Check out what is in the news today, December 28

Society

-- Civil servants and office workers in Ho Chi Minh City will celebrate their seven-day Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday starting January 26, the municipal administration has announced.

-- Tuoi Tre (Youth) reporters have bagged four prizes handed away by the National Traffic Safety Committee for their articles and features promoting traffic safety.

-- One hundred officers and soldiers from a military school located in the south-central province of Binh Dinh will be helping farmers in Phu Cat District improve impoverished soil, the irrigation system and roads over the next three weeks. 

-- An appeal court in Hanoi on Tuesday upheld the 30-year sentence for the former director of the Agriculture and Rural Development Bank of Vietnam (Agribank)’s South Hanoi branch who had been involved in a foreigner-related corruption case that caused losses in loans of more than US$122.6 million to the state-owned bank in the 2008-12 period. Some of her 17 accomplices received lighter sentences though.

-- Police in District 9, Ho Chi Minh City have said they are detaining a gang for trading in counterfeit money and robbing one of their customers last week. 

Business

-- China’s Quality Control, Inspection and Quarantine Bureau has notified the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the East Asian country will only purchase rice from 22 Vietnamese exporters out of 31 applicants starting New Year Day.

-- Apricot blossom flower farmers in Ho Chi Minh City and Mekong Delta provinces have been grappling hard to save their blossoms, one of the Tet (Lunar New Year)’s fixtures, from fickle weather as the holiday is drawing near.

-- As of Tuesday, the central city of Da Nang has drawn more than 138,000 tourist arrivals, including approximately 75,000 foreign visits, despite inauspicious weather, a 21-percent rise against the same period last year, the municipal Department of Tourism has announced.

-- Nguyen Hoang Minh, deputy director of the Ho Chi Minh City branch of the State Bank of Vietnam, requested at a Tuesday working session that banks replenish their ATMs with sufficient amounts of money when demand for cash withdrawal spikes prior to Tet, and ensure their machines will not break down en masse during the season of high demand like previous years.

-- Vietnam spent up to US$7.64 billion importing 17.65 million metric tons of steel of various kinds as of December 15, according to the latest statistics released by the General Department of Vietnam Customs.

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