The Rice fire, east of Camp Pendleton, caused the evacuation of the Fallbrook community.

Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said that 12 Defense Department firefighting teams, with 12 engines, are already working the blazes and more than 17,000 National Guardsmen are potentially available if needed.

In addition, he said, 550 Marines from Camp Pendleton are preparing to deploy to the fire area.

"All of the aid that we provide is the result of a request ... from the state," McHale said. "However, we have been very proactive in independently preparing those capabilities for the possibility of such requests, and we have reached out early to state officials."

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has already called up 1,500 National Guard troops, including more than 200 taken from border duty to help with supplies and security at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium and DelMar Fairgrounds and Racetrack, where thousands of evacuated residents are taking shelter.

Schwarzenegger also requested and received from the federal government six "modular airborne fire fighting systems" units -- which are C-130s that drop water and fire suppressant on the blazes. Watch California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger talk about the crisis »

The Pentagon provided 11 helicopters equipped with water buckets to fight the fires, McHale said. Aerial attacks on the fires, however, have been minimal because of high Santa Ana winds with gusts approaching 70 mph.

In an effort to make room for more civilians who have had to evacuate their homes, sailors stationed in Southern California are abandoning their barracks.

"Orders have been given to all sailors ashore in barracks to move to shipboard billeting to provide room for evacuees," said a Tuesday statement released by the U.S. military.

Only essential personnel are requested to report to duty at Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, and Naval Air Station in El Centro.

Those bases have also set up cots and tents for evacuees.

Also, the Navy has offered an Aegis cruiser, a guided missile destroyer, and two fast frigates to support evacuation efforts.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon designated March Air Reserve Base as the primary staging area for medical and relief supplies coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, McHale said.

And some 100 California National Guard medical personnel are helping alleviate "critical staffing shortfalls" at the San Diego Veterans Center, whose hospital staff are under voluntary and mandatory evacuation orders.

Floodwaters in Texas City, Texas, force a pedestrian to wade to cross the street on Friday.

The bodies of two people, including 6-year-old Cesar Aparicio, were found Friday. The search for Aparicio ended when his body was found on a beach about 15 miles from where he washed into the Gulf of Mexico, said Freeport Police Chief Jeff Pynes.

A volunteer searcher in a private plane spotted the body on a remote stretch of uninhabited beach, Pynes said late Friday. The boy's body was taken to the Galveston County Medical Examination's office.

"The family has been notified and we believe this will be his son," Pynes said. "This is a pretty tough deal but it gives the family some closure."

The boy was at a family gathering on Bryan Beach, where the Brazos River feeds into the Gulf of Mexico about 60 miles south of Houston, when he was swept into floodwaters, Pynes said.

The boy's father and another relative were found clinging to trees and rescued Tuesday afternoon. Since then, Freeport authorities had been searching for the boy but were hampered by intermittent heavy rains and a river that, at 47 feet, was 4 feet above flood stage, said Pynes.

The river was moving so fast that it was pushing out 20 miles into the Gulf on Friday, and taking everything caught upstream -- from cars to refrigerators to trees -- with it. One rescue boat borrowed to aid in the search was damaged by the debris, Pynes said.

The river is "in really bad shape and very, very dangerous," he said. "That tree is a missile, essentially."

At Fort Hood, the body of a civilian worker was found downstream from where his vehicle was pulled out of a creek, post spokeswoman Col. Diane Battaglia said. Isidro Felix Alicea-Acosta, 74, went missing Wednesday night after a fireworks show.

"An hour before he crossed it, the creek was fine," Battaglia said. "He was caught in a flash flood that he was not aware of."

In Fort Worth on Friday night, rescue personnel and divers searched for a missing 26-year-old man whose rubber raft overturned on the Trinity River. A 23-year-old man who was also on the raft was rescued on the side of the river, Fire Department spokesman Lt. Kent Worley said.

The men had little experience rafting and were not wearing life preservers, Worley said.

Meanwhile, rivers in Oklahoma and Kansas continued to recede, revealing millions of dollars in flood damage to at least a few thousand homes and businesses. Authorities found a man believed to be the flood's first fatality in Kansas.

The region may get some relief beginning this weekend. Much of Texas may get some daytime showers and isolated thunderstorms over the weekend, but the large swaths of pounding rain were expected to dissipate, forecasters said.

