I'm from Hanoi, Viet Nam.
I'm an author of Dot Chuoi Non (dotchuoinon.com/author/hangbelu/), a blog on Positive thinking, founded by Dr. Tran Dinh Hoanh, an attorney in Washington DC.
I'm a co-founder of Conversations on Vietnam Development - cvdvn.net, a virtual think tank. I am a co-founder of two companies in Viet Nam working on children education services. I advise companies on STEAM education, English language education for children and students in Vietnam.
I'm studying the Buddha's teaching and the teaching of Jesus. I practice mindful living including meditation.
I hold a PhD on Sustainable Energy Systems from University of Lisbon and Aalto University.
I graduated from Hanoi University of Technology on Environmental Engineering. I obtained a Master degree of the same major from Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University.
My English-language blog at: hangbelu.wordpress/.
I play table tennis as a hobby.
Female infanticide does not only occur in India and China, but in this case study we will focus on those two countries, two of the most populous countries in the world.
Note: China does not longer have a one-child policy. It was replaced with a two-child policy in 2015, and a three-child policy in 2021. This is expected to greatly decrease the prevalence of female infanticide and sex-selective abortions in China.
Introduction
In this article, female infanticide is the sex-selective killings of newborn female children due to a preference for male children. It typically results from, and is a reflection of, the low status of females in the surrounding culture, where males – and therefore also boys – are seen as more valuable than women and girls.
As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar
Xi Jinping has been preparing for a crisis like this for years. China must secure its energy supply “in its own hands”, its president was reported to have said during a visit to one of its vast oilfields in 2021.
The US-Israel war on Iran plunged the Middle East into a deep conflict, with the strait of Hormuz – one of the most important waterways in global trade – all but closed and key energy facilities across the region under attack.
Oil exports from the Middle East have tumbled 61% over recent weeks, according to maritime tracking consultancy Kpler – roiling countries across Asia, which relied on the region for 59% of its crude imports in 2025, and have been left racing to conserve energy.
Baku Takahashi, a JICA expert, provides guidance on tree planting in Muong Phang Commune, Dien Bien Province. (Photo: JICA)
The Green Climate Fund has approved a funding proposal submitted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Government of Viet Nam for a results-based payment project on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), recognising Viet Nam’s emission reduction achievements in 2014.
The proposal, titled “Viet Nam’s REDD+ Results-Based Payment for the Results Period of 2014,” was approved at the 44th meeting of the GCF Board held on March 26, 2026 in Republic of Korea.
Accordingly, Viet Nam will receive 71.96 million USD through a results-based payment mechanism, corresponding to independently verified greenhouse gas emission reductions. These results were achieved through efforts to curb deforestation and forest degradation, while increasing forest carbon stocks through tree planting and natural forest restoration. The funding from the project will be reinvested in strengthening forest-related policies, institutions and enforcement measures.
A local resident beside acacia trees planted in Phieng Ban Commune, Son La Province.
Through project activities, Viet Nam will gradually address the main causes of deforestation and forest degradation, promote sustainable forest management, and improve livelihoods for forest-dependent communities.
The project is expected to be implemented over six years, led by the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment of Viet Nam in coordination with provincial People’s Committees in the project areas. Target locations include provinces in the Northwest and Northeast regions, namely Dien Bien, Lai Chau, Lao Cai, Son La, Phu Tho and Tuyen Quang provinces.
The approval of this project further affirmed the long-standing and effective cooperation between JICA and Viet Nam in the field of REDD+, including support for development of policy, forest monitoring systems, the measurement, and calculation of emission reductions and elimination.
When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.
And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.
Read full text on the AtlanticThis article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.
It started with a tipoff. I was reporting on the trafficking and exploitation of migrant workers in the Gulf when a source I had known for more than a decade reached out. They told me that child sexual abuse trafficking in the US was surging. As the Covid pandemic pushed predators online, some were using Facebook and Instagram to buy and sell children.
