Dioxin clean-up begins at Phu Cat airport

Construction of a 5,400 cu.m. secure landfill site began at Phu Cat airbase in the central province of Binh Dinh on Dec. 16, in a project to isolate dioxin contamination at the airbase.

The landfill site is part of a 4.9 million USD project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through the UNDP.
With the landfill, which is expected to be completed in 2012, Phu Cat airport will be fully compliant with national regulations and will meet international standards. Proper containment and regular monitoring will eliminate the current risks of dioxin outflow.

Phu Cat is one of three military airbases that are still highly contaminated by Agent Orange/dioxin, due to large quantities of herbicides stored or handled there during the war. The other two hotspots are Da Nang and Bien Hoa airports. The three airports were used by US troops for aerial spraying of defoliant during the war.

UN Resident Coordinator in Vietnam Pratibha Mehta described the ongoing presence of dioxin in Vietnam as a sad after-effect of war. About 200,000 cu.m. of contaminated land still exists at Phu Cat, Da Nang and Bien Hoa airports, posing serious health risks to people.

The GEF-funded project, begun in 2010, aims to minimise disruption to ecosystems and minimise health risks for people from the release of dioxin from polluted hotspots.

It is expected that areas contaminated with high dioxin levels will be treated before 2016.

War-left big bomb found in central province

Military forces of the central province of Quang Ngai have defused a 250-kg bomb left from the anti-US war in a rice field in Ba Vinh commune, Ba To district.

The bomb, 1.65 m in length and 30 cm in diameter, was discovered by local farmers.

Coded DK82 and produced in 1967, the bomb was dropped onto the Ba To battlefield by the US troops during the war.

In mid-November, workers unearthed 64 mortar shells at a construction site in Son Ha district.

Over 25,000 additional plane seats offered during Tet

The Mekong Aviation JSC (Air Mekong) will increase the number of its domestic flights from December 23, 2011 to February 5, 2012 by 25%, with up to 25,000 additional seats, in order to meet air travel demands during the upcoming lunar New Year Festival (Tet) holiday.

Air Mekong will also run two flights per day from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to Da Lat for the Da Lat Flower Festival, and double the number of flights on the Hanoi/ Ho Chi Minh City - Phu Quoc/ Con Dao air routes.

There will be extra flights on other routes as well, including Ho Chi Minh City – Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City - Buon Ma Thuot/ Pleiku/ Quy Nhon and Vinh – Dak Lak/ Gia Lai.

Air Mekong began selling tickets on December 5 for travel during the Tet holiday and offered a discounted fare of VND 985,000 (around US$47), not including duties and other charges, for the Hanoi - Ho Chi Minh City route before Tet, and vice versa after Tet, while other air fares cost as little as VND 450,000 (around US$26).

Inequality remains between children and women

Inequality remains in the lives of Vietnamese children and women from different regions, ethnic groups, and socio-economic statuses.  

This was announced following the results of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey for the 2010-2011 period (MICS 4) by the General Statistics Office (GSO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Hanoi on December 16.

In accordance with the findings of the survey, one-half of children in urban areas aged 1-2 received comprehensive inoculation while the rate in rural areas was one-third.

More than seven out of 10 Vietnamese had access to clean water and improved lavatories. However, the numbers of Kinh and Hoa people who had access to these facilities were doubled those of other ethnic minorities.

GSO Director General Do Thuc said with 20 criteria from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and more than 100 others related to children and women, the MICS4 has provided important information which confirms positive results obtained during the implementation of the National Action Programme for Children in the 2010-2011 period, the MDG and the Declaration and Plan of Action “A World fit for Children”.  

Therefore, the MICS4 will actively contribute to controlling the set targets as well as working out new plans for better protecting and taking care of children. Lotta Sylwander, UNICEF Chief Representative in Vietnam, said the precise and valuable data of MICS4 will enable Vietnam to closely monitor progress in fulfilling national goals and global commitments including the MDGs with a vision to 2015.

The MICS4 is an international initiative in surveying households, through which UNICEF supports countries in collecting and analyzing statistics to monitor the situation of women and children.

The three previous MICS were conducted in Vietnam in 1996, 2000 and 2006.

635 scholarships worth VND3.7 billion awarded

PetroVietnam Fertilizer and Chemicals Corporation on December 17-26 will award 635 scholarships worth a total of VND3.7 billion to the best students from 20 universities and colleges across the country in the 2011-2012 academic year.