"You're going to see less and less," National Weather Service meteorologist Cristy Mitchell said.

But river waters could keep rising in some places. Forecasters warned that the Trinity River in East Texas would crest near 43 feet on Sunday -- well above the 28-foot flood stage. Flood warnings were in effect for rivers in Oklahoma, including the Neosho River.

While much of the West has been parched under record temperatures and drought, Texas has been drenched day after day since late May, filling lakes and rivers, washing out bridges and roads, and damaging 1,000 homes. Since May 23, there have been 15 weather-related deaths in Texas.

In Oklahoma, water threatened to overflow from swollen Lake Texoma into a spillway Friday.

The lake, which straddles the border between Oklahoma and Texas along the Red River, stood about one inch below the top of a 640-foot-high concrete spillway, said Ross Adkins, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman.

"It's lapping over the spillway now," Adkins said.

The Corps is pumping an estimated 27,000 cubic feet per second of water into the Red River to help steady the lake's level. Water levels in the river have fallen following heavy rains that swelled it and other streams.

In Coffeyville, Kansas, search teams going door-to-door found a man dead late Thursday in a motel room, city clerk Cindy Price said.

The cause of the man's death wasn't immediately available, but authorities said he had apparently ignored warnings to leave the southeast Kansas town, where a flash flood triggered a 42,000-gallon crude oil spill into the Verdigris River.

State officials said the flooding has left about 3,150 homes damaged or destroyed. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius wondered what had befallen her state this year -- flooding, a winter ice storm and May tornadoes

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Security across London has been increased after police on Friday discovered two cars filled with explosives.

Meanwhile, police increased patrols across London in a hunt for what they said is a man seen running from one of the cars on Friday.

British officials said hundreds of people could have been killed if the devices in the cars had been set off.

The first car was discovered parked near Piccadilly Circus; the second was found about an hour later, less than a kilometer away near Trafalgar Square.

Scotland Yard authorities said they believed the two incidents were connected.

On Friday, London police said the second discovered car -- containing fuel, gas canisters and nails -- was "clearly linked" to the first explosives-packed car found outside a nightclub near Piccadilly Circus, Metropolitan Police said.

A "considerable" amount of fuel and gas canisters, along with a "substantial quantity of nails," was found in the blue Mercedes 280E, said Peter Clarke, Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, said about the second car.

He called the discovery of the second bomb "troubling," but urged the public to remain vigilant and report suspicious behavior to authorities.

The second vehicle was ticketed about 2:30 a.m. Friday (9:30 p.m. Thursday ET), Clarke said. It was near Trafalgar Square, roughly a half-mile from where the first vehicle -- also a Mercedes -- had been found about an hour earlier. (Watch how the second car was armed )

About 3:30 a.m., Clarke said, the Mercedes was taken to an impound lot in Hyde Park. Security sources earlier told CNN that workers who towed it thought the car smelled of gasoline, and became suspicious because of the reports that gasoline was among the explosive materials found in the first vehicle.

Clarke said the second device, like the first, was "potentially viable" but was rendered safe by police explosives officers.

"These vehicles are clearly linked," he said.

The first car, a silver Mercedes-Benz sedan, was discovered about 1:30 a.m. when an ambulance crew called to treat an ill person noticed what appeared to be smoke inside the car and notified authorities, London police said.

The car was parked in front of the Tiger Tiger club, and the discovery prompted the closing of several streets until the vehicle was hauled off nine hours later.

"In the car, they found significant quantities of petrol together with a number of gas cylinders," Clarke said. He could not immediately say how much fuel was there.

"I can tell you it was in several large containers," Clarke said. "There were also a large number of nails in the vehicle."

He said explosives officers manually disabled "a potential means of detonation for the gas and the fuel in the vehicle," which preserved crucial forensic evidence for investigators.

A cell phone was found as part of the device in the silver car, according to security sources with knowledge of the investigation, although it was not immediately known what role the cell phone may have played in the device. The sources said the device was apparently set up to be remotely detonated.

Metropolitan Police Counterterrorism Command officers are reviewing closed-circuit security camera video to see if they can determine who parked the car there, Clarke said.