It was 2021 and I was about to begin an investigation with Mei-Ling McNamara, a human rights journalist, that would lead to the tech company Meta losing a multimillion-pound court case in March this year. The company had not yet rebranded and was known as Facebook, and there had not been any reporting on how children were being trafficked on its platforms. Experts from anti-trafficking nonprofit organisations and an American law enforcement official talked me through the crimes they were seeing.
Economic inequality is a global phenomenon. And while the data suggests that inequality between countries has fallen, inequality within countries has risen. China, for instance, a country with very low levels of inequality just a few decades ago, now features inequality levels that are comparable to those in the US.
Một dòng học thuyết dựa trên bằng chứng khảo cổ cho rằng trống đồng Đông Sơn, Việt Nam có nguồn gốc từ Vân Nam, nằm ở Tây Nam Trung Quốc được mang xuống Bắc Việt Nam, phát triển rực rỡ tại Đông Sơn. Trống đồng sau đó được lan rộng ra toàn khu vực Đông Nam Á. Trống đồng là sản phẩm của quá trình hợp chủng giao thoa văn hoá, Đông Sơn, Việt Nam là điểm phát triển rực rỡ nhất, nhưng không phải là nơi khởi điểm của trống đồng.
Theo Ben Kiernan trong quyển Viet Nam: A history from earliest times to present (2017), kỷ nguyên đồ đồng tại vùng đất là nước Việt Nam ngày nay diễn ra muộn hơn Lưỡng Hà, Trung Hoa (3000 – 2800 BC) hay Ai Cập và Âu Châu (2200 – 2000 BC) rất nhiều. Nó cùng thời với mảnh đất Thái Lan, chỉ vào khoảng 1500 – 1400 BC.
Stepping onto the Laos-China Railway (LCR) in Luang Prabang, the picturesque former royal capital in Northern Laos, brings a rush of aesthetic familiarity to anyone who has ridden the high-speed rail in China. From the train station massage chairs to the voice over the loudspeaker and the advertisements on seatbacks, the experience is decidedly Chinese. The result is both comforting and disorienting: riders feel they are not quite in China, but not quite all the way out of it either. China’s borderlands strategy of integration through connectivity results in borders that are blurred and shifted. The LCR is a physical manifestation of this new kind of borderland.
Opened in December 2021, the LCR is celebrated by China and Laos as a major accomplishment. President Xi Jinping called the LCR a “landmark project of high-quality Belt and Road cooperation.”1 The railway connects the Yunnan provincial capital of Kunming to Laos’s national capital of Vientiane, covering one thousand kilometers in less than ten hours—a trip that previously took days.2 It is a marvel of modern engineering, traversing the mountain jungle terrain of southern Yunnan and northern Laos with a long series of tunnels and bridges. It is the first leg constructed of China’s vision for a pan-Asia railway system connecting Kunming to Singapore via three trunks: Myanmar in the west, Laos and Thailand in the center, and Vietnam and Cambodia in the east.
The Laos-China Railway in Luang Prabang, Laos. By author, September 2025.
On March 19, 2026, the Prime Minister’s Office of the Lao PDR issued Notice No. 366/PMO mandating nationwide adjustments to school operations, as part of emergency measures to ease the financial strain on families amid continued fuel price volatility.
The directive, addressed to the Ministry of Education and Sports, introduces immediate changes to learning schedules while preserving academic standards and signaling further contingency steps if economic conditions worsen.
Under the order, all general education institutions—public and private—are required to scale back in-person instruction from five days to three days per week. Schools must continue delivering the full curriculum, with the academic calendar extended to compensate for reduced classroom time.
For teacher training institutes, vocational schools, and higher education institutions, schedules will be restructured into full-day sessions, combining morning and afternoon classes, while similarly reducing attendance to three days per week. Teaching personnel without assigned classes are instructed to report for duty on a rotating basis.
