Politics

-- Vietnam and Japan inaugurated a ‘friendship train’ traveling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday. There will be 30 train trips between now and September 23.

-- Vietnamese Defense Minister Phung Quang Thanh met Tuesday with his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan in Brunei’s capital Bandar Seri Begawan on the sidelines of the seventh ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting. The Chinese minister said that his country always treasures its relationship with Vietnam, and it will continue strengthening the tie in all areas, including defense cooperation. 

Society

-- Young people account for nearly half of the jobless in Vietnam last year, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency dealing with labour issues. ILO elaborated that their ages range from 15 to 24 years old.  

-- Vietnam saw a sharp decrease, from 58 percent to 10 percent, in the number of poor people living on less than US$1.1 a day, even below the extreme poverty line of $1.25, between the early 1990s and 2010, according to Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank's vice president for East Asia and Pacific.

-- Four people, including three brothers, in the Mekong Delta province of Hau Giang have been arrested for robbing sleeping people in their homes, local police said Wednesday. They were found looking around for people wearing golden necklaces in daylight and cutting their net mosquitoes when they were sleeping to rob the jewelry pieces at night.

-- Ho Chi Minh City police have just captured two people for helping a third man blackmailing his own mother. The two were receiving VND100 million ($4,762) from the woman in a restaurant in District 3 when the police stormed in and nabbed them.

Business

-- Farmers in the central city of Da Lat are in dire straits in the wake of a never-seen-before hailstorm that caused damage worth billions of Vietnamese dong on Tuesday.

-- The Ministry of Finance hiked import tax on gasoline by 3 percentage points to 19 percent on Wednesday, but it has yet to ask any fuel distributor to cut retail prices. Before it had increased the tax and asked for a price slash at the same time.

-- Local banks have bought over 100 tonnes of gold to pay to people during the past one year, according to an announcement released by the State Bank of Vietnam late Wednesday.

Sports

-- Vietnam will sign a local coach to lead its under-23 and national football teams on Friday. Hoang Van Phuc, 49, will head the two teams at the 2014 AFF Suzuki Cup, to be hosted by Singapore and Vietnam, and the 27th Southeast Asian Games, scheduled to be held in Myanmar at the end of this year.