London has a long history of bomb attacks and alerts during decades of violence mounted by Northern Irish guerrilla groups. Lone attackers also have previously targeted the city's gay and immigrant communities. (Timeline of attacks)

Friday's incident came days ahead of the second anniversary of July 7, 2005, when four Islamic extremist suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's transport system in the deadliest strike on the city since World War II.

Witness Daniel Weir said he was walking home from work when he noticed police had cordoned off the area around the nightclub and a nearby vehicle.

He snapped several photos, including one that showed a canister labeled "patio gas." (See the photos)

Clarke said it was too early to determine if the smoke the ambulance crew saw was an indication that the car bomb had been activated but failed to explode.

While Clarke would not speculate that Tiger Tiger was the target, he said "some features of what's happened resonate with previous plots."

"In one previous case we heard talk about nightclubs potentially becoming targets. ... We, of course, saw reference to vehicles being filled with gas or fuel in order to create an explosion," he said.

There had been no intelligence warning of an attack, he said.

"It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been significant injury or loss of life," Clarke said. "The vehicle was parked in one of the busiest parts of central London in the early hours of Friday morning when many, many people were leaving nightclubs and other places after the evening hours." (Watch police describe potential blast )

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said, "We're currently facing the most serious and sustained threat to our security from international terrorism."

The bombs were found just two days after new Prime Minister Gordon Brown took office, and one day after he appointed members of his Cabinet. (Full story)

"For Gordon Brown, it is a rude awakening to the realities you take on as prime minister," CNN's European political editor Robin Oakley said. (Watch Oakley comment on 'rude awakening' for Brown )

Brown, whose predecessor, Tony Blair, stoked anger among Islamic militants with his support for the Iraq war, said Britain faces "a serious and continuous threat" and the public "need to be alert" at all times.

The incident also came days ahead of the second anniversary of July 7, 2005, when four Islamic extremist suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's transport system in the deadliest strike on the city since World War II.

Atlantis had to use its backup landing strip in California after rain and clouds over Florida ruled out Kennedy Space Center.

"We couldn't quite get comfortable with [Kennedy]," Mission Control told the Atlantis crew. "We are going to target Edwards."

The crew executed the landing on its first opportunity at Edwards at 3:49 p.m. ET.

Rain and clouds that scrubbed a planned Thursday landing in Florida continued Friday, and NASA waved off the first planned landing there, which would have been at 2:18 p.m. ET.

The landing site at Edwards had clear skies, and wind gusts there were not expected to pick up until late in the day.

"Our mind-set down here is we're going to land you somewhere safely today," Mission Control told the shuttle crew Friday morning.

Aboard Atlantis, the astronauts closed the shuttle's payload bay doors in preparation for landing. The doors are opened during flights so heat doesn't build up in the orbiter.

Atlantis commander Rick Sturckow said the crew would put on their orange spacesuits for landing.

"That sounds great, Houston," Sturckow said. "We're going to suit up then."

Among the crew returning to Earth was astronaut Sunita "Sunni" Williams, who spent 195 days on the space station, a women's endurance record.

The crew had three chances Friday to land at Edwards, the last at 6:59 p.m. ET. If the weather had spoiled all those opportunities, mission managers would have tried again Saturday, with another backup landing site in New Mexico in the lineup.

The preferred landing site is Kennedy, where it is easier and far cheaper to get Atlantis to its hangar to be prepared for its next mission in December.

Lands in California means it will cost $1.7 million and take up to 10 days to get it home to Florida aboard a jumbo jet.

Atlantis had enough power for its systems to orbit until Sunday, but managers didn't want to wait that long. The flight would have been extended to Sunday only if technical problems needed to be fixed.

During Atlantis' two chances to land Thursday, showers were within 34 miles of the landing strip at Kennedy Space Center, and clouds hung below an altitude of 8,000 feet, both violations of flight rules.

During the crew's 14-day mission to the international space station, the astronauts installed a new truss segment, unfurled a new pair of power-generating solar arrays and activated a rotating joint that allows the new solar arrays to track the sun.

Originally scheduled for 11 days, the mission was extended by two days to give astronauts time to repair a thermal blanket that had peeled away during the June 8 launch. Astronaut Danny Olivas stapled it back into place during a spacewalk. Another extra day in orbit was added after the weather in Florida prevented a landing Thursday.

The shuttle's visit to the space station was complicated by the crash of Russian computers that control orientation and oxygen production.

