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JULIAN, Calif. (AP) — Crews scrambled Thursday to corral a wildfire that burned two homes in Southern California and threatened hundreds of others as an older, larger blaze endangered more homes in rural Northern California.

A blaze that erupted around 10:30 a.m. prompted the mandatory evacuation of 200 homes in central San Diego County near the mountain town of Julian.

Firefighters attacked the 150-acre blaze in the air and on the ground. The fire destroyed two homes and an outbuilding and was 15 percent contained, state fire Capt. Kendal Bortisser said.

Julian, an historic gold-mining town and popular tourist spot, canceled its Fourth of July parade and celebration.

There was no immediate word on what sparked the blaze.

The same area near Cleveland National Forest is where an 11-square-mile blaze destroyed more than 100 mountain cabins just a year ago.

Meanwhile, the fire in Northern California's Napa County grew to more than 6.5 square miles as the fire raced uphill. The steep and rugged terrain also forced firefighters to build containment lines without bulldozers, said Alicia Amaro, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The blaze had scorched more than 4,300 acres by its third day, state fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said. It has damaged nine structures, including the two homes.

The fire was burning to the north, away from the county's famed vineyards.

"It has not come anywhere close to what we consider Napa Valley wineries," said Cate Conniff, a spokeswoman for the Napa Valley Vintners, a nonprofit trade association. "It is moving in the opposite direction, and it continues to move that way. We're keeping an eye out on it."

Residents in nearly 200 homes in a subdivision in the county's Pope Valley were allowed to return after an evacuation order was lifted Thursday afternoon, but 180 others remained threatened, state fire officials said.

Despite the fire-containment level plateauing at 30 percent, the nearly 1,100 firefighters on the scene were making steady progress as temperatures climbed into the mid-90s, Berlant said.

However, "it's still growing at a faster rate than we can build containment lines. We're also seeing a bit of a warming pattern, and the winds are picking up as well," Berlant said. "This fire is taking a very aggressive run."

No injuries have been reported, and the cause of the fire remains unknown.

The fire exploded because of dry conditions across the state caused by the drought, Berlant said. Officials are hoping for full containment early next week.

Amid reports that Saudi Arabia has deployed some 30,000 troops to its border with Iraq, President Obama has called King Abdullah to discuss the developments in the region.

Reuters quotes the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television as saying the kingdom has deployed forces to its border after Iraqi troops abandoned their positions amid a Sunni-led insurgency.

According to Reuters:

"The Dubai-based al-Arabiya said on its website that Saudi troops had fanned out into the border region after Iraqi government forces withdrew from their positions, leaving the Saudi and Syrian frontiers exposed.

"It aired a video which, it said, showed some 2,500 Iraqi soldiers in the desert region east of the Iraqi city of Kerbala after pulling back from the border, which is reinforced on the Saudi side by a system of fences.

"However, the Iraqi prime minister's military spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassim Atta, told reporters in Baghdad: 'This is false news aimed at affecting the morale of our people and the morale of our heroic fighters.'"

MCALLEN, Texas (AP) — The tens of thousands of Central American children entering the U.S. illegally is both a humanitarian crisis and a national security one, Texas Gov. Rick Perry testified Thursday at a congressional field hearing in South Texas.

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended since October. Three-fourths of them are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, and say they are fleeing pervasive gang violence and crushing poverty.

Thursday's hearing by the House Homeland Security committee in McAllen yielded agreement that there is a humanitarian crisis but disagreement among members about its roots or potential solutions. The discussion frequently reverted to the question of securing the border that has stymied attempts at comprehensive immigration reform in the House.

Perry attributed the waves of young immigrants to a failure to secure the border and recent changes in immigration policy that he says sent a message to Central America that if the children came they would be allowed to stay. He and Republican members of the committee said they should be deported more quickly and the National Guard should be brought in to secure the border.

"Allowing them to remain here will only encourage the next group of individuals to undertake this very, very dangerous and life-threatening journey," Perry said. "And those who come must be sent back to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that risking your lives on the top of those trains and the ways that they are coming here, it's not worth it."

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, said she was prepared to support funding that would provide the resources necessary to help cases move through immigration courts faster, but that quick deportations were not the answer.

"A massive deportation policy for children and a mandatory detaining for children is not a humane thing to do," she said.

On June 18, Perry announced that the state would steer another $1.3 million per week to the Department of Public Safety to assist in border security through at least the end of the year. He followed that two days later with a letter inviting President Barack Obama to see the crisis firsthand.

The White House had earlier asked Congress for $1.4 billion to help house, feed and transport the unaccompanied children, and on June 2, Obama called it an "urgent humanitarian situation," putting FEMA in charge of coordinating the response.

The issue of unaccompanied children began drawing national attention in late May with the logjam it created in Border Patrol stations, but the number of immigrant children housed in government shelters had doubled in 2012, nearly doubled again in 2013 and is on pace to double again this year.

The administration appears to be responding now in ways demanded by Republicans, minus the additional National Guard troops.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced that 150 additional Border Patrol agents would be immediately deployed to the Rio Grande Valley. This surge, however, has the unusual characteristic that the waves of mothers and children turn themselves in to the first uniform they see. When smugglers are not worried about evading authorities, but instead just have to get their human cargo onto U.S. soil, it decreases the deterrence value of boots on the ground.

To that end, the administration wants to stop releasing children and families to remove that incentive. On Monday, Obama asked Congress for flexibility to deport children more quickly and $2 billion to hire more immigration judges and open more detention facilities.

Last week, officials announced that barracks at a federal law enforcement training center in New Mexico would be used as temporary detention facilities for women traveling with young children. In recent months, they had made up the bulk of those immigrants released at bus stations with instructions to check in with immigration officials once they reached their destinations.

Rev. Mark Seitz, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso, led a fact-finding trip to Central America late last year to investigate why children were leaving. He left with the impression that the gang violence was an even stronger drive than the intense poverty.

"A deterrence strategy including expedited removal of these children places this vulnerable population at even greater risk and will not necessarily stem the child migrant flow," he testified Thursday.

TOKYO (AP) — Japan's Cabinet has given formal approval to easing sanctions on North Korea.

The decision came at a meeting Friday morning. It endorsed what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had announced the previous day.

The move is in return for North Korea's agreement to reinvestigate the fate of Japanese who were abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s.