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Mask Festival Brings 'Buzz and Beauty' to Benin's Capital

Paradegoers pose with an egungun, a traditional Yoruba figure, at the Porto Novo Mask Festival. Yanick Folly / AFP
Paradegoers pose with an egungun, a traditional Yoruba figure, at the Porto Novo Mask Festival. Yanick Folly / AFP
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Mask Festival Brings 'Buzz and Beauty' to Benin's Capital

Paradegoers pose with an egungun, a traditional Yoruba figure, at the Porto Novo Mask Festival. Yanick Folly / AFP
Paradegoers pose with an egungun, a traditional Yoruba figure, at the Porto Novo Mask Festival. Yanick Folly / AFP

Spectators poured into Benin's capital for a new festival celebrating traditional masks over the weekend as the West African country seeks to attract visitors and showcase its cultural heritage.
The three-day Porto Novo Mask Festival drew participants from across Benin as well as neighboring Togo and Burkina Faso, said AFP.
There was excitement in the crowd as spectators caught sight of some masked and costumed figures rarely seen outside their respective regions.
The main street hummed with traditional music while officials and members of the public watched displays of acrobatics and stilt-walkers perched on eight-meter (26-foot) poles.
Benin's government and city authorities launched the event to replace the Porto Novo International Festival, usually held in January, and there were both secular and religious masks on show.
Voodoo, known locally as Vodun, is widely practiced in Benin. It worships gods and natural spirits while showing respect to revered ancestors.
"I'm very moved -- I saw masks I'd never had the chance to see before," said Vodun religious dignitary Severin Alode, 43. "I've never seen such a buzz. It's a first."
The festival's main attractions were Gonouko, towering masked figures from Porto Novo, alongside an array of other masks and appearances from Zangbeto, traditional Vodun guardians of the night.
Even the rare Hounve mask was on display, as Vodun dignitary Adanklounon Ado Setondji explained.
"Our parents knew how to hide the Hounve, but as we are in the mindset of promotion, we have to take the masks out and show them to the public," he said.
Before the festival, rituals took place away from spectators.
Bale Atchade, a 65-year-old Vodun dignitary, said there were ceremonies centered on resolving social problems and others linked to infertility.
'Source of pride'
Ayaba Collete Dossou, a member of the national Vodun rites committee, said the Porto Novo festival showed "the beauty of our culture and our wealth."
The city's mayor Charlemagne Yankoty said the event "puts Porto Novo in the spotlight."
"The mask festival will enhance Benin's culture and reveal its full value in terms of heritage and culture," he said.
Earlier this year, the government revamped another of Benin's cultural celebrations -- its famous Voodoo festival -- in a bid to attract more visitors.
"Vodun is of economic interest to us, since tourism is an important sector," said President Patrice Talon at the festival in January.
He said he hoped that event would help explain "what Vodun is and how it is practiced" to domestic as well as foreign tourists.
There were signs his wishes were being fulfilled at the mask festival in Porto Novo, too.
Frederica Nzamba, a 30-year-old visitor with Beninese roots, told AFP she came to "better discover and understand Benin's culture" after 16 years living abroad.
The festival, she said, was a "source of pride."

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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.