Catch up on the news in Vietnam today:

Politics

-- Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his spouse arrived in Hanoi on Monday afternoon, starting their two-day state visit to Vietnam at the invitation of Vietnamese State President Vo Van Thuong and his spouse. This is the Philippine leader’s first Vietnam visit since he assumed office in late June 2022.

Society

-- Vietnam welcomed over 1.5 million foreign tourist arrivals in January, surging 73.6 percent over the same period last year and up slightly against January 2019, when the COVID-19 pandemic had yet to hit the country, the General Statistics Office reported on Monday.

-- The owner of an illegally-built 12-story building in Phu Quoc, an island city off Kien Giang Province in southern Vietnam, has had the building demolished following local authorities’ requirement. The demolition will take three months, the Kien Giang administration informed on Monday. 

-- Ho Chi Minh City will provide Wi-Fi at no charge on all buses in the city to serve the demand of commuters, according to the municipal Department of Transport.

Business

-- Vietnam attracted US$2.36 billion of foreign capital in the year to January 20, surging 40.2 percent year on year, according to the General Statistics Office.

-- FPT Retail, a retail chain under Vietnamese tech giant FPT, closed 31 FPT Shop stores, which sell phones, laptops, and electronic products, in 2023, reducing the number of these outlets nationwide to 755. The firm also reported its first loss since it listed shares on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange in 2018, according to FPT Retail’s 2023 financial report.

Lifestyle

-- People living down alleys in Ho Chi Minh City have embellished their neighborhoods to ring in the Lunar New Year, commonly known as Tet, which is due in February.

World News

-- “A batch of newly released images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope show in remarkable detail 19 spiral galaxies residing relatively near our Milky Way, offering new clues on star formation as well as galactic structure and evolution,” Reuters reported.

Like us on Facebook or  follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!