What you need to know today in Vietnam:

Politics

-- The Vietnamese Ministry of Construction and the French Development Agency have signed a cooperation agreement to help Vietnamese cities build climate change resilience, the Vietnam News Agency reported on Thursday.

Society

-- Lightning struck three people to death in Thai Binh Province, northern Vietnam on Thursday, according to local authorities. 

-- Rains and flash floods killed three people, injured another three, and damaged thousands of houses in northern Vietnam from Monday through Thursday, according to statistics.

-- Lightning hit a pig farm in Thai Binh Province on Thursday, killing 229 swines about to be sold to the market, a local official confirmed the same day.

Business

-- Denmark's Pandora Group, the world’s largest jewellery brand, signed on Thursday a memorandum of understanding to build a new jewelry crafting facility at Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park 3 (VSIP) in Binh Duong Province, just outside Ho Chi Minh City, in early 2023, the company said the same day on its website. It will create jobs for more than 6,000 craftspeople and have an annual capacity of 60 million pieces of jewelry, according to the firm.

-- Vietnam's Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh had a business breakfast on Thursday with the U.S. business community, with coordination from the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper journalist reported onsite.

Sports

-- Hosts Vietnam will take on Myanmar in the group stage of men's football at the 31st Southeast Asian Games, which formally kicked off on Thursday, at 7:00 pm on Friday. The game will be broadcast live on VTV6 and the FPT Play platform.

World News

-- At least one person confirmed to have COVID-19 has died in North Korea and hundreds of thousands have shown fever symptoms, Reuters quoted state media as saying on Friday.

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