News stories by Tran Dinh Thanh Lam

He has worked this land for half of 64 years and is known among his fellow farmers in Kien Giang province here in the Mekong Delta as ‘lao nong’, or the old master of rice.

Vietnamese parents think of day care centres and kindergartens as safe, happy places to leave their children in, given the pressures of work and harder times. But they are no longer so sure now, after a series of incidents about mistreatment of young children that has shocked the public.

A Vietnamese film that is vying for an Oscar this month offers a glimpse into how Vietnam and the United States are healing decades-old war wounds, as well as how that war still generates emotional debate today.

There will be no Tet (Lunar New Year) for Doan Hung this year. As festivities heat up for the Year of the Tiger, which starts on Feb. 14, the 12-year-old boy is busy selling lottery tickets on the streets.

With a generating capacity of only 190 megawatts, the Dak Mi 4 hydropower project being constructed in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Nam is small by international standards.

The Mississippi River may be on the other side of the world from the Mekong River, but Vietnamese environmentalists say they hope a new link between the agencies that look after these two river systems can lead to new thinking about ways to manage water resources in the Mekong region.

When they got out of bed one morning in April this year, the residents of Vi Thanh City here in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta were surprised to find that their water had become salty.

The rising level of pollution in Vietnam’s waterways has been common knowledge for years. But in October it became a public scandal after Vedan, a Taiwanese maker of monosodium glutamate (MSG), confessed to discharging toxic waste through hidden pipes into a river for years.