Read what is in the news today, September 11!

Politics

-- Vietnam always welcomes and opens the door for cooperation with countries in Africa and the Middle East for mutual benefits and development, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said at a reception for ambassadors of Middle Eastern and African nations in Hanoi on Tuesday.

-- Nearly 200 delegates, including ministers of some Asian countries and representatives of drug-fighting organizations, pledged to promote bilateral, regional and international cooperation in combating drug crime in a joint statement issued at a ministerial meeting in Hanoi on Tuesday, which was held as an initiative of the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.

Society

-- Hanoi chairman Nguyen Duc Chung on Tuesday signed an urgent dispatch requesting that the light bulb manufacturer Rang Dong Company be moved to a new location away from residential areas, after a six-hour inferno at its warehouses and factories in Thanh Xuan District last month caused up to 27.2 kilograms of liquid mercury - among other harmful chemicals - to be released into the environment,

-- A court in Hanoi on Tuesday sentenced 31-year-old Nguyen Trong Trinh to life imprisonment for “raping a person under 16." In February, Trinh sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl in the Vietnamese capital city, breaking her front tooth and right arm in the process, according to his verdict.

-- A group of Australian veterans on Tuesday handed over a digitized battlefield map of the former province of Phuoc Tuy, which today makes up most of Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province in southern Vietnam as well as the Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelago, to a visiting Vietnamese delegation to Canberra led by Maj. Gen. Tran Quoc Dung, head of the Policy Department under the General Department of Politics of the Vietnam People’s Army. The database is expected to help locate the remains of about 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers from both sides who have remained missing since the American war in Vietnam.

-- The Ministry of Transport’s US$58 billion plan to develop the north-to-south high speed railway may face huge hurdles in attracting investment while long construction time could hike costs even further, the Committee for Management of State Capital at Enterprises (CMSC) said in a recent report on the railway project.

Business

-- Deputy Prime Minister Trinh Dinh Dung urged the UK’s Jardine Matheson Group to expand investment in Vietnam, including in potential areas such as infrastructure, energy, support industries and tourism, at a reception for the group’s chairman and managing director Ben Keswick in Hanoi on Tuesday.

-- The 2019 Vietnam International Travel Mart (VITM) will take place in the southern city of Can Tho from November 29 to December 1, according to the event’s organizing board. It is the first event of its kind to be held in the Mekong Delta municipality.

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