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Used to Fresh Air, Brazil's Modernist Capital Chokes on Wildfire Smoke

An aerial view of the city of Manuas shrouded in smoke caused by forest fires in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, taken on August 28, 2024. (Photo by MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP)
An aerial view of the city of Manuas shrouded in smoke caused by forest fires in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, taken on August 28, 2024. (Photo by MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP)
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Used to Fresh Air, Brazil's Modernist Capital Chokes on Wildfire Smoke

An aerial view of the city of Manuas shrouded in smoke caused by forest fires in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, taken on August 28, 2024. (Photo by MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP)
An aerial view of the city of Manuas shrouded in smoke caused by forest fires in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, taken on August 28, 2024. (Photo by MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP)

Brasilia's iconic futuristic buildings, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, have been engulfed in a thick haze of smoke in recent days.
Several parts of Brazil are suffocating due to raging wildfires, but the fumes are new to the modernist capital, whose residents are used to expansive blue skies and clean air during the dry season, said AFP.
"I have lived in Brasilia for 30 years, this is the first time I have seen this kind of smoke," said Moacir do Nascimento Santo, 47, a driver with two young children.
"(It) compromises our breathing, our vision, and it is worrying for the children -- they suffer with all this smoke," he told AFP.
Situated in the center of the country, Brasilia was carefully planned from scratch on an empty plateau to become the capital in 1960, and is now home to 2.8 million people.
Its wide avenues, organized neighborhoods and green, open spaces are a world apart from other Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo -- and much less polluted.
Forest fires have been raging for several weeks in Brazil, particularly in the Amazon rainforest in the north and the immense Pantanal wetland in the center-west of the country.
The smoke engulfing Brasilia is a result of fires near the capital, but also winds bringing in smoke from other regions, particularly the southeastern state of Sao Paulo, several hundred kilometers away, where bushfires devastated thousands of hectares of agricultural land last week.
Authorities say most fires are human-caused.
'At war against fire'
Many residents of Brasilia have resorted to using protective masks when venturing outside.
"This time of year is usually dry, but this is the first time I've seen the cloud of smoke," said Isaac Tomas, a civil servant in the Chamber of Deputies.
"It's very worrying. I already have problems with rhinitis during the drought, but now, with the smoke, it's even worse."
The Brasilia Environmental Institute on Sunday said the air quality was "very poor." The situation had improved by Wednesday but not in all parts of the city.
Local health services reported a spike in cases of rhinitis, asthma attacks, pneumonia and conjunctivitis.
At Santa Lucia Hospital, the number of patients treated for respiratory problems on Monday was twenty times higher than average, according to Lucas Albanaz, a manager at the facility.
The doctor said patients were "suffering from coughing, red eyes, dry mouth or skin, and symptoms of dehydration."
Brazil has long struggled with fires, largely linked to slash-and-burn techniques used for illegal agricultural expansion.
An extreme drought, linked by experts to climate change, has exacerbated the situation this year.
Environment Minister Marina Silva said this week that Brazil was "at war against fire and crime."
Due to the drought and "extreme temperatures," the government on Tuesday extended an order that requires organizers of concerts, festivals and other large events, including football matches, to provide free drinking water to spectators.
The measure first came into force last November, after the death of a 23-year-old woman at a Taylor Swift concert in Rio amid a heatwave.

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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
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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.