The awards are divided into 20 honorable scholarships (worth VND20 million each per year), 15 full scholarships (worth VND20 million each per year), and 600 scholarships (worth VND5 million each per year).        

The scholarships will be granted to excellent students in the central, northern and southwestern regions and HCM City.

The corporation will also present scholarships to children of farmers, who excel in their study.

Thief exacts brutal revenge on five family members

A family in Cuu Duong Commune, Phu Quoc Island District, Kien Giang Province, was brutally assaulted by three armed men after two members of the family led two others in an effort to capture a thief.

At noon December 13, three men on two motorbikes suddenly appeared outside the house of 66-year-old Nguyen Van Hung. Wielding three knives and a wooden stick, they began to stab and beat him and his four children, including two women.

At one point during their attack, Hung’s wife, Nguyen Thi Ly, 62, kneeled down before the attackers to beg them to stop but they ignored her plea and only left when all the five victims laid on the ground in pools of blood.

The victims were taken to Phu Quoc General Hospital that day and have not yet been discharged due to their critical condition.

The brutal attack came one day after Hung and one of his sons, 24-year-old Nguyen Van Tot, failed to seize two thieves who attempted to steal an electric motor from his neighbor.
One of the attackers was Tran Minh Tan, a local man, who managed to escape after Hung caught him trying to remove the motor.

After receiving a report about the attack, the commune police launched an investigation and later seized one of them, Tran Van Binh, 22, who lives in the same hamlet as Hung.

Meanwhile, Tan and another man, identified as Thanh, had fled before the police came to their houses.

Hung told Tuoi Tre that on the night of December 12, he found a man trying to steal a motor from the house of his neighbor, who was not at home at the time. He immediately informed two other neighbors and they rushed to the scene to seize the thief, but he managed to get away, leaving behind the motor.

Thinking that the thief might return to take the motor, Hung and the neighbors took turns to keep watch. Hung and his son Tot took the first two-hour shift before they were replaced by the other two.

Just as they predicted, the thief came back with a woman. When he was about to take the motor away, Hung recognized it was Tan and rushed at him and held him in two arms.

However, Tan managed to break free from Hung and ran away with the woman.

The case has been referred to the Phu Quoc District police, who are hunting down Tan and Thanh.

What did survivors say about the twin towers fire?

Two survivors of the massive fire that hit the 33-storey twin towers in Hanoi on Thursday told Tuoi Tre about the harrowing experience and their struggle to escape.

According to a source from Hanoi’s Saint Paul Hospital where 29 victims of the 33-storey twin towers fire received treatment, 18 patients with minor injuries have been discharged.

Dr. Nguyen Thong of the hospital said the 11 remaining patients in critical condition are being closely monitored.

Truong Thi Xay, 53, one of the victims rescued from the fire said she could hardly believe she is still alive.

“I was cleaning up the 4th floor when I saw many people rushing madly towards the staircase and shouting ‘Run…run, quick!’ I followed them in a hurry,” she said.

“At that time I just thought that I couldn’t escape through the basement because the sea of smoke was getting thicker and thicker when I went down. Exhausted and suffocated, I tried to go up the staircases and finally reached the 7th floor where I was rescued by firefighters.”

Nguyen Van Lung, 46, from Thanh Hoa central province and his 17-year-old son Nguyen Van Thinh, two other lucky survivors, were preparing to paint the walls in the towers’ basement when the fire occurred.

“At the time of the explosion, the power was cut and there was no light in the basement. My son and I fumbled around the basement to find ways to escape. We had to climb the staircases step by step in near total darkness. It took us a half hour to reach the 4th floor that we later realized was not the exit.

"At that time, we thought our throats were about to blow up due to the heat and suffocation. We saw around 6 or 7 people behind. When I reached the exit door in the northern part of the towers, I felt completely suffocated,” he recalled.

“I was given water by someone and taken to hospital for emergency treatment,” he said.

Lung’s condition is still being monitored while his son has been discharged.

A new home for stray cats

After years of saving, 47-year-old Ta Thi Thao Trang from HCMC has finally built a new house for herself and 200 stray cats.

Although it is a long distance, or 3 buses away from the city center, the graphic designer said she is just thankful her new place does not have any difficult neighbors or cat thieves.

Although Trang has loved cats since she was very young, she said she had never imagined herself busy feeding and taking care of hundreds of cats of all types every day like this.

She began taking stray cats in nearly 30 years ago when she came across a dying cat whose body was covered in blood on a sidewalk.