Officials said the policy is aimed at lowering transportation-related expenses for households while ensuring continuity in education delivery.
The government also outlined escalation measures should fuel-related pressures persist. Institutions with adequate digital infrastructure will transition to remote learning, while those lacking technical readiness may be required to temporarily suspend operations.
To support potential online learning, the Ministry of Technology and Communications has been tasked with verifying internet reliability nationwide and assessing the availability of essential equipment.
Authorities stressed that parents, teachers, and students must prepare for immediate implementation, highlighting the government’s broader effort to balance economic relief with uninterrupted access to education during a period of heightened cost pressures.
China’s high-speed rail network is reshaping regional air travel, challenging short-haul aviation and redefining how passengers move across the country. Yuanfei Zhao (Scott) explores the co-evolution of rail and air, and examines the implications for airline strategy, fleet demand and the future of China’s regional aviation market.
China’s transportation landscape has undergone a quiet but profound transformation, one that is redefining how people move across the country and recalibrating the roles of air and rail in the national mobility ecosystem. At the heart of this shift is the rapid rise of high-speed rail (HSR), which has not only captured market share from short-haul aviation but has fundamentally altered traveller behaviour, airline network strategies, and urban connectivity.
CBSnews.com On the eve of his visit to the United States, China’s president, Jiang Zemin, sat down for a rare interview with Mike Wallace.
In a wide-ranging and surprisingly frank interview, Jiang talked about many topics, including relations between the United States and China, Tiananmen Square and American morals.
Jiang Zemin (born August 17, 1926, Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, China—died November 30, 2022, Shanghai, China) was a Chinese official who was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP; 1989–2002) and president of China (1993–2003).
Jiang joined the CCP in 1946 and graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University the following year with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked in several factories as an engineer before receiving further technical training in the Soviet Union about 1955. He subsequently headed technological research institutes in various parts of China. In 1980 Jiang became vice minister of the state commission on imports and exports. Two years later he became vice minister of the electronics industry and from 1983 to 1985 was its minister. He had meanwhile become a member of the Central Committee of the CCP in 1982. Named mayor of Shanghai in 1985, he joined the Political Bureau in 1987.
Footage of an interview of Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister of Singapore, conducted by Australian and British journalists.
Quote: “If the British withdraw, I am prepared to go on with the Austrialians and the New Zealanders. But, I am not prepared to go on with Americans. ….I think they are highly intelligent, often well-meaning, people, and some of their leaders like Mr. Kennedy, the late President, had signs, of growing greatness, depth. But, by and large, the administration lacks depth. But, by and wisdom which comes out of an accumulation of knowledge of human beings and human situations over a long period of time. That is lacking, and it is not their fault what have they got? Three, four hundred years of history, and they have become a nations just recently. I will tell you this. I have had three experiences, only three experiences, with the Americans. And, they did not intend any harm in each one of them. But, the tragedy was; they did real harm.”
Lee Kuan Yew was 44 at the time. He revealed an attempt in 1960 by an agent of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to bribe an official of the Singaporean Special Branch to report on the activities of the Singaporean state. He also revealed that the American agent was arrested and threatened with prosecution. But the case did not come to open court. He told the journalists that he sent a message to the American government, which he accused of “lacking finesse”, to give Singapore $100 million dollars for economic development. However, the Americans responded by offering Lee and his political Party $10 Million. He refused.
13 March 2026, London: Military tensions in West Asia are beginning to disrupt maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, raising serious concerns for global energy markets, fertilizer supplies and vulnerable economies. In a rapid assessment titled “Strait of Hormuz disruptions: Implications for global trade and development,” UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has highlighted the potential risks posed by interruptions in one of the world’s most critical trade corridors.
The Strait of Hormuz carries nearly one quarter of global seaborne oil trade, along with large volumes of liquefied natural gas and fertilizers. Any disruption in this narrow passage therefore has immediate consequences for global energy prices, maritime transport costs and agricultural input supply chains.
CVD 