The winner of the $10,000 ultimate grand prize this year was Taylor Stanberry, who removed a whopping 60 pythons.

Ultimate Grand Prize Winner of the 2025 Florida Python Challenge. She eliminated 60 snakes during the July 10-20 competition. Taylor Stanberry is the 2025 Florida Python Challenge Ultimate Grand Prize Winner.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) announced Taylor Stanberry removed 60 invasive Burmese pythons and claimed the $10,000 Ultimate Grand Prize. The FWC announced that 934 participants from 30 states and Canada removed a record 294 pythons during the 10-day competition.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge has struck down key parts of a Florida law that helped parents get books they found objectionable removed from public school libraries and classrooms. It is a victory for publishers and authors who had sued after their books were removed.

A Florida judge has ruled that the state’s law allowing books to be pulled from public schools is overly broad and unconstitutional, saying it violates the First Amendment. In a separate finding, the judge also said Florida’s law requiring teachers to use pronouns that match a student’s sex at birth amounts to discrimination,

The law is vague and broad and included no room for considering the literary merit of the work, and so the result was a wave of book bans across the state. One district banned the Maurice Sendak classic “In The Night Kitchen” because one illustration includes a boys bare butt.

For the first time in a decade, Floridians will be legally allowed to hunt black bears in the state. The move was unanimously approved by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission this month, but not without opposition from some conservation and animal rights groups.

Opponents called the hunt cruel, unnecessary and an excuse for hunters to bag a trophy animal when the real issue is the encroaching human population in bear habitat as Florida continues to grow.

While a curve back out to sea is widely expected and forecast in models, any impacts Erin could have on Florida and the U.S. remains uncertain.

Several weather factors come together in a 'perfect storm' to make August and September peak season for hurricanes.