Check out what is in the news today, March 22

Politics

-- Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee Nguyen Thanh Phong on Tuesday met with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during his four-day visit ending Friday to Vietnam.

Society

-- Half of the Vietnamese population have gained access to digital terrestrial television instead of analog TV, the Ministry of Information and Communications announced at a conference on Tuesday.

-- On Tuesday, a rescue ship from the Zone 2 Maritime Search and Rescue Coordination Center in the central city of Da Nang brought to safety two fishermen who underwent a medical emergency while fishing on two different boats on Vietnam’s Hoang Sa (Spratly) waters.

-- The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Transport has proposed the transport ministry require car-hailing service providers, such as GrabCar and V.Car, to bear their trademarks on the vehicles’ front doors to ensure fair competition with traditional cab companies.

-- Experts announced at a Tuesday seminar the preliminary results of a research project jointly conducted by the University of Can Tho and the Netherlands’ Utrecht University which reveal the worrying soil sinking phenomenon that the Mekong Delta region has experienced over recent years.

-- A court in the northern province of Hoa Binh on Tuesday gave away nine death penalties along with life sentences and years-long imprisonment to 23 defendants for trafficking 1,415 bricks of heroin between 2012 and 2015.

-- Police in Xuyen Moc District, Ba Ria- Vung Tau Province, approximately 120 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City, have revealed they are hunting for the owner of about 3,000 poppy plants illegally grown on May Tau Mountain.

Business

-- The Vietnam trade commission in Brazil has urged Vietnamese competent agencies to tighten inspection on meat imported from the Latin American nation, which is looking into cases of ‘dirty meat.’

-- More than 92 percent of those working and training in the tourism sector of the south-central province of Khanh Hoa, home to Nha Trang resort city, have an inadequate command of foreign languages, particularly English, delegates told a Tuesday meeting.

Education 

-- A Vietnamese student team won the first prize of a category for the third time in a row at the Asia round of the Shell Eco-marathon, the world’s largest annual student contest of designing fuel-efficient vehicles, at the Monday finale in Singapore.

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