France and Spain race to control wildfires as more than 250,000 evacuated – live

France and Spain are scrambling to contain wildfires that have forced more than two hundred fifty thousand people from their homes. The Guardian reports that French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu has asked the armed forces to deploy an Airbus A four hundred M military transport aircraft ahead of schedule to help fight the major blazes in the Gironde region. The fires follow three successive heatwaves in as many months, and the strain is showing elsewhere too: the Loire, France's longest river, has fallen to a historical low, with sixteen percent of French rivers reported dried up two weeks ago and little rain since. In the UK, a fire in the Cairngorms national park has been called very serious by Scotland's first minister.

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