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.

The price spike comes after repeated calls from scientists that global warming will worsen droughts and increase the cost of maintaining California's strained water supply systems.

Some water economists have called for more regulations to keep aquifers from being depleted and ensure the market is not subject to manipulation such as that seen in the energy crisis of summer 2001, when the state was besieged by rolling blackouts.

"If you have a really scarce natural resource that the state's economy depends on, it would be nice to have it run efficiently and transparently," said Richard Howitt, professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis.

Private water sales are becoming more common in states that have been hit by drought, including Texas and Colorado.

In California, the sellers include those who hold claims on water that date back a century, private firms who are extracting groundwater and landowners who stored water when it was plentiful in underground caverns known as water banks.

"This year the market is unbelievable," said Thomas Greci, the general manager of the Madera Irrigation District, which recently made nearly $7 million from selling about 3,200 acre-feet. "And this is a way to pay our bills."

All of the district's water went to farms; the city of Santa Barbara, which has its own water shortages, was outbid.

California Fails to Adequately Track Water UsePlay Video

The prices are so high in some rural pockets that water auctions have become a spectacle.

One agricultural water district amid the almond orchards and derrick fields northwest of Bakersfield recently announced it would sell off extra water it acquired through a more than century-old right to use flows from the Kern River.

Local TV crews and journalists flocked to the district's office in February to watch as manager Maurice Etchechury unveiled bids enclosed in about 50 sealed envelopes before the cameras.

"Now everyone's mad at me saying I increased the price of water. I didn't do it, the weather did it," said Etchechury, who manages the Buena Vista Water Storage District, which netted about $13.5 million from the auction of 12,000 acre-feet of water.

Competition for water in California is heightened by the state's geography: The north has the water resources but the biggest water consumers are to the south, including most of the country's produce crops.

The amount shipped south through a network of pumps, pipes and aqueducts is limited by the drought and legal restrictions on pumping to save a threatened fish.

During the last drought, the state Department of Water Resources ran a drought water bank, which helped broker deals between those who were short of water and those who had plenty. But several environmental groups sued, alleging the state failed to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act in approving the sales, and won.

This year, the state is standing aside, saying buyers and sellers have not asked for the state's help. "We think that buyers and sellers can negotiate their own deals better than the state," said Nancy Quan, a supervising engineer with the department.

Quan's department, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the State Water Resources Control Board have tracked at least 38 separate sales this year, but the agencies are not aware of all sales, nor do they keep track of the price of water sold, officials said.

The maximum volume that could change hands through the 38 transactions is 730,323 acre-feet, which is about 25 percent of what the State Water Project has delivered to farms and cities in an average year in the last decade.

That figure still doesn't include the many private water sales that do not require any use of government-run pipes or canals, including the three chronicled by the AP. It's not clear however how much of this water will be sold via auctions.

Some of those in the best position to sell water this year have been able to store their excess supplies in underground banks, a tool widely embraced in the West for making water supplies reliable and marketable. The area surrounding Bakersfield is home to some of the country's largest water banks.

The drought is so severe that aggressive pumping of the banked supplies may cause some wells to run dry by year's end, said Eric Averett, general manager the Rosedale Rio Bravo District, located next to several of the state's largest underground caches.

Farther north in the long, flat Central Valley, others are drilling new wells to sell off groundwater.

A water district board in Stanislaus County approved a pilot project this month to buy up to 26,000 acre-feet of groundwater pumped over two years from 14 wells on two landowners' parcels in neighboring Merced County.

Since the district is getting no water from the federal government this year, the extra water will let farmers keep their trees alive, said Anthea Hansen, general manager of the arid Del Puerto Water District.

Hansen estimated growers would ultimately pay $775 to $980 an acre-foot — a total of roughly $20 million to $25.5 million.

"We have to try to keep them alive," Hansen said. "It's too much loss in the investment and the local economy to not try."

