Your customized headlines for Thu, Jul 5, 2012

LONDON — Fallen banking titan Bob Diamond on Wednesday described regulators on both sides of the Atlantic as partly complicit in a scandal involving the manipulation of a key interbank lending rate, telling a British parliamentary committee that government watchdogs had failed to act after his bank, Barclays, informed them of industry-wide irregularities during the U.S. financial crisis.

Big national holidays are about celebrating common ideals and aspirations; national politics often turn on how those ideals and aspirations match up against the realities of daily life.

So it may come as no surprise that the Fourth of July in an election year can be a time of dissonance, when pride and trepidation march side by side down Main Street.

"Gentlemen, this is an executive suit," barks the silver-haired man at the front of the classroom. He points to a photo of a Brooks Brothers model beaming down from a projector screen.

The 35 senior officers gathered take note. They've seen these suits before, but now they're preparing to wear them. At the Fort Meade Army installation, the officers are examining the cuffs, the lapels, the fit of the suits they usually reserve for Easter services.

WOLFEBORO, N.H. — Mitt Romney said Wednesday that a mandate in President Obama's signature health-care law is "a tax," contradicting a position his campaign staked out this week and belatedly getting in line with many other Republican leaders.