Here are today’s leading news stories.

Society

-- Ben Luc Bridge, which lies along a major route connecting Ho Chi Minh City and provinces in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, was heavily congested until 9:00 pm on Wednesday as people started returning to the southern metropolis after a five-day holiday starting April 30.

-- Residents in southern provinces who left Ho Chi Minh City for a five-day holiday last week once again went through an agonizing journey back to the southern metropolis as many routes were seriously overloaded and congested on Wednesday.

-- The five-day holiday celebrating the Reunification Day on April 30 and International Workers’ Day on May 1 saw 137 traffic accidents, killing 96 people and injured another 96, a slight decrease from last year’s road toll, according to Vietnam’s National Traffic Safety Committee.

-- A 12-year-old Vietnamese teenage in the north-central province of Thanh Hoa was hospitalized for severe injuries after being brutally mauled by a dog earlier this week, doctors said on Wednesday.

-- A group of ‘street knights’ in the southern province of Dong Nai on Wednesday successfully rescued four women, who had been trapped into selling sex at a café in Tam Phuoc Commune, in the provincial capital city of Bien Hoa.

-- A fire broke out at a junk workshop in Thu Thua District in the southern province of Long An, blanketing the section of the National Highway 62 passing the area with black smoke and slowed down traffic for around two hours on Wednesday afternoon.

Business

-- Chinese arrivals to Vietnam from last December to April fell by four percent year-on-year to 1.71 million, while the number of Thai tourists visiting the country in the same period recorded the highest growth of 46.5 percent year-on-year, standing at 174,777 visitors, according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism.

-- Air Asia’s first direct flight from Bangkok landed in Cam Ranh International Airport in Vietnam’s south-central province of Khanh Hoa on Wednesday morning, marking the second non-stop route between the two destinations after a first by Bangkok Airways in January.

Sports

-- Hanoi FC, the reigning champions of Vietnam’s top-tier V-League 1, kept their hopes of progressing from 2019 AFC Cup Group F alive with an emphatic 5-1 win over Cambodia’s Naga World on Wednesday afternoon.

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