Good morning from Vietnam!

Politics

-- Vietnam pledges to fulfill all the commitments and responsibilities of a member state of the ASEAN Community and will strive to be one of the leading nations to contribute to the development of the community, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said at a meeting in Hanoi on Sunday.

Society

-- A bus carrying 29 people in a family was traveling from the southern province of Soc Trang to Ho Chi Minh City when it hit a man walking on the road on Saturday. The man was killed instantly and the 29 people on the bus narrowly escaped death, local police announced on Sunday.

-- Authorities in the southern provinces of Vinh Long, An Giang, Ca Mau, Dong Nai and the city of Can Tho on Sunday afternoon arrived at Phu Quoc Island, off Kien Giang Province in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, to visit the soldiers and people defending the southwestern Vietnamese waters.

-- Colonel Luong Ngoc Chinh on Sunday affirmed that competent authorities are still searching for the vessel that crashed into a Vietnamese fishing boat carrying eight fishermen on Saturday. The vessel left after the incident that happened some 60 nautical miles off Vietnam’s Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelago.

-- Wong Giao Lian, a 29-year-old Malaysian man, has been kept in custody by police in the south-central province of Khanh Hoa for fraud and property appropriation, Colonel Nguyen Hong Ki, deputy chief of the provincial police department, said on Sunday.

-- Four people were killed in a scaffolding collapse at a bridge construction site in the north-central province of Thanh Hoa on Saturday, the provincial People’s Committee said on Sunday.

Business

-- Russian oil producer Gazprom Neft has issued a notice to cease the negotiation to buy 49 percent of the shares of the Dung Quoc Oil Refinery in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Ngai from Vietnam’s oil and gas group PetroVietnam.

-- About 40,000 automobiles worth a combined US$1 billion were imported from China into the northern Vietnamese province of Lang Son in 2015. The customs revenue generated by the importation of Chinese cars contributed about VND3.2 trillion ($142.46 million) to the provincial budget, according to the statistics provided by the Lang Son Customs Office.

Lifestyle

-- The eighth annual charity campaign “Xuan Tinh Nguyen” (Volunteer Spring Campaign 2016) kicked off on Sunday in Ho Chi Minh City with the participation of over 3,000 Vietnamese youths. The event will conclude on February 6 and is expected to attract over 30,000 Vietnamese and foreign students studying in the country.