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Benito the Giraffe Leaves Extreme Weather at Mexico’s Border and Heads to a More Congenial home 

Benito the giraffe is seen in his enclosure at the Central Park of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on January 21, 2024, before been transferred from Ciudad Juarez Central Park to African Safari zoo located in the Puebla state, central Mexico. (AFP)
Benito the giraffe is seen in his enclosure at the Central Park of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on January 21, 2024, before been transferred from Ciudad Juarez Central Park to African Safari zoo located in the Puebla state, central Mexico. (AFP)
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Benito the Giraffe Leaves Extreme Weather at Mexico’s Border and Heads to a More Congenial home 

Benito the giraffe is seen in his enclosure at the Central Park of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on January 21, 2024, before been transferred from Ciudad Juarez Central Park to African Safari zoo located in the Puebla state, central Mexico. (AFP)
Benito the giraffe is seen in his enclosure at the Central Park of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on January 21, 2024, before been transferred from Ciudad Juarez Central Park to African Safari zoo located in the Puebla state, central Mexico. (AFP)

After a campaign by environmentalists, Benito the giraffe left Mexico's northern border and its extreme weather conditions Sunday night and headed for a conservation park in central Mexico, where the climate is more akin to his natural habitat and already a home to other giraffes.

Environmental groups had voiced strong complaints about conditions faced by Benito at the city-run Central Park zoo in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, where weather in the summer is brutally hot and temperatures plunge during the winter.

A crane carefully lifted a container holding the giraffe onto a truck while city dwellers in love with the animal said a bittersweet goodbye. Some activists shouted, “We love you, Benito.”

“We’re a little sad that he’s leaving. but it also gives us great pleasure ... The weather conditions are not suitable for him,” said Flor Ortega, a 23-year-old who said she had spent her entire life visiting Modesto the giraffe, which was at the zoo for two decades before dying in 2022, and then Benito, which arrived last May.

The transfer could not have come at a better time, just when a new cold front was about to hit the area.

Benito was heading on a journey of 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) and about 50 hours on the road to his new home, the African Safari park in the state of Puebla. Visitors travel through the park in all-terrain vehicles to observe animals as if they were on safari.

The container, more than five meters high (16.5 feet), was specially designed for Benito, and the giraffe was allowed to become familiar with it during the weekend, said Frank Carlos Camacho, the director of the park.

The animal's head sticks up through the top of the big wooden and metal box, but a frame allows a tarp to cover over Benito and insulate him from the cold, wind and rain as well as from noise and the sight of landscape speeding by.

“The giraffe has huge, huge eyes and gains height to be able to look for predators in the savannah and we have to inhibit that so that it does not have any source of stress,” Camacho said in a video posted on social media.

Inside the container is straw, alfalfa, water and vegetables, and electronic equipment will monitor the temperature and allow technicians to even talk to the animal.

Outside, Benito will be guarded by a convoy of vehicles with officers from the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection and the National Guard.

“He’s going to be calm, he’s going to travel super well. We’ve done this many times,” Camacho said.

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Varieties

Snowstorm Paralyzes Vienna Airport

People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
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Snowstorm Paralyzes Vienna Airport

People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl

Massive snowstorms caused power outages and transport chaos in Austria on Friday, forcing the Vienna airport to temporarily halt all flights.

Flights departing from the capital, a major European hub, were cancelled or delayed, and more than 230 arrivals were similarly disrupted or rerouted.

"Passengers whose flights have been delayed are asked not to come to the airport," the facility said in a statement.

The area received 20 centimeters (nearly eight inches) of snow, national news agency APA reported.

The main highway south of Vienna was closed for several hours, and other sections of highway were temporarily inaccessible because of snowdrift, stranded lorries or poor visibility, said the national automobile association, OAMTC.

According to AFP, electric companies reported power outages in several regions in the south and east, including Styria, where 30,000 homes lost electricity.

The weather was forecast to improve from around midday, but the risk of avalanches remained high.