Both have seen big growth. Starting from zero about eight years ago, swapalease now brokers about 7,000 deals a year, according to Scot Hall, a company executive.

LeaseTrader is a bit older and larger, on track to handle about 35,000 transactions this year, according to LeaseTrader President Sergio Stiberman.

Stiberman said he has seen a 30 percent increase in people looking to sell their SUV leases this year.

"They definitely mention gas prices as a reason for getting out," said LeaseTrader spokesman John Sternal.

The fees are similar at both sites.

LeaseTrader charges $79 to sellers to post an ad; buyers pay $40 for a 60-day membership. The site runs credit checks so sellers know buyers can afford to assume their lease payments. If a transaction takes place, each party has to pay a $149 fee to the site.

Swapalease has a listing fee ranging from $49 to $149, depending on the amount of exposure the seller wants the ad to have. Membership fees for buyers run about $40. A transaction fee is only charged if a seller has the cheapest listing fee, in which case it's $95.

There are other costs too, noted Alex Rosten, an industry analyst at the auto research site Edmunds.com.

The leasing company usually charges a $200 to $400 fee to switch the names. And if the car isn't purchased when the lease runs out, there's often another $200 to $600 charge. If the car isn't local and needs to be shipped, that could run another $500.

"It's not as simple as signing on the dotted line," said Rosten. "Always research the fees before you pull the trigger."

For people looking to sell a lease, they'll have the best chance if the vehicle is still far from the mileage limit in the lease contract and the original lease terms are financially attractive.

Many of the ads feature cars that have used up all their allotted miles or where the original lease was expensive.

In those cases, the seller will usually try to sweeten the deal by offering a cash incentive, often thousands of dollars, to the prospective lease buyer.

Getting a good deal on these sites is possible, but it depends entirely on the details of the lease and the incentives being offered.

Sites like these can be good places to shop for a short term lease, say a year or less, said Rosten, for the simple reason that it's hard to find new car leases that short.

You can also benefit from someone's mistake, said Rosten. Some people still make big down payments on leased vehicles - something experts advise against - which can reduce the monthly cost substantially.

"If that happens, you can end up with a real bargain," he said.

But he offered one more word of caution: some of the ads on those sites are put there by dealers or leasing companies, not legitimate third parties.

"You're going there to take over a lease, not start a new one," he said. 

For once, critics and moviegoers are likely to be on the same page. Who isn't ready for a refreshingly frank, funny odd-couple comedy with engaging leads and too many belly laughs to count? (Lemme guess: I had you at "refreshingly.") Indeed, who isn't up for a movie that doesn't come encumbered with so much as a digit in the title, or even a colon?

OK, so "Knocked Up" sits comfortably on the same well-worn couch as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," the previous hit from writer-director-producer Judd Apatow. Several of the same actors crop up, many of them veterans from Apatow's short-lived but fondly remembered small-screen gems, "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared." But in this case, those are signs of high quality.

First and foremost there's Seth Rogen, an amiable, beer-bellied slob with a tight mop of curly hair, permanent five o'clock shadow and a voice like Baloo the bear, who seemed likely to play sidekicks for the foreseeable future.

Rogen's obvious limitations in the romantic leading man department aren't just the butt of the humor here, they're also the plot. It's "Beauty and the Beast," and he's the beast: his character, Ben Stone, is a twentysomething non-achiever living with four likeminded slackers. Their only employment is idle research into movie-star nudity for a proposed Internet start-up.

Beauty comes in the form of Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl from "Grey's Anatomy"), a perky blonde E! Entertainment presenter. Attractive and goal-oriented, she's on the fast track to success -- that is, until she has the misfortune to cross paths with Ben. Letting her hair down to celebrate a promotion, Alison is charmed by his gallantry at the bar, and then tipsy enough to take him to bed.

"You're prettier than I am," he acknowledges in a fleeting moment of bemused revelation as their clothes come off. But it's not until the morning after that she appreciates how far she's strayed from type, and another couple months before the consequences of this otherwise forgettable one-night stand come home to roost.

She's adamant about having the baby, and he wants to do the right thing. First, though, the parents will have to get to know each other and find out if they can fall in like.

None of this is exactly unexpected, and as the movie gestates the pregnancy's ballooning crises feel rather familiar, from finding the right obstetrician to the inevitable push-comes-to-shove about-face on an epidural.

