The Guardian

• We need a wartime mindset to fight the threat of wildfires | Seth Klein

  While many leaders compare the wildfire crisis to the second world war, governments fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action

  As France and Spain battle historic wildfires, comparisons to the second world war abound. “One of the continent’s biggest evacuation efforts since World War II,” reports the Associated Press. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called the wildfires his country’s “most difficult situation since the second world war”.

  The images crossing all our screens certainly feel war-like – emergency aircraft and black smoke fill the skies, frantic civilians seeking shelter, historic towns lying in ruins, charred forests and burned-out vehicles, exhausted and sweat-soaked emergency responders.

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• Winner of Florida python hunting contest nabs 96 snakes: ‘I was on a mission’

  Burmese pythons are an invasive species in the Everglades, and the challenge is part of initiative to remove them

  The winner of this year’s annual Florida Python Challenge hunted down and eliminated 96 invasive Burmese pythons from the Everglades national park, as part of an initiative to remove hundreds of the snakes from the area every year.

  The challenge invites hunters to participate in 10 days of capturing and humanely euthanizing as many of the invasive snakes as possible across eight designated hunting locations, with the winner taking home a cash prize of $10,000. The event is hosted by Florida fish, wildlife and conservation (FWC), the south Florida water management district, the National Park Service and others.

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• Toronto zoo announces birth of pygmy hippo calf, third for mother Kindia

  The 20-year-old’s third calf is being monitored by officials as survival rates for the species are challenging, the zoo said

  The Toronto Zoo has announced the birth of a female pygmy hippo calf.

  Kindia, the zoo’s 20-year-old pygmy hippo, started showing signs of labor at around 8.15am last Sunday, it said. Around four hours later, the calf’s feet emerged and after 1.5 hours of active labor, Kindia successfully gave birth to the baby pygmy hippo.

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• The herbicide haunting a New York farm town

  Paraquat is banned in over 70 countries. Some farmers and their families in Hebron believe the pesticide is causing Parkinson’s disease and are demanding that New York ban it

  Gordon Chaplin gingerly stepped out of the car at the top of the steep hill behind his farmhouse, sporting a bandage on his hand from a fall the day before. He gripped his cane as he shuffled through the knee-high grass. He stopped every few feet to catch his breath, leaning on his caregiver for support.

  Looking out at the distant Adirondacks and Catskill mountains, he thought back to the years when he could run up the hill with ease.

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• Protesters occupy 200-year-old tree at US-Mexico border to stop its destruction: ‘She’s our Statue of Liberty’

  Demonstrators stage ‘tree sit’ in Arizona town to stop felling of ancient cottonwood grove to make way for border wall

  Protesters are staging a “tree sit” in a tiny Arizona town to prevent the destruction of a grove of ancient cottonwood trees as federal contractors race to build a row of two 30ft walls along the border with Sonora, Mexico.

  The gathering ramped up last week in the town of Lochiel, in the remote San Rafael valley of south-east Arizona. On 27 July, contractors working for Fisher Sand and Gravel crushed three of the largest cottonwoods with excavators.

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