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Strategic Capital Bank in Champaign and Citizens National Bank in Macomb were closed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver of both, the FDIC said. Strategic Capital’s deposits were assumed by Midland States Bank of Effingham, Illinois, and deposits at Citizens National were purchased by Morton Community Bank.

“Deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC, so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance coverage,” the FDIC said.

Almost 15 tonnes of narcotics including opium, heroin and morphine were seized over the course of the operation, which started on Tuesday, along with supplies of poppy seeds and drug refining products, the military said in a statement issued late on Thursday.

The operation, which included air strikes that killed 16 militants, was aimed at securing the Loy Cherah Bazaar in Marjeh city, a narcotics processing hub and militant stronghold in Helmand province.

Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium, most of it in the Taliban’s southern heartland. U.S. military officials have estimated the opium trade provides between $80 million and $400 million a year to the Taliban.

“The only other narcotics discovery comparable in size to the Marjeh operation was a 260-ton stockpile of hashish with an approximate street value of $350 million … in Kandahar Province in July 2008,” the statement said.

He happens to live in New Jersey, where state education authorities have long worried about a dearth of math teachers.

Last week he heard about a new program called “Traders to Teachers” being set up at Montclair State University to retrain people in the finance industry who have been laid off in the deepest crisis to hit Wall Street since the Great Depression.

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Brooks, 39, has two children aged 8 and 10 and has been coaching soccer and baseball at local schools for several years — an experience he says revived an interest in teaching that dates from his undergraduate studies in math and education.

The university’s 101-year-old College of Education received 146 applications for 25 spots in the first round of the program, which offers three months intensive training followed by a job at a high school in January. The first year on the job includes close mentoring, and after two years probation they can become fully certified math teachers.

The contraction followed a revised fourth-quarter drop of 14.4 percent, the Cabinet Office said today in Tokyo. Gross domestic product fell 3.5 percent in the year ended March 31, the most since records began in 1955, confirming that the recession is Japan’s worst in the postwar era.

Exports plunged an unprecedented 26 percent last quarter, forcing companies from Toyota Motor Corp. to Hitachi Ltd. to cut production, workers and wages. Stocks have gained 32 percent since reaching 26-year low in March on speculation worldwide interest-rate reductions and spending by governments will halt the slide in the world’s second-largest economy.

“There was a collapse across the board,” said Yoshiki Shinke, a senior economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. Still, he added that there’s “light at the end of the tunnel” and the economy will resume growing this quarter as companies replenish inventories and stimulus plans at home and abroad take effect.

The yen traded at 95.71 per dollar at 11 a.m. in Tokyo from 96.16 before the report was published. The Nikkei 225 Stock Average rose 0.4 percent.

The first-quarter contraction was the most severe since records started 54 years ago. Economists predicted the economy would shrink 16.1 percent.

Worse Than U.S.

GDP fell 4 percent on a non-annualized basis, more than double the U.S.’s 1.6 percent slide. It’s also worse than Europe’s record 2.5 percent contraction. Without adjusting for price changes, Japan shrank 2.9 percent last quarter.

Weaker domestic demand was the biggest contributor to the decline, shaving 2.6 percentage points off GDP, the most since 1974. Net exports — the difference between exports and imports — was responsible for 1.4 percentage points of the drop.

Consumer spending slid 1.1 percent and business investment plunged a record 10.4 percent. Economists say companies will keep cutting spending because the decline in demand has left factories and workers underused.

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.