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Follow Garance Burke at http://www.twitter.com/garanceburke

RODANTHE, N.C. (AP) — Arthur strengthened to a hurricane early Thursday and threatened to give North Carolina a glancing blow on Independence Day, prompting the governor to warn vacationers along the coast not to risk their safety by trying to salvage their picnics and barbecues.

Forecasters expect Arthur to whip past the state's Outer Banks on Friday without making landfall. One local remarked that he was more worried about his tomato plants than storm damage.

But North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory warned: "Don't put your stupid hat on."

The first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season prompted a hurricane warning for much of the North Carolina coast and a mandatory evacuation for visitors to the Outer Banks' Hatteras Island as of 5 a.m. Thursday. Residents also were advised to leave the island. A voluntary evacuation was announced for the Outer Banks' Ocracoke Island, accessible only by ferry.

The islands are linked by North Carolina Route 12, which has been sliced apart twice in recent years as storms cut temporary channels from the ocean to the sound. Hatteras Island is particularly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding and the road is easily blocked by sand and water.

In addition to the hurricane warning, tropical storm warnings were in effect for coastal areas in South Carolina and Virginia.

Gary Reinhardt, 63, and his wife Lori, both of Sarasota, Florida, said they planned to exit low-lying Hatteras Island on Thursday morning. So were nearly two dozen other family members from California, Nebraska and Michigan. A long line of cars, trailers and recreational vehicles already formed a steady stream of traffic before sunset Wednesday.

"I'm worried about the road. It took way too long to get here," said Gary Reinhardt, adding that the two-and-a-half-hour delay to get on the island came Sunday, when there was no hurricane threatening. Reinhardt worried their departure would take twice as long Thursday.

Mike Rabe of Virginia Beach, Virginia, planned to stay in his beach home the entire weekend. He and his wife, Jan, arrived Wednesday at the house they bought two and a half years ago and set to work stowing lawn furniture and anything else that could be tossed about by hurricane winds. He said he was going to spend Thursday helping a friend and longtime resident prep his nearby water sports shop and campground for bad weather.

"I'm going to help him prepare and then I'm going to ride it out," said Rabe, 53.

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People ride the Thunderbolt roller coaster ride as a storm rolls in at Coney Island in the Brooklyn …

Other areas of the Outer Banks were taking a cautious, but still-optimistic approach: No evacuations had been ordered for areas north of Hatteras, including the popular town of Kill Devil Hills, which was the site of the Wright brothers' first controlled, powered airplane flights in December 1903.

Farther north, the annual Boston Pops Fourth of July concert and fireworks show was moved up a day because of potential heavy rain ahead of Hurricane Arthur. Organizers and public safety officials said the celebration was being rescheduled for Thursday, which appeared to be the best of two potential bad weather days.

The holiday weekend was not expected to be a complete loss for the estimated quarter-million visitors vacationing on the Outer Banks. Forecasters said the storm would move through quickly with the worst of the weather near Cape Hatteras about dawn Friday. Then it was expected to clear.

In the Myrtle Beach area, the heart of South Carolina's $18 billion tourism industry, Arthur was expected to move by Thursday night, spinning wind gusts from 40 to 50 mph toward the high-rise hotels and condominiums lining the oceanfront.

Early Thursday, Arthur was about 340 miles (545 kilometers) southwest of Cape Hatteras and moving north around 9 mph (15 kph) with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 kph).

The National Hurricane Center predicted Arthur would swipe the coast early Friday with winds of up to 85 mph. The storm would be off the coast of New England later Friday and eventually make landfall in Canada's maritime provinces as a tropical storm, the Hurricane Center predicted.

"Although the current forecast doesn't indicate this will be a major impact, we are taking it very seriously," McCrory said. "I don't want you to put at risk not only yourself but also people who may try to help you."

He signed executive orders declaring a state of emergency for 25 counties and one that waives regulations allowing faster restoration of power and debris removal.

Generators, lanterns and flashlights, water and other supplies were snapped up in stores on the Outer Banks on Wednesday.