But if this material has been thoroughly homogenized by decades of situation comedy, it's a tribute to Apatow that even the most hackneyed scenes get a new lease on life from his ruder instincts, steeped as they are in the vulgar, anarchic energies of adolescent angst.

In this movie -- as in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" -- we can sense the "American Pie" generation growing up and settling down, but only with the very greatest reluctance. Ben and his buddies' slacker lifestyle isn't what you would call hygienic, but Apatow pictures it with a fond indulgence -- a note less evident in the barbed E! scenes featuring allegedly adult careerists.

Amid the candid jokes about pregnant sex, the earthy language and promiscuous drug use, "Knocked Up" is also surprisingly grown-up, a fundamentally honest, family-affirming picture in which even Alison's sister's severely strained marriage proves eminently salvageable. Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd contribute some of the movie's sharpest, funniest asides as the unhappy couple -- though in truth, the entire extended cast delivers the goods right down the line.

Even if, like most pregnancies, it goes on too long, "Knocked Up's" winning combination of benevolence and belly laughs will leave audiences smiling. In a nice touch, the end credits are illustrated with the cast and crew's baby pictures. And in Seth Rogen, for sure, a new star is born.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) -- Not many things are less challenging than staring at the Kazakh steppe all day. Such was our distraction on our drive to the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Forest became grassland, grassland turned into desert and desert reverted to grassland. A river flashed by and a shepherd on horseback turned to watch our car speed past. It felt a bit like being in outer space.

Then, in the midst of this barren, monotonous expanse, rose Baikonur, the world's oldest space launch facility and a storied vestige of the rivalries of the Cold War.

The vast complex, itself the size of a small country, found itself adrift in Kazakhstan with the break-up of the Soviet Union. It is now technically part of Russia, which pays rent on it under a lease that runs until 2050.

Just 125 miles east of the Aral Sea and 10 times that far from Moscow, Baikonur is surrounded by a big fence and administered by a Russian mayor, a stocky man with straightforward manners.

We had gone there for the launch on April 7 of the Soyuz TMA-10 spaceship, bound for the international space station with two Russian cosmonauts and American space tourist Charles Simonyi.

Simonyi, one of the founders of Microsoft, paid $25 million for his two-week trip, which made him the first billionaire in space.

The event was another first for Baikonur, set up by the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s initially as a secret long-range missile test facility.

It was the venue for the launch in 1957 of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, then in 1961 for the historic flight that made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space.

Capturing the cosmos

In many ways Baikonur has changed little since it was set up.

The town that caters to the cosmodrome, now also called Baikonur but known as Leninsk until 1995, is a collection of quiet, orderly streets lined with buildings that look older than they should for their age.

A poster in one shop shows a rocket in flight, leaving a trail of fire.

It reads: "Cosmos".

"Cosmos is inside you," said one journalist, a phrase repeated by Baikonur residents inexplicably often.

The place still has a feel of the Soviet Union about it, tinged with an air of the wild frontier. But these days it is accompanied by a touch of the surreal.

We checked into the Central Hotel on Lenin Square, where guests register on the ground floor, pay on the second and receive the keys on the fourth.

Then there was Martha Stewart, the American queen of sophisticated domestic styles for the masses, who showed up to see off her friend Simonyi.

Stewart, who had selected the menu for a special dinner for Simonyi and the crew of the space station, wore the same charming smile each time she made a public appearance.

"Baikonur is beautiful," she would say.

One day a camel appeared at a ceremony in her heavily guarded hotel.

"Very lovable," Stewart said.

Simonyi and the two Russian cosmonauts he flew with had to go into quarantine before their flight.

When they emerged from their quarantine zone, they were greeted by journalists wearing surgical masks and white coats who flashed their cameras and thrust microphones at them.

They felt excited, they felt great, they were really looking forward to it. They had nothing much else to say. We took down every word.

Pretending not to notice us, the cosmonauts played table tennis and pool. They ate vegetables, pork and a muffin for lunch.

Then they were gone in the dead of night, propelled into space by a rocket that puffed and exhaled a cloud of smoke, roared skywards, turned into a bright dot and disappeared from sight.

Since 1943 we've been dedicated to a single mission – to protect people, assets, and environment from the effects of corrosion.

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