“The way it looked at me made me unable to just go by and leave it there,” she recalled. “I thought it couldn’t survive when I took it to a veterinarian but somehow it managed to live another one month after I bought it home.”

Other stray cats she has been saving and taking in aren’t any more fortunate. They were either sick, injured or lost their way after being thrown out to the streets by their owners when Trang first saw them.

“When cats feel they can’t live anymore, they will find a place to hide themselves and wait for their time,” she said.

“Otherwise they will show how much they want to be saved through the way they look at you.”

Though she isn’t young and walks with difficulty as the result of polio which she suffered in childhood, Trang said she had never let her cats go hungry in all those years.

Besides working as a graphic designer, she also teaches French and paints to earn enough to give her cats two meals a day.

They take up most of her time every day, but they give her more strength to live, she said.

"I built up this place so that these unlucky cats can continue to live,” Trang said. “I’m more than willing to give them to people who really love cats as it is hard for me to take good care of all of them alone.”

Trang said she had even had some of them spayed as she can’t afford having kittens.

Yet, there are too many people who just leave their cats in front of her door when they are sick or injured from an accident, she said.

“Your owner left you here for me,” said Trang as she comforted one of the abandoned cats. She addressed herself as “mom” in Vietnamese. “You have to try and get healthy and continue living.”

VN’s rice farming rice techniques benefit Cuba

The Vietnam-Cuba cooperation project on rice production at household scale has helped Cuba reduce imports, gradually realising the target of self-sufficiency.

Dr. Luis Aleman, head of the project in the third phase, made the assessment at a conference to review the implementation of the project over the past three years in Havana on Dec. 15.

Aleman said that during the performance process, Vietnamese experts have provided equipment, rice farming techniques and human resource training to Cuba.

They also shared experience in building mechanisms and policies to manage rice production and consumption, and helped the island country build rice seed production centres in some cities and provinces nationwide.

Many Cuban households have successfully applied Vietnam’s rice farming techniques, raising average output to around 6.5 tonnes per hectare, up 40 percent from the previous time, he said.

Nguyen Van Hoa, Head of the International Cooperation Department under the Government Office and Secretary of the subcommittee of the Vietnam-Cuba Inter-governmental Cooperation Committee, said that the success of the project will lay a foundation for the two sides to carry out the fourth phase from 2012 to 2015 to help Cuba ensure food security.

Craft village fair to take place in Lam Dong

The annual Craft Village Fair will be held from Dec. 29 to Jan. 3, 2012 in the Central Highland province of Lam Dong.

The Department of Processing and Trade for Agroforestry, Fisheries and Salt Production under the Ministry of Agriculture, the organizing board, said the fair aims to promote craft villages and their products, honour craftsmen and boost trade and tourism activities. It will also contribute to preserving and developing national cultural identities.

An Van Khanh, Deputy Head of the Department, said this year’s fair, which is part of activities toward Da Lat Flower Festival, features a lot of more sophisticated products than the previous event. In addition, the products are various in design, rich in traditional character and environmentally friendly.

The fair will include a retail section grouped by sectors and regions, exhibition areas for trade and tourism products of Lam Dong province and products entering the final round of the 8 th competition for Vietnamese handicraft products, plus areas for gastronomy and skill demonstrations.

Denmark helps improve environment in VN

Projects under the Vietnam-Denmark Development Cooperation in Environment Programme (DCE) have effectively helped to improve the environment in Vietnam.

The results have been seen in Phu Tho, Thai Nguyen, Ha Nam, Nghe An, Quang Nam and Ben Tre provinces.

The programme not only helped enterprises reduce energy consumption, production costs and improve the living environment, but also brought benefits to local people, especially in Mo Cay and Ba Tri districts of Ben Tre province.

Because of these achievements, the programme is expected to be extended in future.

The DCE programme was carried out from 2005 to 2011 with a budget of 250 million DKK in non-refundable aid from the Danish government.

The programme aimed to assist Vietnam in implementing a national strategy on environmental protection, ensure people could earn a sustainable living and improve living conditions for the poor.

It included five components, namely pollution control in poor, densely populated areas, sustainable livelihoods in and around marine protected areas, cleaner production in industry, environmentally sustainable development in poor urban areas and capacity support in environmental planning and management.

The cleaner production in industry component has helped Vietnam reduce wastewater by 1.3 million cubic metres and carbon dioxide emission by 30,000 tonnes annually./.