Panda Fans Get the Bear Facts

--Ten panda-loving Los Angeles area youngsters treated their Chinese hosts to a rendition of “Jingle Bells” during a party in their honor at Peking’s Huadu Hotel. The Americans, who had helped raise more than $90,000 to save giant pandas, are on a busy two-week tour of China arranged by the China Wildlife Assn. “We haven’t had a single teeny moment to breathe, it’s been so busy,” David Kim, 16, said. The Californians visited Shanghai, Hangzhou and the Wolong panda preserve in southwest Sichuan Province before arriving in Peking on Monday. “We saw a lot of pandas,” said Kevin Lin, 11. The Americans, ages 10 to 16, organized a Save-the-Panda committee in July when China sent two of the rare animals to Los Angeles for the Summer Olympics. They sold Chinese-made panda pins for $1 each at the Los Angeles Zoo. China has the only wild giant panda population. The animals are threatened by starvation because of a cyclical die-off of arrow bamboo, their favorite food, and the encroachment of civilization on their range.

--Actress Pia Zadora started the new year by giving birth in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan to a girl who “looks just like her,” Zadora’s manager, Tino Barzie, said. The baby, Kady Zadora Riklis, named after the lead character the actress played in the 1980 movie “Butterfly,” weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces when she was born shortly after 2 a.m. “They are fine. They’re doing fantastic,” Barzie said. He said that the 28-year-old Zadora “has not stopped talking, she’s so excited” and that Zadora’s husband, millionaire businessman Meshulam Riklis, 59, was with her during the delivery.

--If the Michigan-based Unicorn Hunters have their way, “mandate” and “Star Wars” won’t be part of the language in 1985 or after. The 10th annual Unicorn Hunters’ banishment list includes “vertical access device” and the suffix “-busters.” Unicorn Hunters archivist William T. Rabe, a journalism instructor at Lake Superior State, said that “mandate” topped the list. “There were hundreds of nominations of ‘mandate,’ and not all from disappointed Democrats,” whose presidential candidate, Walter F. Mondale, was buried under a landslide by Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan, Rabe said. Joseph J. Dary of Toronto, a Canadian Press editor, said, “ ‘Star Wars,’ applied to a military defense system, gives the impression of meaning something which it doesn’t.” “Vertical access device,” said John Constantino of East Lansing, is bureaucratese for “elevator.” The suffix “-busters” follows the pattern set by “-arama” and “anatomy of a . . . “ Rabe said. “They are all drawn from the entertainment world and then applied to almost everything, as ‘inflation busters’ and ‘crime busters.’ ”