Catch up on the news in Vietnam today:

Society

-- The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court on Saturday sentenced 18 people, including two Chinese and two South Koreans, to death and three others to life in prison for participating in a cross-border drug trafficking network that traded and transported 216.3 kilograms of narcotics.

-- Police in Phan Thiet City, Binh Thuan Province, south-central Vietnam are investigating a case in which a construction elevator fell as its cable broke, killing three workers inside the elevator at the construction site of a six-floor housing project on Saturday.

-- More than 2,000 people along with 29 vehicles were mobilized for a fire drill at Landmark 81, Vietnam's tallest skyscraper, and adjacent Landmark 6 building in Binh Thanh District, Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday morning.

-- Health authorities in southern Ben Tre Province have reported the first case of monkeypox, an illness caused by the monkeypox virus, in the province. The patient began to show symptoms of the disease on Friday last week and has contacted 12 people since then.

-- Police in Ha Tinh Province, north-central Vietnam said on Saturday that they detected the bodies of two men floating on a local river on the morning of the same day. Their identity remains unknown.

-- The Ho Chi Minh City Forest Protection Department on Saturday anesthetized and brought a pig-tailed macaque to a wildlife rescue station after the primate continuously annoyed residents and injured two women in District 12. Rangers have caught four mischievous monkeys over the past week.

Business

-- Hanoi on Saturday launched a smart city project designed to cover 270 hectares of land and require an estimated investment of US$4.2 billion. The highlight of the project is a 108-story skyscraper.

World News

-- “Icelandic authorities said on Saturday they were preparing for a volcanic eruption in the southwest of the island in the coming days after a series of earthquakes and evidence of magma spreading rapidly underground,” Reuters reported.

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