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Pursuant to the authority that 31 U.S.C. 5111(a) and 5112(a)(7-10) grant the Secretary of the Treasury to mint and issue gold coins, and to prepare and distribute numismatic items, the United States Mint mints and issues 2008 American Eagle Gold Proof and Uncirculated Coins with the following weights: One-ounce, one-half ounce, one-quarter ounce, one-tenth ounce. The United States Mint also produces an American Eagle four-coin set that contains one coin of each denomination.

Because of increases in the cost of gold, the United States Mint will begin accepting orders for 2008 American Eagle Gold Uncirculated Coins at the prices indicated below, effective April 1, 2008:

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes — a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

“They cut it here and then pulled it right out of the wall,” real estate broker Marc Charney said, pointing to broken plaster near a wrecked baseboard heating system in the 2,774-sq-ft home in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class city of 94,304 people.

Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India.

In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

“We’re in an incredibly unfortunate time where the nonferrous metals commodities market for scrap is at an all-time high. Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process,” Cleveland city councilor Tony Brancatelli said.

Analysts at the financial research firm Celent LLC said in a report Tuesday that it expects the U.S. commercial banking industry — essentially, all companies that lend or collect deposits — to lose 200,000 of its 2 million jobs over the next 12 to 18 months.

An annual loss of 200,000 jobs at the nation’s commercial banks would be an unprecedented number.

In 2007, the entire financial services sector — which consists of mostly commercial banks — announced job cuts that totaled a record 153,000, according to the job placement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. More than half of those cuts were in the mortgage-lending business, and occurred all over the country, particularly in New York and California.

Octavio Marenzi, the head of Celent’s financial consultancy unit, said more layoffs are inevitable as the subprime crisis hits other parts of the banking industry and spreads beyond mortgages to mortgage-related products, such as home-equity loans, and other types of lending, such as credit cards.

“The banking industry over the past 40 years has never seen a downturn in its revenue growth,” Marenzi said. “In 2008, it looks like it will decrease for the first time in living memory. They’re going to have to respond with severe cost cutting. It’s not an environment they’re entirely used to.”

The credit crisis began in earnest last summer when the markets tightened up at the sight of spiking subprime mortgage defaults.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index gained 3.6 percent on the strength of a surge in shares of financial services firms. Lehman Brothers, the bond insurer MBIA and the mortgage giant Fannie Mae were among the index’s biggest gainers.

Asian stocks, also led by banks, advanced in early trading Wednesday.

Despite the discouraging numbers — $19 billion in write-downs at UBS and nearly $4 billion at Deutsche Bank in the first quarter alone — investors appeared hopeful that the bad news could signal the last of Wall Street’s credit woes.

“UBS was providing transparency to the market,” said Ryan Larson, a Voyageur Asset Management trader. “That’s something we’ve desperately needed in the face of this current crisis.”

Adding to the good feelings, Lehman said private investors had snapped up a $4 billion offering of preferred stock — far more than expected — in a move to dispel a swirl of rumors about its stability. Shares of Lehman jumped 17 percent. UBS said it would try a similar move with $15 billion in additional funds; its shares rose 15 percent.

Analysts pointed to the successful Lehman offering as a sign that the actions of the Federal Reserve had restored some confidence among banks.

“Lehman demonstrated that not only could they raise the capital at a reasonable cost, but that the Fed really had succeeded at stabilizing the financial system,” said Ed Yardeni, the investment strategist. “Lehman was an important test of that.”

The agency’s hidden tape recorders turned up almost nothing about communism.

But they did reveal embarrassing details about King’s sex life — details the FBI was able to use against him. Video Watch how the FBI tracked King’s every move »

The almost fanatical zeal with which the FBI pursued King is disclosed in tens of thousands of FBI memos from the 1960s.

The FBI paper trail spells out in detail the government agency’s concerted efforts to derail King’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement.

The FBI’s interest in King intensified after the March on Washington in August 1963, when King delivered his “I have a dream speech,” which many historians consider the most important speech of the 20th century. After the speech, an FBI memo called King the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”

The bureau convened a meeting of department heads to “explore how best to carry on our investigation [of King] to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the Bureau,” which included “a complete analysis of the avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.”

The FBI began secretly tracking King’s flights and watching his associates. In July 1963, a month before the March on Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover filed a request with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to tap King’s and his associates’ phones and to bug their homes and offices.

In September, Kennedy consented to the technical surveillance. Kennedy gave the FBI permission to break into King’s office and home to install the bugs, as long as agents recognized the “delicacy of this particular matter” and didn’t get caught installing them. Kennedy added a proviso — he wanted to be personally informed of any pertinent information.

While King did have associates who had been members of the Communist Party, by all accounts they severed those ties when they started working in the civil rights movement. What’s more, the FBI bugs never picked up evidence that King himself was a Communist, or was interested in toeing the party line.

…

When King learned he would be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the FBI decided to take its harassment of King one step further, sending him an insulting and threatening note anonymously. A draft was found in the FBI files years later. In it the FBI wrote, “You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.” The letter went on to say, “The American public … will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast,” and “Satan could not do more.”

Warning investors on Tuesday that conditions had deteriorated dramatically in recent weeks, Chief Executive Josef Ackermann said the bank would write down 2.5 billion euros ($3.9 billion) in the first quarter on the value of loans it has committed to as well as other investments.

The news was overshadowed by rival UBS, which unveiled $19 billion of additional writedowns on U.S. property and related assets, pushing it $12 billion into the red in the first quarter and forcing it into a fresh hunt for funds.

Deutsche Bank, the country’s biggest financier, had been seen as one of the winners in the crisis that fatally wounded rival Bear Stearns and toppled other Wall Street titans.

But as conditions in global markets worsen, the bank is looking increasingly vulnerable.

The new write-down is equivalent to more than a third of its 2007 net profit and more than all the markdowns the bank made last year.

In the past fortnight, some banks, including HSBC, have pulled out of the $85 billion (£42 billion) a year US student loans market, fuelling anxiety that the turmoil that hit debt markets on Wall Street last summer is spilling over into the wider economy and making credit more difficult to secure for ordinary American households.

In the US, many undergraduates take out a federal guaranteed loan and top up their financial needs with a private loan from lenders such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citi-group. In the academic year 2005-06, $17 billion in private student loans was used to finance higher education.

Banks have become reluctant to offer private student loans because worsening credit conditions have meant that they cannot package up the loans and sell them on.

Although the brightest students who win places at America’s rich Ivy League universities will be affected less because of generous bursaries – which do not have to be repaid – less able students applying to other institutions are expected to face difficulty in securing private loans to fund their study. At one end of the field is Harvard University, with $34 billion of endowments, and at the other are many community colleges and low-tier universities with limited resources.

According to the March Prospective Plantings Report, farmers intend to plant about 86 million acres of corn this year, down 8 percent from 2007, when the amount of corn planted was the highest since World War II.

Analyst Heather L. Jones said in a note to investors if the USDA estimate proves accurate, the year may produce just 200 million bushels of corn. That, she said, wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, given current export and feed demand trends and higher ethanol demand. Both ethanol and animal feed are made with corn.

“That is an untenable inventory demand, in our opinion,” she said. “Consequently, we believe demand must be rationed or there needs to be a big supply response from other growing regions of the world.”

The plantings report caused nervousness among meat producers and food makers who spent last year struggling to offset higher corn costs. Even though acreage was high, demand for ethanol and need overseas pushed prices to record levels.