Danny Couch of Buxton, who owns and operates a company that offers bus tours of Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, said local businesses have a narrow window to make their money each year.

"We've got that 15-week stretch between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and every week counts. ... The local business community holds its breath as Labor Day approaches but now we're holding our breath for July 4th," he said. "These stumbling blocks come up in front of us that have to be surmounted."

But Bill Motley, who works at Ace Hardware in Nags Head and has lived on the Outer Banks for 13 years was not too concerned about storm damage.

"I'm more worried about my tomato plants. With the wind coming, if we get a 50-mph gust, it will knock over my tomato plants," he said.

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Associated Press writers Martha Waggoner in Raleigh, N.C.; and Tony Winton in Miami contributed to this report.

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Emery Dalesio can be reached at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio .

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel began moving troop reinforcements to its border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday, defense officials said, raising the possibility of an expanded military operation in the Palestinian territory in response to intensifying rocket barrages.

The movement of tanks and artillery forces came after another night of heavy rocket fire, including barrages that struck two homes in the southern border town of Sderot. Israel's last major operation in Gaza, a territory controlled by the Hamas militant group, took place in late 2012.

The rocket fire comes at a time of heightened tensions following the abduction and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank. Israel has accused Hamas of being behind the deaths, and arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives in the West Bank as part of a broad manhunt in the largest ground operation in the West Bank in nearly a decade.

The Palestinians have meanwhile accused Israeli extremists of abducting and killing a teenage boy in east Jerusalem in a revenge attack, and stone-throwing youths clashed with Israeli police throughout the day Wednesday.

The weeks since the Israeli teens disappeared have seen militants in Gaza fire scores of rockets at Israel, which has responded with airstrikes against alleged militant targets. Two Palestinian militants were killed in an airstrike last week, and a young Palestinian girl was killed by an errant rocket attack. There have been no serious casualties on the Israeli side.

More than a dozen rockets struck Israel on Thursday, including the attacks on Sderot. The strikes knocked out electricity in part of the town but caused no injuries. Israel said it responded with overnight airstrikes on 15 Hamas targets.

Hamas seized Gaza in 2007 from forces loyal to the Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas recently formed a unity government backed by Hamas meant to end the seven-year rift, but Hamas, which possesses thousands of rockets, remains in firm control of the coastal strip.

Israel threatened tough action against Hamas in response to the killing of the three teens. Hamas praised their suspected abduction but denied responsibility.

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Israeli army soldiers take positions during clashes with Palestinians in an early morning operation …

On Thursday, buses carrying Israeli troops could be seen heading to the Gaza border area, where soldiers milled about organizing their equipment.

A senior Israeli military official described the troop movements as "defensive."

"If Hamas keeps things quiet, we will keep things quiet," he said. He and other officials spoke on condition of anonymity under military guidelines.

In east Jerusalem, tensions remained high as police continued to investigate the disappearance of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, whose family says he was abducted Wednesday shortly before a charred body was found in a Jerusalem forest.

The family accused extremist Jews of killing him in revenge for the deaths of the three Israeli teens, who went missing on June 12 and whose bodies were found in a field in the West Bank on Monday. Hundreds of right-wing Jewish youths marched through downtown Jerusalem on Tuesday, vowing revenge.

The suspected killing ignited clashes in east Jerusalem between rock-throwing Palestinians and Israeli forces, who responded with stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets. The rioters set tires ablaze and torched three light-rail train shelters, leaving city streets covered in stones and debris.

Police were still trying to identify the body, but Abu Khdeir's family set up a mourning tent near a mosque in east Jerusalem. Some 100 people crowded into the tent on Thursday to pay their condolences.

East Jerusalem was quiet Thursday morning but police said units were still patrolling the area. An Associated Press cameraman filmed Hebrew graffiti reading "death to Israel" and "death to Jews."

Police said they were trying to pinpoint the motive behind the killing.

