The Taipei Zoo has been nominated in the Giant Panda Zoo Awards for the second year in a row, organizers of the online prize dedicated to giant panda conservation said.
Yuan Zai (圓仔), nominated for both “Panda Cub of the Year” and “Panda Personality of 2013: The Bear” and won the latter, has been shortlisted for an award again this year, according to Belgian panda enthusiast Jeroen Jacobs, who initiated the campaign in 2012.
This year, the young panda vies for “Panda Personality of 2014.”
Photo courtesy of Taipei Zoo
The now 50kg Yuan Zai has been wildly popular since her birth at the zoo in July last year to parents Tuan Tuan (團團) and Yuan Yuan (圓圓), who were a gift from China five years ago.
The other nominee for an award from Taiwan this year is Chen Yu-yen (陳玉燕), a worker at the Taipei Zoo who is in the running for “Human Panda Personality.”
Among the awards’ 10 categories, the “human” section was established to highlight individuals who are making a difference in panda conservation, Jacobs said.
Chen is to compete against four people from Belgium, China and Malaysia.
“I invite all panda fans around the world to support those who are working very hard in the field of panda conservation each day of the year by casting your vote,” Jacobs said.
Voting is open on the Giant Panda Zoo Web site until Jan. 18.
About 240,000 ballots were cast during last year’s competition.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching