Good morning from Tuoi Tre News!

Society

-- A 221-hectare area in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City will soon be off-limits to personal vehicles, according to a new plan initiated by the municipal Department of Transport to transform the city’s downtown into a pedestrian-only area.

-- Vietnam-based websites have suffered close to 7,700 cyber attacks in the first three months of 2017, according to a recent report by state-run Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team, which named mobile phones, cloud storage and IoT devices the most common targets of such attacks.

-- Excessive sand mining has been found responsible for lowering water levels in the Red River in northern Vietnam, experts said at a seminar on Wednesday hosted by the Vietnam Academy of Water Resources.

Lifestyle

-- Hoi An City has just been named Vietnam’s Capital of Culinary Arts and Cuisine by the World Association of Chefs, the head of which, Tomas Andeas Gugler, presented Hoi An’s deputy chairman Nguyen Van Son with the certification on Wednesday evening during the opening ceremony of the Second Hoi An International Food Festival.

Business

-- Japan-made bio-toilets, which turn human waste into usable compost, installed on Vietnamese trains have been found too confusing for local train operators, who complained that the toilets gave off a foul smell and were prone to malfunction.

-- India has lifted temporary import bans on six Vietnamese agricultural products, which are coffee beans, bamboo/bamboo toothpicks, black pepper, cinnamon, beans and dragon fruit, after the bans were imposed in retaliation for similar restrictions on Vietnam’s side.

Education

-- Ho Chi Minh City-based Ton Duc Thang University has launched its first English-language journal under the name Journal of Information and Telecommunications, which will be published and distributed internationally by UK-based Taylor & Francis publishing house.

-- Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University and the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will be giving a talk this morning with professors and students at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities on the topic of the American Civil War as part of her working visit to the university.