France and Spain race to control wildfires as Bordeaux suburbs evacuated – live

France is racing to contain major wildfires in the Gironde region, and The Guardian reports the country's prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has asked the armed forces to bring forward the deployment of an Airbus A400M military transport plane to help fight the blazes, sooner than originally planned. The fires come amid three successive heatwaves in as many months, and as The Guardian tells it, the strain is showing in France's rivers too. The Loire, the country's longest, has fallen to a historic low, reduced in places to a trickle between sandbanks. Two weeks ago, sixteen percent of French rivers were reported to have dried up, with a quarter of small streams stagnant or gone altogether, and little rain has fallen since.

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