Enjoy your breakfast while perusing these brief news items on Tuoi Tre News today, January 18, 2015.

Society

-- A batch of 1,888 Candino Swiss watches featuring the Vietnamese flag and map and reiterating Vietnam’s sovereignty over Truong Sa (Spratly) and Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelagos was introduced in Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday.

-- International weather forecasting agencies announced on Saturday that tropical storm Mekkhala has been formed and is brewing off the Philippines’ central coastal area. The Vietnamese National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting predicts that after making landfall in the Philippines, there are high chances that the storm will weaken into a tropical depression before entering the East Vietnam Sea and is thus unlikely to affect Vietnamese climate. 

-- Local firefighters on Saturday morning rescued five members of a family, including a middle-aged expat Vietnamese man, from a blaze which raged in a five-floor house in Le Chan District of northern Vietnam’s Hai Phong City.

Business

-- The Vietnamese Prime Minister has just given his nod to a project to build a tourism and entertainment complex that houses a casino in Phu Quoc, renowned globally as a paradise-like island, in the Mekong Delta province of Kien Giang.

-- The Airport Corporation of Vietnam and the People’s Committee of Binh Dinh Province in the central region on Saturday started work on the construction and expansion of the civil aviation zone of the province’s Phu Cat Airport.

-- Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup on Saturday opened two new VinMart supermarkets in Hanoi, one at Vinhomes Riverside in Long Bien District and the other at Van Quan in Ha Dong District. The corporation has also started work on its Vincom Mega Mall Thao Dien commercial center in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City.

Education

-- At a Saturday meeting which marked the 20^th anniversary of the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program (FETP) and was attended by U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius, delegates stressed that Fulbright University Vietnam, the country’s first-ever American-style non-profit private university, will be established and reach world-class standards.

Lifestyle

-- Tran Binh Minh, general director of national broadcaster Vietnam Television, on Saturday afternoon decided to cease the airing of a program called “Dieu Uoc Thu 7” (Saturday Wishes) and suspend the show’s director and editor from work. The decision followed the revelation of the program producer’s blunders in one of its episodes, which was broadcast on the broadcaster’s VTV3 channel on Saturday last week.