Cheap facsimiles of $100 bills waft in the tropical breeze, littering Ho Chi Minh City's sidewalks with Benjamin Franklin's face. Elsewhere in Vietnam, US President Richard M. Nixon has become a gritty fashion icon, giving politicized street cred to "urban wear" clothes.
President Benigno Aquino III is set to break tradition by having his first state visit outside the member-states Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and opting instead to go straight to the United States. ABS-CBN's TV Patrol reported that all post-1986 Philippine presidents, including President Aquino's mother Corazon Aquino, first visit neighboring countries in the ASEAN.
A mass grave has been found containing the remains of 30 communist soldiers believed to have been killed during the Tet Offensive, seen by many as the turning point to the Vietnam War. Authorities had searched unsuccessfully for the grave in Quang Tri province in central Vietnam for three years based on information provided by American veterans who said some 158 soldiers may be buried there, said Maj. Col. Tran Trong Trung of the provincial military command.
A Vietnam War-era artillery shell exploded and killed a villager in southern Vietnam as he was cutting it up for scrap metal. Long Duc village chief Truong Hoang Hai in the southern province of Soc Trang said the man was killed in the explosion Monday that also seriously wounded his wife. The man was in his early 40s.
A week is a long time in politics, as they say, but in this internet-centric age, a week in the the web can be even longer. To keep up with what's happening in Asia, every Monday I recap my pick of Asia's key tech/digital news and articles from the previous week, while also including a round-up of the week's posts from this blog too.
Vietnam's president has ordered more than 17,000 prisoners freed as part of the country's annual National Day amnesty, officials said Saturday.
Twenty of those to be released have been charged with national security crimes, but no high-profile pro-democracy dissidents were included. Several were ethnic minorities from the restive Central Highlands bordering Cambodia.
Well, the image of “travelling in tour groups” has taken a severe battering of late. First, there was the Hong Kong tour guide rant at a group of Chinese tourists for not shopping enough, which makes you wonder how long these zero-commission tours should be allowed to continue. Then, we watched in horror as a bungled attempt to rescue a group of tourists from the Hong Thai bus in Manila unfolded before our very eyes this week.
A tropical storm that destroyed homes and rice fields in Vietnam caused nine deaths and a fishing boat with 10 crew is missing, officials said Wednesday. Tropical storm Mindulle, which slammed the north-central coast on Tuesday, destroyed or damaged more than 31,000 houses and damaged over 89,000 acres (36,000 hectares) of rice fields in hardest-hit Nghe An province, local disaster official Nguyen Van Vinh said.
A new Border Guard Force (BGF) program deadline for the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA) also known as Mongla group has been scheduled. At an August 20 meeting, the Burmese junta instructed the two ceasefire groups to submit their agreement on transforming into BGF by the first week of September, said Shan Herald News.
A disaster official says seven people have been reported missing and feared dead in a landslide that happened during sunny weather in northern Vietnam. Pham Quoc Hung says more than 100 soldiers have been mobilized to search for the victims, including two children who were buried under up to 30 feet (10 meters) of earth and rocks following the landslide Sunday in Yen Bai province.
I recently posted details of Vietnam's authoritarian approach to combating internet-addiction in young people. Government policy, for August only, has closed down internet cafes within 200 metres of schools while late night curfews have been placed on all other internet cafes in Hanoi.
The express train from Lao Cai on the border of China to the Vietnam capital Hanoi is very comfortable, particularly in first class. The night passed without incident and I thought vaguely of my Honda motorbike Beauty, somewhere back in cargo, and hoped they had put her up securely on her stand. There was no need to worry - the next morning she was waiting for me on the platform and I loaded her up, pushed her a kilometre or down the road to get petrol (very ingeniously they drain the bikes of fuel before they are loaded but don't give you anything on arrival) and then rode 10km through the dawn streets of Hanoi to the old quarter.
Vietnam
