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It was initially thought that guards at the prison in the northern state of Zacatecas had been overpowered.

The jail break, which occurred on Saturday, was captured on closed circuit television recordings.

Authorities have launched a hunt for the 53 escapees. Some have been linked to Mexico’s notorious drug cartels.

Fifty-one people suspected of involvement in the prison break have been ordered to be jailed, said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman for the attorney general.

These include the prison director and all 44 guards on duty during the break, he said.

He also said that the prisoners stole 23 guns from the jail before escaping.

Corruption

Interpol issued a security alert for 11 of the prisoners, whom it described as “a risk to the safety and security of citizens around the world”.

Footage of the prison break released by the attorney general’s office shows guards stepping aside as prisoners let themselves out of cells.

The inmates then cover one of the security cameras with a blanket.

Another camera outside the building filmed guards opening the prison gates to gunmen who had arrived in what appeared to be police cars with flashing lights.

Once inside, the gunmen, disguised as security officers, escort the prisoners out.

Only once the convoy has driven off do the guards run out with their guns drawn, in what seemed an attempt to cover up their role in the escape.

“It’s very important that this Congress and this president put in place policies that will bring those deficits down to a sustainable level over the medium term,” Geithner said in an interview with Bloomberg Television yesterday. He added that the target is reducing the gap to about 3 percent of gross domestic product, from a projected 12.9 percent this year.

The dollar extended declines today after Treasuries and American stocks slumped on concern the U.S. government’s debt rating may at some point be lowered. Bill Gross, the co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., said the U.S. “eventually” will lose its AAA grade.

Geithner, 47, also said that the rise in yields on Treasury securities this year “is a sign that things are improving” and that “there is a little less acute concern about the depth of the recession.”

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Gross said in an interview yesterday on Bloomberg Television that while a U.S. sovereign rating cut is “certainly nothing that’s going to happen overnight,” markets are “beginning to anticipate the possibility.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, speaking in Hong Kong today, nevertheless argues it’s “hard to believe” the U.S. would ever default.

Britain’s AAA rating was endangered when Standard & Poor’s yesterday lowered its outlook on the nation’s grade to “negative” from “stable,” citing a debt level approaching 100 percent of U.K. GDP.

A consortium of investors, including District-based private-equity giant Carlyle Group, agreed to buy and recapitalize BankUnited, the fourth-largest bank to fail since the onset of the financial crisis. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said it expects to absorb $4.9 billion in losses.

It is the second major bank failure involving allegations that OTS, the primary regulator of banks that concentrate in mortgage lending, allowed a bank to obscure its problems from investors.

OTS has previously acknowledged allowing IndyMac, which failed last summer, to conceal its problems in a financial filing. A report yesterday by the Treasury Department’s inspector general accused OTS of permitting three more banks to file misleading reports about their financial condition.

In the case of Coral Gables-based BankUnited, OTS had ordered the company to raise additional capital and it had been unable to meet a deadline to do so, the report said.

OTS’s senior deputy director allowed the company to raise the money after the deadline and then to issue a financial report stating that the money had been raised before the deadline, the report said.

The inspector general’s report describes BankUnited’s case but does not name the senior deputy director. The inspector general’s office confirmed the bank was

BankUnited. Scott Polakoff was the only senior deputy director at OTS during the period.

Polakoff stepped down this year from his position as acting director of the agency after the inspector general brought his actions to the attention of Treasury officials.

“We consider these matters very serious and find it alarming,” the inspector general wrote in the report.

Pictures from space are being used along with other intelligence to pinpoint Mexican narcotics operations and anticipate smuggling attempts into the United States, said R. Scott Zikmanis, a deputy director of operations with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Federal officials say an eye in space adds one more tool in an ever-expanding technological arsenal aimed at defending the border from narcotics traffickers, human smugglers and terrorists.

If a satellite picks up on activities by drug runners, U.S. authorities could then transmit information to agents along the border.

In turn American authorities could notify their Mexican counterparts to a stash-house location or use the intelligence to calculate when and where loads of drugs may be coming across the border, Zikmanis said. “Is it possible? Of course it is,” Zikmanis said. “Is it practical? Yes.”

During a Phoenix conference on border security last week, Zikmanis said his agency already has supplied some data to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a federal clearinghouse for the investigation of drug cartels.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency uses satellite surveillance on foreign soil for the Pentagon, though it also has assisted emergency responders in domestic disasters such as wildfires and Hurricane Katrina.

The use of satellite imagery for border security has been limited because of concerns about a military agency assisting domestic law enforcement, Zikmanis said.

Federal law strictly limits U.S. military operations on American soil unless such operations are authorized by Congress.

Any border-security surveillance will be done over Mexico, not the United States, Zikmanis said.

His agency uses both military and commercial satellites for its work.

Because the military photographs may be classified, he said, the agency is wrestling with legal questions about what can be shared with law enforcement.

Civil rights attorneys question the use of satellite technology in law enforcement.

“We are in the midst of a really dangerous time in terms of technology,” said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the Technology and Legal Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Though the ratings agency reaffirmed the country’s actual long-term credit rating at “AAA” and its short-term rating at “A-1+,” it said the outlook had deteriorated because of massive borrowing to deal with the recession and the banking crisis.

The outlook revision does not trigger a formal re-evaluation of Britain’s rating — unlike being put on credit watch — but does mean that policy makers have to be aware that a downgrade may happen if public finances do not improve.

The pound slumped by over 2 U.S. cents to just below $1.56 after the news, but recovered some ground to trade around $1.5670. Meanwhile the FTSE share index fell more than 120 points, or around 2.7 percent, though like other markets around the world it was facing heavy selling pressure after the U.S. Federal Reserve warned that the U.S. economy would shrink by more than anticipated this year.

A lower credit rating would make the government pay higher interest rates to borrow money on bond markets. An S&P study found that 37 percent of its negative outlooks were followed by a downgrade.

“Pressure on the rating will raise concerns regarding the ability to issue the record amount of gilts (British government bonds) required over the coming year to fund the deteriorating fiscal position in the U.K.,” said Hans Redeker, an analyst at BNP Paribas.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.

Victims of the abuse, who are now in their 50s to 80s, lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. They say that for all its incredible detail, the report doesn’t nail down what really matters — the names of their abusers.

“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Christine Buckley, 62, who spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not.

The Catholic religious orders that ran more than 50 workhouse-style reform schools from the late 19th century until the mid-1990s offered public words of apology, shame and regret Wednesday. But when questioned, their leaders indicated they would continue to protect the identities of clergy accused of abuse — men and women who were never reported to police, and were instead permitted to change jobs and keep harming children.