"The investigation is continuing in order to determine whether this was criminal or nationalistic," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

The incident elicited international condemnation and prompted calls for calm from Israeli leaders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded a swift probe of the "reprehensible murder." Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said it was clear extremist Jewish settlers were responsible for the death and called on Israel to bring the killers to justice.

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Yaniv Zohar on the Israeli border with Gaza and Yousur Alhlou in Jerusalem contributed reporting.

DMITRIADOVKA, Russia—When the neighbor's dog was killed by artillery fire, it was time to go.

Oksana Vasilieva was in the kitchen of her home on Comintern Street in the Ukrainian city of Slovyansk in late May as the shelling of her neighborhood began. She screamed for the children to run outside and then herded them into the cellar.

When they emerged, the neighbors' house had been hit. So had their sandy-brown dog, its dead body mangled in the remnants of a destroyed metal fence. She boarded an evacuation bus and fled to Russia.

"I'm not going to return," Ms. Vasilieva, 36 years old, said outside the one-room bunk she has been sharing with her mother and daughter in a refugee facility at a summer camp on the Azov Sea. "It's a dead city."

Ms. Vasilieva is one of tens of thousands of people from Ukraine's southeast Donetsk and Luhansk regions who have fled to Russia in the 2½ months since fighting between pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian forces started.

Many of them, feeling alienated, resentful and afraid, are vowing to build their lives anew in Russia, despite the dread and uncertainty of starting over with next-to-nothing.

According to the United Nations, 110,000 Ukrainian refugees have gone to Russia since the start of the year and 54,000 more have left their homes and moved elsewhere in Ukraine.

The rancor among those fleeing to Russia is palpable, and shows the broken nature of Ukrainian society even if the government manages to retake control of the separatist-held areas.

Many in southeast Ukraine feel alienated from the country's western half, which is oriented more toward Europe, culturally and economically. Russian propaganda has reinforced that division and suggested that as Russian speakers, they were only Ukrainian by an accident of history.

President Vladimir Putin himself has adopted some of the language of the separatists, using the tsarist term Novorossiya (New Russia) in April to refer to regions such as Donetsk and Luhansk, which were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviets. "Why they did that, God knows," he said on Russian television.

Ukraine's new pro-Western government has failed to persuade the locals otherwise or win their trust.

As a result, some refugees traversing the Russian border expressed a conviction that Ukrainian forces had moved in not to neutralize separatists but to force people like them out. Chistka was the word on their lips, the Russian term for purge that has become a buzzword in reports by Russian state news.

"To them, we have always been Moskaly," said Ms. Vasilieva, using the Ukrainian slur for Russians.

She and others looked on with envy when Russia took control of Crimea, hoping that their region, too, would become Russian. "We always considered ourselves Russians," she said.

Those who feel otherwise generally have fled in the other direction. Ukrainian cities such as Kiev, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk are also coping with an influx of refugees. Polls conducted before the insurgency showed a bulk of the southeast's residents wanted toremain part of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is guaranteeing amnesty for those who put down their weapons and haven't committed grave crimes, but many refugees don't believe the promise.

Some of those arriving in Russia expressed worries that Ukrainian authorities, should they regain the territory, would hunt down locals who voted in a May separatist referendum or punish friends and relatives of rebel militants.

Ukraine has accused Russia of inflating the number of refugees—the speaker of Russia's upper chamber of parliament last month cited a figure nearly four times the U.N. estimate—and of sparking the crisis by supporting the separatists in the first place. Russian officials have shot back by criticizing Ukraine and its Western allies for turning a blind eye to a humanitarian crisis they blame on the Ukrainian military.

Nowhere in Russia has seen a more dramatic influx than the Rostov region, which borders the heaviest conflict zone.

According to the local branch of Russia's Ministry of Emergency Services, the region had registered 15,802 displaced people from Ukraine as of June 26, more than 6,000 of them children. There are likely many more who haven't registered.

Most are living with friends, relatives or volunteers, but more than 3,600 are staying in government-issued facilities such as college dorms and the Dmitriadovka summer camp where Ms. Vasilieva landed.

