Japan’s oldest giant panda Tan Tan dies
Compiled by CHARLES RAMENDRAN, BEH YUEN HUI and R.ARAVINTAN

TAN TAN, the oldest giant panda in Japan, died of heart disease in Kobe, major Chinese dailies reported.

The female panda breathed her last on Sunday. She was 29, equivalent to roughly 100 years in human age.

Born Shuang Shuang at the China Conservation and Research Centre for Giant Pandas in 1995, Tan Tan arrived at Oji Zoo at the age of five.

She was due to return home in July 2020, but the trip was postponed following the Covid-19 outbreak. Eight months later, she was diagnosed with age-related cardiac disease.

After the pandemic, the zoo and Chinese officials reached a consensus for Tan Tan to continue her stay in Japan due to the need for medical treatment and the risks of transporting the aged animal.

Following her death, Japan now has eight giant pandas in two zoos.

> Nanyang Siang Pau reported that a 75-year-old Singaporean man was sentenced to jail for 21 years and three months for sexually assaulting his daughter and granddaughter when they were kids.

Among the 35 charges, he was accused of molesting his daughter, then seven, between 1984 and 1986.

When the daughter grew up, she chose to forgive her father. In 2009, the daughter, now 46, placed her four-year-old girl under the care of the father.

Little did she know that the child would face the same ordeal as her.

The little girl was repeatedly molested and forced to perform oral sex.

> Cantopop star Kelly Chen is a big fan of durian, Sin Chew Daily reported.

The songbird once finished a whole crate of the thorny fruit with her co-workers by the roadside near a Malaysian airport.

She said she was dazzled by the King of Fruits upon tasting it when she came to Malaysia many years ago.

The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.
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TAN TAN, the oldest giant panda in Japan, died of heart disease in Kobe, major Chinese dailies reported.