(Continued from page 20)

and become a hurricane by Thursday.
• With the July Fourth weekend on the horizon, the Atlantic hurricane season's first named storm plodded off Florida's coast but wasn't yet spooking too many in the storm's potential path.
• "I think everybody's keeping one eye on the weather and one eye on the events this weekend," said Joe Marinelli, president of Visit Savannah, the city's tourism bureau.
• ___

• SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Throughout California's desperately dry Central Valley, those with water to spare are cashing in.
• As a third parched summer forces farmers to fallow fields and lay off workers, two water districts and a pair of landowners in the heart of the state's farmland are making millions of dollars by auctioning off their private caches.
• Nearly 40 others also are seeking to sell their surplus water this year, according to state and federal records.
• Economists say it's been decades since the water market has been this hot. In the last five years alone, the price has grown tenfold to as much as $2,200 an acre-foot -- enough to cover a football field with a foot of water.
• Unlike the previous drought in 2009, the state has been hands-off, letting the market set the price even though severe shortages prompted a statewide drought emergency declaration this year.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- A onetime Army Ranger and former CEO of a Fortune 500 consumer products company, Robert McDonald may face his toughest challenge yet in fixing the huge, scandal-plagued Veterans Affairs Department.
• Veterans groups worry that the longtime corporate executive, nominated by President Barack Obama to lead the VA, may have trouble adjusting to a far-flung bureaucracy of more than 300,000 employees, where hundreds of hospital directors and other career executives wield great power far from the agency's Washington headquarters.
• "Procter & Gamble is going to feel like a Ferrari compared to the VA," said Paul

(Continued on page 22)