible way must not be subject to prosecution in this country," Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters.

Three-time Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin is a contemporary folk legend. Colvin started playing guitar at the age 10 and went on to cut her teeth on the folk circuits of Illinois and San Francisco before moving on to the Fast Folk cooperative of Greenwich Village in New York City. During her solo music career, Colvin has appeared in off-Broadway shows and episodes of television shows such as The Simpsons and Treme.