At this point it’s mostly an inconvenience, growers say. Spring planting is a month or more away for crops such as corn, soybeans and sugar beets. If the rain holds off and unusually warm temperatures don’t melt the remaining snowpack too rapidly over the next few weeks, the waters could recede, enabling a decent or even good growing season.

But a worst-case scenario — heavy spring rains and prolonged flooding well into April — could spell trouble for this year’s crops, while also causing problems for livestock producers during the crucial calving season.

“It’s definitely not going to help us any to have this flood, but I can’t say definitely that it’s going to hurt us either, because it depends on the weather from here on out,” said Andrew Swenson, an extension farm management specialist at North Dakota State University.

The region’s fertile soils yield an abundance of grain and beets. About 500,000 acres in Cass County — which includes Fargo — are planted in soybeans, more than in any other county in the nation.

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He wades through shallow rapids cascading across his driveway, then drives a mud-spattered pickup on a narrow dirt road until so much water blocks his path that he must hop into a motorboat and putt-putt over a cornfield resembling a sprawling lake. Finally, about four miles from home, he gets into his waiting car and drives to the nearest town.

“It’s kind of a hassle,” Thomas, 52, said Thursday as he jerked the rope to restart the boat motor.

As the cities of Moorhead, Minn., and next-door Fargo nervously wait for the Red River’s expected crest on Sunday at 20 feet above the flood stage, some of the region’s farmland is already under water after smaller rivers, swollen with melting snow, overflowed. Even fields that aren’t buried in water are so saturated that they look like vast expanses of squishy black mud.

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“Yes, they did. They included that as part of the problem,” Sheehan said, according to a webcast on the website of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“That there were gay soldiers?” Levin then asked.

“That the combination was the liberalization of the military, a net effect was basically social engineering.”

The Dutch Defence Ministry issued a statement calling Sheehan’s claims “absolute nonsense” and adding that gay Dutch soldiers routinely cooperate with the U.S. military in the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

Renee Jones-Bos, the Dutch ambassador to the United States, said in a statement, “I couldn’t disagree more” with Sheehan, adding there was no evidence of his claims in the extensive record of research on Srebrenica.

Dutch press agency ANP quoted the head of the military union AFMP, Wim van den Burg, as saying Sheehan’s comments were “ridiculous” and “out of the realm of fiction.”

At a U.S. congressional hearing on Thursday on allowing gay soldiers to serve openly in the military, former Supreme Allied Commander John Sheehan said there was a link between having homosexuals in the Dutch forces and the massacre at Srebrenica.

Bosnian Serb forces overran lightly armed Dutch soldiers in the United Nations-designated enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995 and subsequently massacred more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys.

Reports on the hearing said Sheehan blamed a post-Cold War effort by European nations to “socialize” their forces by, among other things, letting gays serve.

“That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war. The case in point that I’m referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs,” Sheehan said.

“The battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them.”

Chairman of the , asked: “Did the Dutch leaders tell you it was because there were gay soldiers there?”

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Rice, speaking at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said she believed history would eventually vindicate many of the decisions made during the presidency of George W. Bush.

“I would many times over liberate Iraq again from Saddam Hussein,” Rice said. “I think he was a danger to the Middle East.”

However, she suggested the U.S. government failed to understand “how broken Iraq was as a society” and should have focused its rebuilding efforts outside of Baghdad, the capital.

“We tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out, and we really should have rebuilt Iraq from outside Baghdad in,” she said.

“We should have worked with the tribes, worked in the provinces,” she said, adding that smaller projects should have been favored over big ones.

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“Other fabrication techniques, though, might lead to larger cloaks,” he added in an interview via e-mail.

The value of the finding, Ergin said, “is that we learn more about the concepts of transformation optics, and that we have made a first step in producing 3-D structures in that field.”

“Invisibility cloaks are a beautiful and fascinating benchmark for the field of transformation optics, and it is very seldom that one can foretell what practical applications might arise out of a field of fundamental research,” he added.

In earlier research, a team led by David Schurig at Duke University developed a way to cloak objects in two dimensions from microwaves. Like light and radar waves, microwaves usually bounce off objects, making them visible to instruments and creating a shadow that can be detected.

The new research led by Ergin used infrared waves, which are close to the spectrum of visible light.

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Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies.

Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said.

The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold later beneath, the researchers reported in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.

In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it.

“In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it,” Ergin said. But, he added, developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, “so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible.”

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KENNEWICK, Wash. – A burglar who spent about five hours on a store’s computer after breaking into the business gave police all the clues they needed to track him down. Investigators said the 17-year-old logged into his MySpace account while at Bella Office Furniture and that made it easy for them to find him. He also spent time looking at pornography and trying to sell stolen items, all while using the business’ computer.

He was arrested Tuesday and charged with first degree burglary. Kennewick Police said he helped officers recover a cell phone stolen in the break-in

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Even if producers ultimately didn’t need Fuchs’ involvement, they had reason to be afraid of her. The bassist split from the Runaways in 1977 (there is disagreement about when exactly that happened, a debate explored in the 2004 documentary “Edgeplay: A Film About the Runaways“) and has since squabbled with her former bandmates about merchandising and other issues.

And unlike Jett, who went on to a successful post-Runaways music career, Fuchs went to Harvard Law School. Yes, Jackie Fox is now a lawyer. Focusing on showbiz, she spent years in the legal trenches at places like Columbia Pictures and Miramax and now works for a Los Angeles-based film company, which means she’s as knowledgeable as anyone about legal issues that can arise during production.

“She was sending letters around to producers and others who were involved,” says Oren Warshavsky, Jett’s lawyer. “‘Sounds like you’re doing something including my name and likeness; what are you going to do about it?’ That kind of thing.”

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Still, necessary or not, studios often snap up life rights as an insurance policy against potential lawsuits.

MINIMIZING RISK

To make “The Runaways,” producers Art and John Linson optioned Currie’s book “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway” and secured her life rights. They got rights from Jett and drummer Sandy West, as well as producer Kim Fowler, who, along with Jett and Laguna, owned music publishing rights that would be necessary to include the band’s hit songs in the film.

Production company River Road Entertainment then commissioned a legal opinion that analyzed the life rights issues that might arise, and the script was adjusted to minimize risk.

Even if producers ultimately didn’t need Fuchs’ involvement, they had reason to be afraid of her. The bassist split from the Runaways in 1977 (there is disagreement about when exactly that happened, a debate explored in the 2004 documentary “Edgeplay: A Film About the Runaways“) and has since squabbled with her former bandmates about merchandising and other issues.

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