Check out what is in the news today:

Society

-- The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Planning and Investment has proposed the municipal People’s Committee approve a project initiated by Australia’s Trisun Green Energy Co. to build a US$520 million waste treatment plant in the outlying district of Cu Chi.

-- Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai announced on Tuesday that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung had decided to cease granting permits to new riverbed sand mining projects and will ban export of saline sand dredged from rivers and seas in the coming time.

-- According to the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Transport, city dwellers own 7.43 million motorbikes at the end of 2015, up nearly two million against 2011. 

Business

-- Minister of Transport Dinh La Thang proposed at a meeting on Monday that airlines slash airfares over slumping fuel costs. However, Lai Xuan Thanh, head of the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam, stressed all carriers’ ticket prices have always been below the cap set by the government and they can lower their rates at their own will.

-- The State Bank of Vietnam has stipulated that more than 70 million ATM cards in Vietnam must be switched to chip cards by the end of 2020.

-- S. G. Bharadi, acting executive director of India’s Basic Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals & Cosmetics Export Promotion Council (CHEMEXCIL), said on Tuesday that Indian enterprises consider Vietnam their potential-rich market of dyes, dye compounds and basic chemicals. CHEMEXCIL statistics revealed that its members’ turnovers earned from exports to Vietnam totaled $114.02 million in 2014 and 2015.

-- Representatives of insurance firm Prudential Vietnam announced on Tuesday that it had invested VND500 billion ($21.93 million) in government bonds and pledged another VND5.5 trillion ($241.3 million) in 2016.

Education

-- Michael Dirkx, director of the German Schmitz Stiftung Foundation on Tuesday worked with the Department of Education and Training of the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong, promising a grant of approximately VND23 billion ($1.009 million) to rebuild a deteriorating school for hearing-impaired students in Da Lat City.

Lifestyle

-- Twenty-six Vietnamese artists have posed for a photo collection featuring them biting their nails in a bid to raise awareness of the misbelieved medicinal properties of rhino horns in Vietnam and put a stop to the illegal, rampant slaying of the wild animals.