Have a nice Sunday!

Politics

-- Vietnam's Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong stressed there remain overwhelming obstacles obstructing the fight against corruption in Vietnam when he and other officials met electors in Hanoi on Saturday.

Society

-- A representative of an Internet service provider revealed on Saturday that repairs to a rupture to the infamous submarine cable system AAG, crucial to Vietnam’s Internet connectivity, will not be completed until August 21. Users in the country have had to surf the Internet at a snail’s pace since the cable system broke on Tuesday at a section around 80 kilometers from Hong Kong. 

-- Phan Ngoc Tho, deputy chair of the People’s Committee in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue, confirmed to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Saturday that only those wishing to use the provincial administration’s brand name bun bo Hue, or Hue-style beef noodle soup, must obtain a permit to do so. The regulation, included in a set of rules recently released by the administration to place trademark protection on its signature dish, has sparked public concern and outrage for its infeasibility and irrationality.

-- The People’s Committee in the north-central province of Quang Binh has instructed localities to tighten checks on the waste that might have been, or will be, brought into the province by the Vietnamese subsidiary of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group. The subsidiary, located in nearby Ha Tinh Province, is currently among the accused as the country probes its illegal burial of more than 390 tons of waste in Ha Tinh in July. 

-- The Vietnam Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC) said on Saturday that six Vietnamese fishermen of a fishing boat from the south-central province of Binh Dinh are on board a Hong Kong-flagged ship on its way to Shanghai, China, before returning to Vietnam safe and sound later. The Chinese vessel crashed into the Vietnamese boat around 85 nautical miles east of Vietnam’s Nha Trang waters on Tuesday and rescued the crewmen who had been flung into the sea.

-- Thousands of trucks, cars and motorbikes were caught in a serious traffic jam on streets leading to the entrance area of Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Tan Binh District, Ho Chi Minh City, on Saturday noon.

Business

-- Experts and industry insiders have called for solutions for boosting Vietnamese industries’ competitive edges in response to the findings of a study recently released by the International Labor Organization, which showed that roughly 56 percent of the labor force, particularly in the garment industry, in five Southeast Asian nations, including Vietnam, face risks of losing jobs to robots over the next two decades.

-- The Animal Health Department in the central province of Quang Ngai confirmed on Saturday that a flock of nearly 5,000 chickens and ducks raised in Son Tinh District had tested positive for the H5N1 avian flu, the second case in the district since early July.

Education

-- The American University in Vietnam held a ceremony on Saturday to kick off its new academic year in Da Nang City. The school leaders also inked partnership agreements with several prestigious U.S. universities during the event.