Enjoy your breakfast and weekend while perusing these brief news items on Tuoi Tre News today, April 5.

Society

-- Hoang Duc Cuong, director of the weather forecast agency, observed on Saturday that Storm Maysak is weakening fast as it approaches the East Vietnam Sea. It is forecast that after crossing the northern area of the Luzon Archipelago off the Philippines, the storm will likely further abate and blow itself out in the East Vietnam Sea. The storm, however, brings about inauspicious weather to the sea, particularly in the areas near its eye.

-- Police in My Tho City, the capital of Tien Giang Province in the Mekong Delta, said on Saturday they are looking into an assault and scouring for two suspects. The two suspects were allegedly hired by an eighth-grader who is studying at a local middle school to assault P.K.A., one of his school mates, on Wednesday right in front of the school entrance to straighten out their previous conflicts. A. was injured while another friend standing near A. was stabbed repeatedly and beaten with an iron tube. Nobody was killed in this attack. 

-- On Saturday morning, over 50 border soldiers in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, some 100 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City, raided nine boats and six barges which were stealthily sucking sand from the bed of the Mo Nhat River in Tan Thanh District. The soldiers opened fire several times to keep the operators of the watercrafts from fleeing. The six barges were carrying roughly 2,000 cubic meters of stolen sand at the time of the swoop.

-- Police in Thang Binh District in the central province of Quang Nam said Saturday that they are investigating an incident in which Nguyen Thanh, a resident, was “buried” alive with soil and rock dumped from a truck which was part of a team working on the expansion of National Highway 1A. That same morning, Thanh and some other locals were at the construction site to stop the workers from proceeding with their work when an unidentified driver began to dump a load of soil and rock from his truck onto Thanh. The injured man was immediately dug up by locals and escaped death.

-- A Saturday seminar held at Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City heard that cardiovascular intervention approaches adopted by one of the infirmary’s departments have saved 2,264 lives over the past 10 years.    

Business

-- Some 1,000 delegates, including many businessmen, partook in a seminar organized Friday in Son La Province in the north to discuss measures to boost the economic growth of northwestern provinces, which boast great tourism and economic potential.

-- While the outlets and economic efficiency of Macadamia, a tree indigenous to Australia, remain questionable, many farmers in Central Highlands provinces have grown over 2,000 hectares of the trees for their nuts. A recent proposal to grow 200,000 hectares of such trees in the region in five years’ time met with a warning from Nguyen Van Nen, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, as the total area around the world is only roughly 80,000 hectares.

Lifestyle

-- In one of its programs aired on Saturday evening, VTC14 – the online channel of digital service provider VTC – apologized for its failure to abide by proper procedures regarding the use of information and images and to blur the characters’ identity details in one of its features. The feature, which aired on VTC14 on Friday last week, showed a group of students in school uniforms relishing shisha, an Oriental tobacco pipe with a long, flexible tube connected to a container. The channel presented their feature as an investigative program and misled the viewers into believing that the reporter was stealthily recording the youngsters getting high on the substance with a hidden camera. In fact, the reporter has been found staging that scene. VTC has suspended the production team for further investigation.