Pandamania sweeps Hong Kong as city hopes to lure back tourists

Hong Kong is in the midst of pandamania as the city is trying to use the cute animals to lure back tourists.

The panda population in Hong Kong reached six after two new adult giant pandas were gifted to the special administrative region to mark the 27th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. The pair, An An and Ke Ke, will meet the public for the first time next month.

At Hong Kong’s Ocean Park, the home to the pair of pandas, the excitement to see them is running high.

"We don't have pandas in the Philippines and it's one of the things we really want to see here in Ocean Park and especially here in Hong Kong," said a tourist.

"They are rare animals. You know that all pandas are belonging to China. It is interesting," another tourist said.

Last month, the Ocean Park held a vibrant celebration to mark the 100th day since the birth of the first panda twins in Hong Kong.

The new-born pair, a female and a male, are the offspring of Ying Ying and Le Le, giant pandas gifted by the central government to Hong Kong in 2007.

Officials in Hong Kong are hopeful that the pandas will help to boost tourism in Hong Kong, and have encouraged businesses to capitalize on the popularity of the new pandas to create a "panda economy".

Analysts said the key to driving the economy and bringing in more tourists is to offer something unique and different to other places.

"It might not be a game changer to fully change the challenges that Hong Kong is facing right now. And of course, having pandas can actually give businesses more ideas to cross sell, etc, but at the end of the day, it also depends on the quality of the products that they offer," said Gary Ng, a senior economist of Natixis Hong Kong.

Pandamania sweeps Hong Kong as city hopes to lure back tourists

The death toll from a landfill collapse in the central Philippine city of Cebu has risen to eight by Monday morning as search and rescue operations continued for another 28 missing people.

The landfill collapse occurred on Thursday as dozens of sanitation workers were working at the site. The disaster has already caused injuries of 18 people.

Family members of the missing people said the rescue progress is slow, and the hope for the survival of their loved ones is fading.

"For me, maybe I’ve accepted the worst result already because the garbage is poisonous and yesterday, it was raining very hard the whole day. Maybe they’ve been poisoned. For us, alive or dead, I hope we can get their bodies out of the garbage rubble," said Maria Kareen Rubin, a family member of a victim.

Families have set up camps on high ground near the landfill, awaiting news of their relatives. Some people at the site said cries for help could still be heard hours after the landfill collapsed, but these voices gradually faded away.

Bienvenido Ranido, who lost his wife in the disaster, said he can't believe all that happened.

"After they gave my wife oxygen, my kids and I were expecting that she would be saved that night because she was still alive. But the night came and till the next morning, they didn't manage to save her," he said.

Death toll in central Philippine landfill collapse rises to eight