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Four AT&T fiber-optic cables in an underground vault were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two hours later along Old County Road near Bing Street in San Carlos, authorities said.

John Britton, spokesman for AT&T, said, “Clearly, we have some vandalism. Someone purposefully and deliberately cut the wires.”

He added, “We can’t speculate about any connection, but the method of operation appears to be the same.”

Britton said the four cables that were cut in San Jose were about the width of a silver dollar and were encased in tough plastic sheath. One cable contained 360 fibers, and the other three had 48 fibers each.

In both instances, saboteurs had to use a piece of equipment to lift heavy manhole covers and climb down several feet to get to the cables. They would have to have been equipped with heavy-duty cutting equipment to slice through the thick cable coating.

Police in San Jose and San Carlos are sharing information, said Cmdr. Rich Cinfio, a spokesman for San Carlos police. Investigators said they had no suspects in either act of vandalism. AT&T announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrators.

Verizon, which depends on AT&T cables in the South Bay, said its 52,000 landline customers who lost service in southern Santa Clara County came back online just before 4:30 p.m. Britton said AT&T hoped to have all service restored by 7 p.m.

Landlines, cell phones and the Internet were all affected. The outage knocked out 911 service, and officials said anyone without phone access who needs emergency help should get to a police or fire station or hospital on their own or flag down a law enforcement vehicle.

Extra sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and police officers were on the streets in the affected areas, authorities said. Additional ambulances were on hand at St. Louise Hospital in Gilroy.

“We’re having a more visual presence out there in the field,” said Sgt. Don Morrissey, Santa Clara County sheriff’s spokesman. “We’re out there to be the conduit, if you will. We’re trying to bridge that communication gap between emergency services and citizens.”

The outage was nearly tragic in at least a couple of instances.

Destiny Evans of Gilroy began blacking out this morning at her job as an office manager at Ortho Sports in Gilroy. Her boss, Joseph Abmont, called 911 on a landline and cell phone, but couldn’t get through.

So he put Evans in his car and drove her to St. Louise Hospital in Gilroy, where she was diagnosed with a kidney infection.

“He was my savior,” Evans said as she left the hospital later in the day with her boyfriend.

Florance Lijon of Gilroy was at home when her 84-year-old mother began to feel ill. She tried to call 911 to summon an ambulance. “I couldn’t call nowhere,” Lijon said. “I couldn’t use my home phone, I couldn’t use my cell phone, I couldn’t use my computer. I was miserable.”

Finally she drove her mom to the hospital.

“I worry about people that don’t have a car,” Lijon said. “It’s a good thing I could take her. I was going to call the ambulance, but I couldn’t.”

St. Louise spokeswoman Jasmine Nguyen said the hospital was rescheduling elective surgeries out of concern that if something went wrong, would be no way to contact doctors.

Hospital personnel were driving to doctors’ houses to get word to them if they were needed. They were also using a satellite phone and walkie-talkies to communicate.

“We literally feel like were on an island right now,” Nguyen said. “It’s bringing us back to the Stone Age.”

Most of the service outages were caused by the San Jose vandalism. Among those affected were customers of Verizon, Verizon Wireless and Sprint wireless, which rely on AT&T to carry their phone traffic back to their networks.

Verizon spokesman Jon Davies said the outage was first reported to the company at 1:25 a.m. He said about 52,000 of the company’s landline customers were affected in the Gilroy and Morgan Hill areas. Verizon is the sole provider of landlines in southern Santa Clara County.

Verizon Wireless customers were also affected in southern Santa Clara County and from Watsonville to Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County.

At least one of the severed San Carlos lines belongs to Sprint, which lost service for several thousand landline business customers. Crystal Davis, a crisis communications manager for Sprint, said the company was able to restore service to some of its customers by rerouting traffic.

Davis said she couldn’t recall the last time a concerted effort was made to attack multiple phone lines.

“Fiber cuts happen all the time, usually by accident. Someone is drilling for a water line or a power line,” she said. “But a specific act of vandalism, I can’t say that I recall it.”

The vandalism comes as AT&T is in talks with the Communications Workers of America for a contract covering more than 80,000 employees, who have been working under their old deal since it expired at 11:59 p.m. Saturday. Union members voted in late March to authorize a strike but have not scheduled one.

