Tuoi Tre News briefs you on some of the leading stories published today in Vietnamese media:

Politics:

-- China on Saturday deployed a maritime surveillance aircraft to spy on Vietnamese law enforcement vessels at an altitude of 200-300 meters operating in the waters of Vietnam where the Chinese oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 has been illegally placed since May this year, according to the Vietnam Fisheries Resources Surveillance Department. Meanwhile, as many as 105 Chinese ships of all kinds, including five warships, continued to patrol around to protect the oil rig, aggressively preventing Vietnamese ships from getting close to the drilling platform.

-- The agenda of the coming 29th session of the National Assembly (NA) Standing Committee, scheduled to open in Hanoi on Monday, will focus on law building by discussing the preparation of a draft law on the election of deputies to the NA and local People’s Councils, and draft laws on the organization of the People’s Courts and the People’s Procuracies. It will also give comments on bills on citizens’ identification and civil status as well as a bill on the management and use of state capital in production and business.

-- Vietnam and Singapore, after finishing a talk at the eighth political consultation between the two foreign ministries held in Singapore on Saturday, have agreed on a set of measures to carry their strategic partnership forward by facilitating all-level visits, with a Vietnam visit by former Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong scheduled for September this year.

Society:

-- As many as 70,000 households in Hanoi are facing severe water outages because the main water pipeline bringing water from the Da River in the neighboring province of Hoa Binh to them has been reported broken once again, the 9th time since 2012 and the 2nd time in July this year. The director of the Department of Civil Engineering, Le Van Duc, came forward to take responsibility for the incident on July 10.

-- Huynh Quang Hung, Deputy Chairman of Phu Quoc District in the Mekong Delta province of Kien Giang, said Air Korea airline has launched a field survey on the island in preparation for offering air services from Incheon in South Korea to Phu Quoc and vice versa, after a 5-star hotel complex of Phu Quoc Vinpearl is inaugurated and put into operation by the end of next year.

Business:

-- Nearly one week after the local gasoline price was raised Tuesday to the highest rate ever, the retail price of vegetables and fruit at markets around Ho Chi Minh City has been reported to surge 10-15 percent compared to the rates applied before the fuel price hike.

-- The U.S.’s anti-dumping duties on Vietnamese frozen tra fish fillets, which will be reduced, still pose difficulties to Vietnamese exporters, said the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers in a recent press release after the U.S. Department of Commerce released the preliminary findings on its 10th administrative review for anti-dumping duties on tra fish fillets imported from Vietnam early last week.

-- According to statistics, in the first six months of 2014, the total volume of mushrooms imported to Vietnam was nearly 8,000 tons, an increase of 62 percent over the same period last year, during which mushrooms imported from China accounted for 78.01 percent of all of the imports. However, according to the Plant Protection Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, it has yet to discover any mushroom sample from China containing chemical preservatives exceeding the regulated rates.