Many of the summer facilities aren't winterized, so they will have to move come autumn, but they don't know where.

Ukrainians technically can stay in Russia only for 90 days at a time. Russia has announced plans to modify the rules, but the new regulations have yet to become clear.

The biggest worry among many, apart from finding jobs, is where they can enroll their children in school in the fall given the mass influx of children.

Russian officials already are dispatching them to other regions, including the restive north Caucasus.

Many of the Ukrainian refugees have lost hope that their hometowns can be restored.

"If it is possible, I don't know how many years it would take," Ms. Vasilieva said of Slovyansk, where she lived her whole life. She is intending to take her 14- and 6-year-old daughters as well as her mother to start over somewhere in Russia. Where—she doesn't know.

Months ago, she was picking out clothes for her younger daughter to start first grade and planning for the other's higher education. Now she says she's thankful for a bed, water and a working toilet. She shrugged. "Who knew that life would take this kind of turn?"

Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com

Members of the Iraqi security forces take their positions during an intensive security deployment west of Baghdad, June 24, 2014. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi insurgents are preparing for an assault on Baghdad, with sleeper cells planted inside the capital to rise up at "Zero Hour" and aid fighters pushing in from the outskirts, according to senior Iraqi and U.S. security officials.

Sunni fighters have seized wide swathes of the north and west of the country in a three week lightning advance and say they are bearing down on the capital, a city of 7 million people still scarred by the intense street fighting between its Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhoods during U.S. occupation.

The government says it is rounding up members of sleeper cells to help safeguard the capital, and Shi'ite paramilitary groups say they are helping the authorities. Some Sunni residents say the crackdown is being used to intimidate them.

Iraqis speak of a "Zero Hour" as the moment a previously-prepared attack plan would start to unfold.

A high-level Iraqi security official estimated there were 1,500 sleeper cell members hibernating in western Baghdad and a further 1,000 in areas on the outskirts of the capital.

He said their goal was to penetrate the U.S.-made "Green Zone" - a fortified enclave of government buildings on the west bank of the Tigris - as a propaganda victory and then carve out enclaves in west Baghdad and in outlying areas.

“There are so many sleeper cells in Baghdad,” the official said. “They will seize an area and won’t let anyone take it back... In western Baghdad, they are ready and prepared.”

A man who describes himself as a member of one such cell, originally from Anbar province, the mainly Sunni Western area that has been a heartland of the insurgency, said he has been working in Baghdad as a laborer while secretly coordinating intelligence for his group of Sunni fighters.

The attack on the capital will come soon, said the man, who asked to be called Abu Ahmed.

“We are ready. It can come any minute,” he told Reuters during a meeting in a public place, glancing nervously around to see if anyone was watching.

“We will have some surprises,” he said. He pulled his baseball cap down tight on his face and stopped speaking anytime a stranger approached.

A portly man in his mid-30s wearing a striped sports shirt, the man said he fought as part of an insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades during the U.S. occupation and was jailed by the Iraqi government from 2007-2009.

He gave up fighting in 2010, tired from war and relatively optimistic about the future. But last year, he took up arms again out of anger at a crackdown against Sunni protesters by the Shi'ite-led government, joining the Military Council, a loose federation of Sunni armed groups and tribal fighters that has since emerged as a full-fledged insurgent umbrella group.

While it was not possible to verify all details of his story, Reuters reporters are confident of his identity.

Like many Sunni fighters, Abu Ahmed is not a member of the al Qaeda offshoot once known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and is ambivalent about the group which launched the latest uprising by seizing the main northern city Mosul on June 10 and shortened its name this week to the Islamic State.

Many Sunni armed groups turned against al Qaeda during the U.S. occupation but are now rallying to ISIL's rebellion against the Shi'ite led government, though some say they deplore ISIL's tactics of killing civilians and branding Shi'ites heretics.

Abu Ahmed said his own group, which includes former officers in Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein's disbanded army, supports some aims of ISIL. "There are some good members of ISIL and some bad," he said. Of the good ones: "We have the same cause."