Candice Johnson, spokeswoman for the CWA, said union members were not involved in the incidents.

“I can state that CWA members have nothing to do with this at all,” Johnson said. “There is an investigation going on and we’ll fully cooperate. But our members are working. They’re on the job.”

In 2004, 1,200 Bay Area customers temporarily lost service after vandals cut wires at SBC telephone boxes in Oakland, Alameda, San Leandro and Vallejo. The vandalism took place during a four-day CWA strike of SBC, which became AT&T.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC), which represents most major shop chains, reported yesterday a 9 per cent rise in the price of food in the shops in the year to March, against a fall in the prices of non-food items of 1.5 per cent. Prices were up 0.4 per cent month-on-month. Despite a general fall in inflation – the annual rise in the Retail Prices Index (RPI) hit zero last month – food prices remain stubbornly high, and rising.

Imports of fresh vegetables from eurozone nations such as Spain have become especially dear – up by around one quarter. Other foods that have seen double-digit price rises since 2008 include lamb (21.3 per cent), beef (20.6 per cent), pork (19.7 per cent), cereals (16.1 per cent) and milk (11.5 per cent). British lamb is becoming an expensive delicacy, up 26.7 per cent, the largest jump of any food item in the RPI.

Because so many food prices are determined globally, home produce prices have also been pushed higher by the fall in the pound, as the price of otherwise comparatively cheap UK produce has been bid up by foreign buyers.

The BRC said: “Although around 60 per cent of food consumed in the UK is sourced domestically, the grocery industry is a global market place and hence exchange rate fluctuations affect the price of produce and production. The farm gate price of UK-produced foodstuffs has increased markedly as sterling has depreciated, to maintain parity in the price of similar goods sourced in other currencies in the global market place.”

Those households where food prices and utility bills (which are rising even faster) represent a big proportion of the budget are seeing little benefit from the much-heralded onset of deflation. The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently found that the richest fifth of households had an average inflation rate of minus 1 per cent; the poorest fifth had an average inflation rate of 5.3 per cent. The least-well off pensioner households, usually with no mortgage and no benefit from the cut in Bank rate, are still coping with inflation at 6.9 per cent.

He raises the rifle to his shoulder and takes aim. BAM! There’s a thud, and a few excited squeals from the remaining pigs behind the bars. Carefully, the man sets down the gun and steps into the trailer. He emerges dragging a small, dead—but still twitching—reddish pig with a bullet hole the diameter of a pencil eraser just about perfectly centered in its forehead.

Meet John Taylor, or “One Shot Johnny,” as his customers call him. His business card offers just “JT’s Custom Slaughtering” and his cell phone number, along with clip art of a cow, pig, sheep, and lamb. But then, he doesn’t really need a card. Just about everyone in California north of San Francisco who raises animals for meat knows the tall “ranch butcher” with the bristly mustache and straight-arrow demeanor of a frontier sheriff. Now 43, he began sweeping floors in his family’s butcher shop (since sold) in third grade, and started helping his uncle in the pasture not long after. “I was doomed—I knew this was what I was meant to do,” he says.

Taylor ties on a black rubber apron that hangs past the tops of his rubber boots and chains a knife holder around his waist. He sticks a hook through the animal’s lower jaw and attaches it to a winch mounted on his truck. Twenty minutes of expert scraping, shaving, and eviscerating later, the pig has become pork.

The trailer belongs to Brock Fulmer, of Black Sheep Farm near Potter Valley, California, who’s hauled three swine 90 minutes south from his farm and paid $50 per head to have them slaughtered on this dead-end road outside a friend’s property. Fulmer could have paid just $20 per head at a usda-inspected facility two hours’ drive east of his farm, but that would have required booking a slot at least a month ago. And the customer who bought these pigs for a barbecue didn’t think that far ahead.

“Besides, J.T.’s the best there is,” says Fulmer. “He’s like a ninja.”

