What you need to know today in Vietnam:

Politics

-- Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and his entourage left Hanoi on Friday for an ASEAN summit scheduled to take place at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia on Thursday and Friday, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

Society

-- Police in Gia Lai Province, located in Vietnam's Central Highlands, arrested a 30-year-old suspect on Thursday for stabbing a priest and setting fire to a church, a local official said on Friday. 

-- Vietnam administered the first shot of AstraZeneca vaccine to 20,200 people on Thursday, taking the total number of vaccinated people past 128,000, the Ministry of Health said in a report on Friday. 

-- A court in Vietnam on Thursday sentenced a 45-year-old woman to two years in prison for publishing Facebook posts to subvert the people's administration from October 2019 to November 2020.  

-- A police man has been identified as the suspect that stabbed a ward-level Party official to death in Khanh Hoa Province on Tuesday, a source told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Thursday.

Business

-- Vietnam's benchmark VN-Index lost over 40 points on Thursday, as the country's stock market opened again after a national holiday.

-- Lending to the stock market had reached VND46 trillion (US$2 billion) by the middle of this month, up 0.7 percent year on year, the State Bank of Vietnam said on Thursday.

-- Vietnam's Vinamilk is the only dairy company in Southeast Asia to rank among the world's top 50 milk producers, according to Plimsoll Publishing Ltd., an expert in the field of company and industry financial analysis. 

-- Secretary of the Can Tho City Party Committee Le Quang Manh and U.S. Consul General in Ho Chi Minh City Marie C. Damour expressed their wish to spur bilateral cooperation in trade promotion, climate change response, health care, and education during a meeting on Thursday, the Vietnam News Agency reported the same day.

World News

-- "Russia announced on Thursday it was ordering troops back to base from the area near the border with Ukraine, apparently calling an end to a buildup of tens of thousands of soldiers that had alarmed the West," Reuters reported.

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