Ha Tay, Vietnam News

Vietnam and China reached a broad common understanding on the promotion of their comprehensive strategic partnership during the sixth session of the Steering Committee for Vietnam-China Bilateral Co-operation in Beijing on Saturday.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung will pay an official visit to Russia at the invitation of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev from May 12-15. His visit aims to strengthen the comprehensive strategic relationship between the two nations.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has given the green light to a US$27-billion oil refinery project in the coastal province of Binh Dinh.

The Communist Party of Viet Nam and the Social Democratic Party of Germany held their third dialogue yesterday in Ha Noi, focusing on challenges facing sustainable social welfare policies for the people of both nations, and solutions to these issues.

During the war in Viet Nam, US troops stored more than 98,000 buckets of Agent Orange at Bien Hoa airbase in the southern province of Dong Nai.

A campaign to popularise blood donation was launched in Ha Noi yesterday, with the target of mobilising 600,000 people to donate over 300,000 units of bloods during the 2013 summer.

Viet Nam's first Earth observation satellite was successfully launched into orbit at 9.06am this morning.

After reports of foreign tourists being overcharged by taxi drivers and hotel employees, Viet Nam's capital city Ha Noi plans to work harder to prevent scams, said Deputy Director of the municipal Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism Mai Tien Dung.

Four one-year-olds lie on the bed, scrambling for toys. Seeing a stranger come into the dark, dank room, they sit up and stretch out their hands.

The Vietnamese Government has called on international partners to help mobilise resources to fight the avian influenza A/H7N9, which is threatening to spread from neighbouring China where it has claimed 27 lives out of 128 cases.

A rare collection of images of Ha Noi during the 1980s was shown to the public for the first time in London at weekend.

Young women working as sex workers in Ha Noi will be helped to reintegrate into society by a project launched yesterday by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids, and Social Affairs and Plan International.

An increasing number of people have contracted human influenza type A/H1N1 in recent days, including whole families, but doctors are calling for public calm after establishing it is merely seasonal flu.

The mobile phone market has been one of the victims of Vietnam's recent economic troubles, but canny companies have found a glimmer of hope amid the gloom by tapping into the rising demand for used phones.

At The Cart, a cheerful shop with two locations in the capital, the owners have made a truce with the iconic sandwich by adopting its battle strategy.

Nguyen Thanh Hai is a 32-year-old engineer working for a State-owned construction company in Ha Noi.

Photos of the daily life of Vietnamese people taken by John Ramsden in the early 1980s will be on display at Hoxton Arches Gallery in London from May 2-5. Ramsden lived in Ha Noi from 1980-83 as part of the British Diplomatic Service.

The Communist Party of Viet Nam will host a meeting of the Standing Committee of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties for the first time today in Ha Noi.

With its airport closing and tourism sector performing worse than expected, the former royal city of Hue has attempted to revive its fortunes by launching an extensive discount programme for tourists visiting its local historical attractions.

Four passengers injured on the Vietnamese tourist bus that overturned in Bolykhamxay Province of Laos on Saturday remained at Nghe An General Hospital while the other 29 were transferred to Ha Noi.