Marksmanship is important, but so is legal savvy, since a single misstep could land Taylor in hot water. By California law, he can slaughter livestock only for a farmer’s personal use or for a farmer’s customer who buys the animal alive and whole; in the latter case, he has to do so off farm premises. And under federal law, every carcass Taylor delivers to a butcher shop for cutting—and every piece from it—must be stamped “Not for Sale.” Only meat from usda-inspected slaughterhouses can be sold across state lines or on a retail basis (including at farmers markets and restaurants) in the 25 states without their own inspection systems, like California and New York. Taylor has something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with his farmers—if Taylor knew his clients were going to sell the meat he shot and officials found out, he could be liable for any food-borne illnesses, for example.

Such rules are partly why federally inspected slaughterhouses kill 98 percent of all cattle and 99 percent of hogs in this country. But as giants like Tyson and Smithfield Foods—which have their own abattoirs—have increasingly dominated the meat industry, the number of usda-approved slaughterhouses nationwide has fallen, from 1,405 in 1992 to just 808 in 2008. (Wyoming doesn’t have a single one.) In 2007, just 14 plants killed 18.5 million cattle, more than half the country’s total; that’s a per-slaughterhouse average of 2.5 head per minute, 24-7. These big operations “are not talking to the little guy, the farmer who says, ‘I have 500 head of beef'”—let alone 50 or 5, says Bruce Dunlop, who raises lamb and pork on Lopez Island in Washington state. “They laugh at him.” Nor is the little guy excited to take his animals to the plant, considering the very real possibility that they will be mistreated (see the 2007 scandal involving workers at a Chino, California, facility who sprayed water up the noses of lame cattle to get them to walk to slaughter, as required by law, and moved those that couldn’t walk by forklift), or that their meat will be caught in the net of a massive E. coli-driven recall.

In desperation, farmers are going into the abattoir business themselves. In 2002, Dunlop, who worked as an engineer before raising sheep, headed a group of farmers who funded, designed, and built a usda-approved mobile slaughterhouse unit that now serves Washington state’s four northwest counties. A 34-foot trailer with a cooler and a water system, it dispatches up to 10 cattle a day, four days a week. Dunlop has sold six similar units for about $175,000 each to ranchers around the country. Joel Salatin, whose Polyface farm starred in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is thinking bigger: In July, with a partner, he bought a small usda-inspected slaughterhouse in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

But smaller slaughterhouses are struggling mightily to stay in business. The initial investment is steep and the payoff slow if you’re not processing thousands of head each day. It takes a minimum of $2 million to build a new plant or even overhaul an old one, says Mike Lorentz, who built a 30-head-a-day facility in 1999 in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. “We lost a million dollars in the first three years. I am like a cancer survivor—exhilarated that I survived, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

“The Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the big benefactors to the financial community,” said Kevin Phillips, author of “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.”

“The financial community is donating more to Democrats than ever before and you’ve got more Democrats in the financial community, creating a very powerful pattern there. I don’t think you’re going to see the Obama administration and Congress willing to be tough enough in dealing with these things,” he told Reuters.

Phillips, a former strategist in the Nixon White House who has turned highly critical of the Republicans and voted for Obama in 2008, published “Bad Money,” his 13th book, a year ago.

The paperback edition came out March 31 with a revised preface and afterward, interpreting the events of the past year, but the prescient body of “Bad Money” remains unchanged.

A year ago, he warned of a the pending explosion of a 25-year “multibubble” that started in the 1980s, when the financial sector accounted for 10 percent to 12 percent of the U.S. economy had started metastasizing into an “arguably crippling” 20 percent to 21 percent by the middle of this decade.

Overleveraging and easy credit was bound to create disaster, he warned.

Phillips assigns much of the blame to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, but perhaps even more on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who he calls a “disaster,” and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan.

Phillips calls Paulson a Wall Street insider who was looking out for his own, and Bernanke an academic misguidedly trying to refight the 1930s Great Depression. Together they formed the wrong team at the wrong time whose ad hoc approach threw away hundreds of billions of dollars and more than doubled the Fed’s balance sheet, he says.

“What you’re seeing Bernanke do is he’s trying to create a bailout reflationary bubble, which he can’t describe as a bubble, just as Greenspan couldn’t describe the housing mortgage bubble as a bubble. What we’re seeing by Bernanke is a covert attempt to rebubble,” Phillips told Reuters.

Moreover, a commodities cycle probably started early in this decade and is only being masked now by recession, Phillips says, presaging a repeat 1970s style inflation, he said.

“The danger is that the great unwind — the unraveling of the mammoth buildup of debt — is under way. If that predominates, Bernanke’s theory is you’re going to have deflation,” Phillips said.

“My theory is that if we are in a commodities cycle, what you will get will be more like 1973-74-75 … where as soon as the recovery begins you get rising inflation because you’re going to play havoc with all money supply and liquidity that’s been unleashed ” he added.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer and small investor have little defense.

One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said.

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.

Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.

The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.

But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air — making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested — could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.

Still, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he added.

The Treasury is still talking about how results of the regulatory stress tests on the 19 largest U.S. banks will be released, and may disclose them as summary results that are not institution-specific, the source said.

The government is testing how the largest banks would fare under more adverse economic conditions than are expected in an attempt to assess the firms’ capital needs. The tests are due to be completed by the end of April, but Treasury has said they may be finished before then.

The source, speaking anonymously because the Treasury has not made a final decision on what to disclose, said officials do not want any test results released before the earnings season wraps up for most U.S. banks on April 24.

Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. regulators have reached the closing phase of the stress tests, with many of the top banks having already turned in their internal versions of the test to officials. Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis said last Thursday that his bank has already completed its test.

Bank regulators are at the stage of reconciling their own versions of the results with the banks’ internal assessments.

Officials realize it may be hard to keep the results under wraps, and they are looking for ways the banks could disclose some details without unduly disturbing the markets. They are also looking at providing some summary information about how the banks fared.

“There will be definitely be some information that will be provided at the end of it, but exactly what that will be, and when it will be provided, will come forth later,” Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, who supervises some of the nation’s largest banks, said last week.

The stress tests at the biggest banks are part of a wide-ranging effort to restore stability to a sector hit by huge mortgage-related losses.

The tests are designed to determine the depth of banks’ capital holes if conditions deteriorate further. After the tests are completed, the banks will have six months to either raise private capital to compensate, or accept government funds.

But officials are worried about how the market will react to the stress test results if there is not a clear recovery path for a bank that is deemed to have a large capital need.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Mombasa-based East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, said the 17,000 tonne Maersk Alabama was carrying 21 U.S. sailors when it was hijacked in the Indian Ocean off Mogadishu.

He told Reuters all the crew were believed to be safe.

Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) confirmed that the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama had been attacked by pirates about 500 km (300 miles) off Somalia and had probably been hijacked. It said it had 20 crew on board.

A U.S. naval spokeswoman in Bahrain, Lt. Stephanie Murdock, said a U.S.-flagged, Danish-owned ship with 21 crew reported being attacked by pirates at 7:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday about 280 miles (440 km) southeast of Eyl, Somalia.

The lead defendant, Darnell Bell, a documented member of the Lincoln Park street gang in Los Angeles, received at least $9 million in proceeds from the enterprise, prosecutors said.

Bell’s status as an active member of the Lincoln Park street gang helped him recruit straw buyers for 220 properties with a total sales price of $100 million, and later maintain discipline among them, according the indictment.

“It was relevant not so much to running the (real estate) scheme but to managing (the people),” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicole Acton Jones said.

Another defendant, Stanley Gentry, let the conspirators use his real estate license in exchange for a $10,000 monthly payment and a percentage of the commission and broker’s fees from each purchase, prosecutors said.

Defendant Billie Bishop was an escrow officer who helped with the enterprise’s fraudulent purchases of more than 100 properties, prosecutors said.

The defendants allegedly used straw buyers and inflated appraisals to purchase homes that had sat on the market for extended periods and had been reduced in price.

They submitted offers that exceeded the homes’ asking prices, and had the overage paid to a shell construction company that they claimed would make upgrades or handicap modifications to the properties, prosecutors said.

The defendants instead disbursed the “kickback amount” to members and associates of the enterprise as payments for their participation, the indictment said.

Lenders later foreclosed on the properties, taking “severe financial losses,” after the straw buyers failed to make payments, the indictment said.

Bell, who was in federal custody on narcotics charges, made his first court appearance on Tuesday. The remaining defendants were arrested on Tuesday and were expected to make their initial appearances on Wednesday, Acton Jones said.

Attorneys for the defendants could not be immediately reached for comment.