What you need to know in Vietnam today:

Politics

-- Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong on Thursday hosted a reception in Hanoi for former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who stressed the need to intensify exchanges of high-ranking delegations and highlighted the importance and historic meaning of the upcoming U.S. visit by the Party chief.

-- Chairman of the People’s Committee of Long An Province Do Huu Lam on Thursday sent a diplomatic note to Chieng Am, Governor of Cambodia’s Svay Rieng Province, on recent violent actions by Cambodian extremists in the Vietnamese locality, requesting Cambodian authorities to find appropriate solutions for rectifying the situation and to tighten control and management in order to prevent similar cases from recurring in the future.

-- Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong on Thursday met with newly accredited Vietnamese ambassadors and chiefs of the country’s overseas representative offices in Hanoi, urging them to thoroughly grasp and fully perform their assigned missions while creatively applying the Party and State’s external guidelines and policies to ensure a peaceful and stable environment for national development.

Society

-- The Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs has proposed a fund worth VND39.4 trillion (US$1.8 billion) for Program 135 in the 2016-20 period during a meeting between the committee’s leaders and Deputy Prime Minister Vu Van Ninh on Thursday. Program 135 is designed to improve infrastructure and boost production in extremely disadvantaged areas, including border communes, communes in war safety zones, and very poor hamlets.

-- Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have launched a three-month crackdown on human trafficking along the Vietnamese borders that will last until September as the issue has become more complicated recently, according to what was discussed at a conference in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho on Thursday. Vietnam uncovered 334 human trafficking cases and detained 616 traffickers in 2014, while busting 136 cases, seizing 227 traffickers, and rescuing 303 victims in the first half of 2015.

-- The number of traffic accidents in the first half of 2015 fell 12.85 percent year on year to roughly 11,180 cases, leaving about 4,480 dead and 10,150 others injured, down 4.5 percent and 17.24 percent respectively, according to a tele-conference chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Thursday to review the performance of the National Committee on Road Safety.

Business

-- The Vietnam-Laos Trade Fair opened on Thursday at the International Convention and Exhibition Center in Vientiane, attended by around 200 enterprises from the two countries that showcase many goods such as building materials, agro-forestry-fishing products, processed food, garments and textiles, handicrafts, interior furniture, plastics, and consumer goods.