Varieties

NASA Delivers Harsh Assessment of Botched Boeing Starliner Test Flight

NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
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NASA Delivers Harsh Assessment of Botched Boeing Starliner Test Flight

NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File

NASA on Thursday blamed what it called engineering vulnerabilities in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft along with internal agency mistakes in a sharply critical report assessing a botched mission that left two astronauts stranded in space.

The US space agency labeled the 2024 test flight of the Starliner capsule a "Type A" mishap -- the same classification as the deadly Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters -- a category that reflects the "potential for a significant mishap," it said.

The failures left a pair of NASA astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months in a mission that captured global attention and became a political flashpoint.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision-making and leadership," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in a briefing.

"If left unchecked," he said, this mismanagement "could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight."

The top space official said the investigation found that a concern for the reputation of Boeing's Starliner clouded an earlier internal probe into the incident.

"Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable bounds and place the mission, the crew and America's space program at risk in ways that were not fully understood at the time," Isaacman said.

He said Starliner currently "is less reliable for crew survival than other crewed vehicles" and that "NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected" and a problematic propulsion system is fixed.

But the administrator insisted that "NASA will continue to work with Boeing, as we do all of our partners that are undertaking test flights."

In a statement, Boeing said it has "made substantial progress on corrective actions for technical challenges we encountered and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the findings in the report."

- 'We failed them' -

Isaacman also had harsh words for internal conduct at NASA.

"We managed the contract. We accepted the vehicle, we launched the crew to space. We made decisions from docking through post-mission actions," he told journalists.

"A considerable portion of the responsibility and accountability rests here."

In June 2024 Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams embarked on what was meant to be an eight-to-14-day mission. But this turned into nine months after propulsion problems emerged in orbit and the Starliner spacecraft was deemed unfit to fly them back.

The ex-Navy pilots were reassigned to the NASA-SpaceX Crew-9 mission. A Dragon spacecraft flew to the ISS that September with a team of two, rather than the usual four, to make room for the stranded pair.

The duo, both now retired, were finally able to arrive home safely in March 2025.

"They have so much grace, and they're so competent, the two of them, and we failed them," NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya told Thursday's briefing.

"The agency failed them."

Kshatriya said the details of the report were "hard to hear" but that "transparency" was the only path forward.

"This is not about pointing fingers," he said. "It's about making sure that we are holding each other accountable."

Both Boeing and SpaceX were commissioned to handle missions to the ISS more than a decade ago.

Varieties

Abandoned Baby Monkey Finds Comfort in Stuffed Orangutan

A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
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Abandoned Baby Monkey Finds Comfort in Stuffed Orangutan

A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

At a zoo outside Tokyo, the monkey enclosure has become a must-see attraction thanks to an inseparable pair: Punch, a baby Japanese macaque, and his stuffed orangutan companion.

Punch's mother abandoned the macaque when he was born seven months ago at the Ichikawa City Zoo and when an onlooker noticed and alerted zookeepers, they swung into action.

Japanese baby macaques typically cling to their mothers to build muscle strength and for a ‌sense of security, ‌so Punch needed a swift intervention, zookeeper ‌Kosuke ⁠Shikano said. The keepers ⁠experimented with substitutes including rolled-up towels and other stuffed animals before settling on the orange, bug-eyed orangutan, sold by Swedish furniture brand IKEA.

“This stuffed animal has relatively long hair and several easy places to hold," Shikano said. "We thought that its resemblance to a monkey might help ⁠Punch integrate back into the troop later ‌on, and that’s why ‌we chose it."

Punch has rarely been seen without it since, ‌dragging the cuddly toy everywhere even though it is ‌bigger than him, and delighting fans who have flocked to the zoo since videos of the two went viral, Reuters reported.

“Seeing Punch on social media, abandoned by his parents but still trying ‌so hard, really moved me," said 26-year-old nurse Miyu Igarashi. "So when I got the ⁠chance to ⁠meet up with a friend today, I suggested we go see Punch together.”

Shikano thinks Punch's mother abandoned him because of the extreme heat in July when she gave birth.

Punch has had some differences with the other monkeys as he has tried to communicate with them, but zookeepers say that is part of the learning process and he is steadily integrating with the troop.

"I think there will come a day when he no longer needs his stuffed toy," Shikano said.