VIETNAM TODAY

Vietnam’s No.1 badminton player Nguyen Tien Minh has surprisingly been disqualified from the first round of the 2013 Badminton Asia Championships in Taipei (China).

A deadly explosion and fire tore through a fertilizer plant in a small Texas town late on Wednesday, injuring more than 100 people, leveling dozens of homes and spewing toxic fumes that forced evacuations of half the community, authorities said.

The Prime Minister has approved a project to send 1,800 State employees abroad for further training from 2013 to 2020, using State funding.

Women account for 24.4 percent of the total deputies in the Vietnamese National Assembly, ranking it second only to Laos in Southeast Asia, reported the United Nations Development Programme.

Ministries, sectors and regions must prepare measures to ensure road safety and tackle traffic jams during the coming holidays commemorating the Hung Kings, Liberation Day and May Day, the Prime Minister has urged.

Many parents in big cities have been racing to send their children to prestigious schools.

Hundreds of consumer households and businesses trading in the salagane bird in HCM City have started to feel the effects after thousands of salaganes died last week in central Ninh Thuan Province.

Several luxury real estate projects in Hanoi are finding it hard to sell their housing, and are forecast to remain unsold for next decade.

North Korea laid out conditions Thursday for any talks with Seoul or Washington, including the withdrawal of UN sanctions and a guaranteed end to South Korea-US joint military drills.

Vietnam-Singapore Business Forum 2013 opens in Ho Chi Minh City on April 17 in the presence of Bui Quang Vinh, Vietnam ’s Minister of Planning and Investment and Lim Hng Kiang, Singapore ’s Minister of Trade and Industry.

The 17th session of the Vietnam-US Human Rights Dialogue took place in Hanoi on April 12, said the Foreign Ministry’s Spokesperson when answering a reporter’s question relating to the dialogue.

As many as 108 Vietnamese native animals have been illegally traded through the internet, a conference on wildlife trafficking was told in Hanoi.

People in the central province of Nghe An are being cheated by illegal labour export companies who abandon them in Angola.

Vietnam and Turkey have signed a programme of action between the two Ministries of Foreign Affairs for 2013-2015 and a memorandum of understanding between their Diplomatic Academies.

The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court sentenced a resident in the city to three years in prison and another three years of probation on the charge of “conducting propaganda against the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.

"Gangnam Style" star Psy's new music video crossed the 100 million views mark on YouTube Wednesday, shattering another record on the video-sharing site since its much-anticipated weekend debut.

Natural disasters economically cost 1.48 percent of Vietnam’s Gross Domestic Product annually from 2008 to 2012.

NA deputies expressed worries as a result of the Social Insurance Agency using 70% of their funds for loans to credit institutions and concerns about default mount.

The credit industry has been a recent introduction to Vietnam, and some financing companies have taken advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge.