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Taipei Zoo's Veteran Giant Panda Celebrates 20th Birthday

Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
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Taipei Zoo's Veteran Giant Panda Celebrates 20th Birthday

Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

With politics set aside, well-wishers gathered to wish the Taipei zoo’s senior panda a happy 20th birthday.
Visitors crowded around Yuanyuan's enclosure to take photos of her with a birthday cake in the shape of the number 20.
Yuanyuan was born in China and arrived in 2008 with her partner Tuantuan. He died in 2022 at age 18 but not before fathering two female cubs, Yuanzai and Yuanbao, now 11 and 4 respectively and still living at the zoo.
Danielle Shu, a 20-year-old Brazilian student in Taiwan, said she found online clips of the pandas an enjoyable distraction. “And I just find it really funny and cute,” The Associated Press quoted Shu as saying.
Giant pandas are native only to China, and Beijing bestows them as a sign of political amity. Yuanyuan and Tuantuan arrived in Taiwan during a period of relative calm between the sides, which split amid civil war in 1949. China claims the island its own territory, to be annexed by military force if necessary.
Faced with declining habitat and a notoriously low birthrate, giant panda populations have declined to around 1,900 in the mountains of western China, while 600 pandas live in zoos and breeding centers in China and around the world.

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Indonesia Arrests Man for Selling Rhino Horn Via Social Media

A white rhinoceros calf stands next to its mother Nola at Lunaret Zoo in Montpellier July 31, 2024. (Photo by Sylvain THOMAS / AFP)
A white rhinoceros calf stands next to its mother Nola at Lunaret Zoo in Montpellier July 31, 2024. (Photo by Sylvain THOMAS / AFP)
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Indonesia Arrests Man for Selling Rhino Horn Via Social Media

A white rhinoceros calf stands next to its mother Nola at Lunaret Zoo in Montpellier July 31, 2024. (Photo by Sylvain THOMAS / AFP)
A white rhinoceros calf stands next to its mother Nola at Lunaret Zoo in Montpellier July 31, 2024. (Photo by Sylvain THOMAS / AFP)

Indonesian authorities arrested a man trying to sell elephant tusks and the horns of critically endangered rhinos via social media.

The illegal wildlife trade remains rampant in Indonesia, where law enforcement is lax, but the arrested man could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted, the environmental ministry said in a statement late Wednesday.

South Sumatra police began an investigation after seeing posts on Facebook earlier this year offering parts of protected wildlife for sale, AFP reported.

A 60-year-old man, identified only by the initials "ZA", was arrested last week during a transaction while trying to sell a rhino horn and a pipe made of an elephant tusk in Palembang, South Sumatra.

Police found seven more rhino horns and at least four elephant tusks at his house.

"It seems like he's very experienced in wildlife trading," the environmental ministry said.

In June police arrested a gang of poachers suspected of killing 26 critically endangered Javan rhinos in Ujung Kulon National Park since 2018.

They once numbered in the thousands across Southeast Asia, but have been hard hit by rampant poaching and human encroachment on their habitat, and the environment ministry says there are only around 80 of the beasts left in the wild.

Sumatran rhinos have also been declared critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature or IUCN with fewer than 50 remaining.