What you need to know today in Vietnam:

Politics:

-- A total of 1,565 delegations, comprising 55,600 people, paid their final respects to Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the National Funeral Hall in Hanoi, the Reunification Hall in Ho Chi Minh City, and his hometown in Lai Da Village, Dong Hoi Commune, located in Hanoi's outlying district of Dong Anh, from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm on Thursday, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

-- On Thursday, Vietnamese National Assembly Chairman Tran Thanh Man met with Tolstoy Petr Olegovich, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s State Duma (lower house), who is in Vietnam to attend the state funeral of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.

Society

-- At a guesthouse in a town bordering Laos, the Quang Tri Province Border Guard of Vietnam arrested a girl along with 15kg of ketamine on Tuesday, local border guards said on Thursday. During their urgent investigation, they also discovered an additional 40 bricks of heroin and several kilograms of 'happy water' (a slang term for a drug solution).

-- Do Thi Nguyen, director of the Department of Health in Binh Phuoc Province, southern Vietnam, on Thursday asked a local food safety watchdog to suspend the facility that provided meals for Pin Yuan Vietnam Co., Ltd. at Nam Dong Phu Industrial Park in Dong Phu District, where 63 of its employees were hospitalized on Tuesday after eating the meals, showing signs of food poisoning.

-- An electric vehicle fire occurred in Hoi An City, Quang Nam Province, central Vietnam early on Friday, destroying 21 electric vehicles in minutes, local authorities said the same day.

-- The weather in the northern region of Vietnam is forecast to have significantly less rain on Friday, with many areas experiencing hot and sunny conditions, followed by showers in the evening. The southern region will have mostly cloudy skies, with showers to heavy rain expected.

Lifestyle

-- Nguyen Van Duong, a non-tea drinker born in 1984 and residing in Thuan An City, Binh Duong Province, southern Vietnam, owns nearly 1,000 antique teapots and particularly cherishes a teapot made in 1984 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Business

-- HSBC has revised its forecast for Vietnam's GDP growth this year to 6.5 percent, up from the previous projection of six percent, following the country's better-than-expected performance in the first half of the year, according to the bank's latest 'Vietnam at a Glance' report.

World News

-- "Japan has warned of the need to be increasingly vigilant to excessive foreign exchange fluctuations driven by speculation at a Group of 20 meeting," Reuters quoted top currency diplomat Masato Kanda as saying on Thursday.

-- "More than 97% of Windows sensors are back online, CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz said on Thursday, nearly a week after a software update by the cybersecurity firm triggered a global outage," according to Reuters.

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