Check out what is in the news today:

Society

-- Work will start in early 2017 on a 101.28-km highway, which stretches from some districts in Dong Nai Province bordering Ho Chi Minh City to the south-central province of Binh Thuan, its developer said Tuesday. The cost is projected to be more than VND 17.7 trillion (US$785 million).

-- Trung Nam Group, a local realty developer, has announced they had just been named the investor of a project meant to relieve tide-related flooding in Ho Chi Minh City, with climate change taken into consideration, by the municipal People’s Committee. The company is slated to begin work on the project, worth nearly VND 10 trillion ($443.5 million), later this month.

-- The body of a 43-year-old Swedish tourist was taken to a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday. The previous evening, he and two of his Vietnamese friends had got stuck in a whirlpool while swimming in Vung Tau, a resort town approximately 120 kilometers from the southern metropolis. 

-- Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong urged authorities in the Mekong Delta province of Long An to take all possible measures and mobilize available resources to minimize the damage caused by salinization during his working session with provincial leaders on Tuesday. Other delta provinces have also been taking drastic measures to cope with the crisis.

-- A captain and four crew members who returned safely to a fishing port in Nha Trang City, Khanh Hoa Province on Tuesday reported that an iron-clad vessel bearing Chinese characters had slammed hard into their boat while they were fishing in Vietnam’s Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelago waters on March 7.

Business

-- Many enterprises have voiced their grievances over the tardiness of value-added tax refunding and asserted they had never been paid interest on the arrears as stipulated.

-- Nguyen Ngoc Tuan, deputy chair of the People’s Committee of the central city of Da Nang, said during a meeting on Tuesday with representatives of the World Bank that a project meant to relocate a train station and to facilitate urban development, worth VND 9.93 trillion ($442.23 million), will kick off in the coming time after being suspended for years.

Lifestyle

-- The grand finale of the Miss Vietnam beauty pageant is poised to take place on August 27 in Ho Chi Minh City, a comeback to the southern metropolis after 14 years, the organizers announced in a press conference on Tuesday.