SECURITY PLANS

The government says it can protect the capital and has spies who are tracking sleeper agents like Abu Ahmed to round them up.

"We have ample security plans. The sleeper cells are not only in Baghdad but in all other provinces and they are waiting for any chance to carry out attacks," said Lieutenant-General Qassim Atta, the prime minister's military spokesman.

“We keep those cells under careful and daily scrutiny and follow up. We have arrested some of them. We have dispatched intelligence members to follow up those cells closely and we have special plans to counter their activities.”

An attempt to take Baghdad, a majority Shi'ite city with heavily fortified areas, would be a huge task for a rebellion that has so far concentrated on controlling Sunni areas. Many Baghdadis, Sunnis as well as Shi'ites, say they would fight an insurgency led by militants who want to establish a caliphate.

The Iraqi capital was the principle battlefield in Iraq's worst sectarian bloodletting from 2006-2007, with tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, killed in fighting between Sunni insurgents, Shi'ite militias and U.S. troops.

Then, millions of people fled the capital and millions more fled homes within it, turning previously mixed neighborhoods into fortresses dominated by one sect or the other.

Although it has been at least six years since warring Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militia last held open sway over whole sections of Baghdad, the capital has remained vulnerable to infiltration by ISIL suicide bombers, who strike Shi'ite and government targets almost daily.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said Washington had evidence that ISIL was in the process of configuring its forces for a Baghdad assault using a plan that would include coordinated ISIL suicide strikes.

However, other U.S. officials believe ISIL could overextend itself were it to try to take all of Baghdad. They say the more likely scenario would be for fighters to seize a Sunni district and cause disruption with bomb attacks.

ISIL fighters insist that their plan is to take the capital and topple Baghdad’s political elite.

“We will receive orders about Zero Hour,” said Abu Sa'da, an ISIL fighter reached by telephone in Mosul. He said the group had cells in Baghdad and communicated with them by e-mail despite the government's sporadic blocking of Internet in an effort to disrupt the militants.

CAT AND MOUSE

For now, it is a cat and mouse game in the city. Abu Ahmed said the insurgency had agents in the Iraqi security forces, government ministries and inside the Green Zone. Men like him try to dodge an intensified campaign by the security forces and Shi'ite militias to round up conspirators.

There are "more detentions right now especially of ex-military officers and those who had been in American jails," he said. “Their houses are raided by special police and militias, then we never hear about them again. We check the jails, they are not there.”

So far, they’ve managed to free 12 of them, at least one with the help of a 20,000 U.S. dollar bribe. He blames harsh treatment by the Iraqi government for forcing them to war, opening his shirt to reveal two dark scars on his chest he says came from interrogations in custody. There was no way to verify his allegations of abuse by the security forces.

The prospect of an assault on Baghdad has led Shi'ite paramilitaries, mainly underground since 2008, to mobilize this year to help the authorities fight ISIL. Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, a Shi’ite group Washington believes is funded and armed by Iran, says it has helped round up insurgent agents in Baghdad.

The movement says it is taking orders from the government and responding to a fatwa by Shi'ite clergy three weeks ago calling on citizens to help the armed forces.

The insurgents' "goal is to control Baghdad and also to forestall the political process in Baghdad. They will try to execute this plot with their sleeper cells,” said Asaib Ahl al-Haq spokesman Ahmed al-Kinani. “We arrest them and hand them over to security forces.”

Many Sunnis in Baghdad say such activity has brought back memories of the last decade's civil war, when Shi'ite militias and Sunni insurgents prowled the streets, capturing and killing the innocent under the excuse of rooting out terrorist foes. Now people are disappearing again.

A Sunni woman who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared retribution from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, said her brother was first held by police for 13 days in April. Eight hours after he was released, masked Asaib fighters stormed into their house and took him.

"Their faces were covered. They had no number plates on their cars," she said. That was the last time she saw him.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Peter Graff)