Check out what is in the news in Vietnam today:

Society

-- The number of dengue fever patients in many cities and provinces, especially Ho Chi Minh City, has continuously increased despite efforts by health workers to curb the disease. The country’s most crowded city had more than 10,000 patients in the year to October 1, an 80 percent rise compared with the same period last year. Five among them have died.

-- On October 4, a Vietnamese was shot to death by armed robbers in Angola, the Vietnamese embassy in the southern African country said. The victim was identified as Le Van Que, 32, from the north-central province of Ha Tinh.

-- A pilot of national carrier Vietnam Airlines was captured in Japan on Wednesday for carrying goods which he had not paid for out of a shop one day earlier. An official from Vietnam Airlines told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the carrier is working with Japanese authorities to bail the pilot, as he believes that the case is not very serious.

-- Pham Viet Huong, deputy head of the Overseas Labor Management Department, has required labor exporter Simco Song Da to protect the rights of Vietnamese workers who were beaten by Chinese contractors in Algeria. The seven beaten workers were sent to work for a Chinese company in Algeria by Simco Song Da and were swatted after they refused to work, as the Chinese company failed to observe contract terms and arbitrarily change its payment method.

-- A recent research shows that air pollution from China is spreading to Vietnam, while a number of Vietnamese cities and provinces have been enveloped in fog over the last couple of days due to forest fires in Indonesia.

Business

-- More than 150 Vietnamese and Japanese firms operating in Vietnam on Wednesday met with a Japanese enterprise delegation from Osaka in Ho Chi Minh City. According to the Ho Chi Minh City Investment and Trade Promotion Center, this is the first time the Osaka delegation has come to Vietnam to interact with Vietnamese enterprises as well as to find customers and suppliers.

Lifestyle

-- Officials in the southern province of Ca Mau have recently imposed a VND5 million (US$223) fine on Huynh Kim Hai, a member of theVietnamese Association of Photographic Artists’ Ca Mau chapter, for circulating false information on a provincial photo contest. Hai, under the Facebook name of Rober Hai, posted a photo from the contest and claimed that it was a cheat and violated the competition’s regulations. However, the entry was later confirmed to be eligible for the contest.