Conversations on Vietnam Development
Asiancorrespondent – THE millions of people who depend on the Mekong River for survival are at risk due to the twin threats of climate change and hydroelectric power plants. While the latter is often seen as part of the solution to the former, in this case hydroelectricity may, in fact, be a more urgent threat. Tiếp tục đọc “Vietnam: Climate change, dams will drastically impact Mekong region”
Ngày 3/5, Đại sứ Mỹ tại Việt Nam, ngài Ted Osius và Thứ trưởng Bộ Quốc phòng Việt Nam, Thượng tướng Nguyễn Chí Vịnh đã cùng công bố kết quả xử lý thành công đất nhiễm dioxin tại sân bay Đà Nẵng, trong khuôn khổ dự án được Bộ Quốc phòng Việt Nam và USAID quản lý. Phó Thủ tướng Vũ Đức Đam đã đến dự.
Tiếp tục đọc “45.000 m3 đất sân bay Đà Nẵng được tẩy sạch dioxin”
30/04/2016 06:53 GMT+7
TTCT– Ở “Trung tâm trưng bày hoạt động khắc phục hậu quả bom mìn” (Mine Action Visitor Center – MAVC) tại Quảng Trị có một quả bom hiện vật, phần vỏ thép bị xé rách, tạo hình như dáng đứng đau thương và nhẫn nại của một con người trên vùng đất quá nổi tiếng vì đạn bom này.
Nguyễn Thị Diệu Linh bên quả bom chôn 42 năm ở nhà ông Nguyễn Vũ -Ngô Xuân Hiền
8 April 2016 East Asia Forum
Recent developments in the South China Sea are a serious cause for concern for Southeast Asian states, which have a huge interest in ensuring the safety and security of these waters given their importance for international shipping. Ongoing militarisation in the disputed waters increases the risks of unintended military confrontations, threatening regional stability.
China’s extensive land reclamation and installation of military facilities on the disputed islands, together with the United States’ increasingly high-profile naval operations in the region, further increase the complexity and volatility of the situation in the South China Sea. Tiếp tục đọc “ASEAN should choose CUES for the South China Sea”
Is Vietnam diverting its civilian know-how to create an indigenous nuclear weapons program? Not yet, says the CSS’ Oliver Thränert, but increased tensions or overt conflict with China could lead Hanoi to develop its own nuclear deterrent.
By Oliver Thränert for Center for Security Studies (CSS)
ISN – For many years, the international nuclear non-proliferation regime has been in deep crisis. This became apparent most recently when the ninth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in May 2015 ended without a common final document. At the same time, a number of threshold countries are planning to begin using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. In a time of increasing international tensions, some of them might build on know-how acquired through their civilian programs to safeguard their national security needs through a nuclear weapons program in the near future. Vietnam is an interesting case in point. Irrespective of certain delays in the development of its peaceful nuclear program, the country has progressed quite far. At the same time, it is engaged in an increasingly precarious conflict with its main neighbor, nuclear-armed China. Currently, there are no signs of a Vietnamese nuclear weapons program. In the framework of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the country is a model of transparency and cooperation. But it is uncertain whether this will always remain the case. On the contrary, Hanoi might change its policy if the conflict with China should come to a head while the NPT continues to be weakened.
Vietnam’s strategic situation
Vietnam might complete its first nuclear reactor within a few years, ahead of ambitious neighbors such as Indonesia or Malaysia. The country’s main motivations are its growing energy requirements and the desire to diversify its energy sources. Considerations of prestige may also be a factor. As a threshold nation, Vietnam aims to achieve the same level as Asia’s developed nations. With a view to China, Hanoi probably also wishes to demonstrate the high level of global confidence that the country enjoys in sensitive matters of security policy. Tiếp tục đọc “Nonproliferation and Nuclear Energy: The Case of Vietnam”
22/03/2016 13:41 GMT+7
TTO – Nhiều người cho rằng sau vụ nổ kinh hoàng ở Hà Đông, dân kinh doanh phế liệu là vỏ bom mìn ở “chợ bom” xã Diễn Hồng, huyện Diễn Châu tỉnh Nghệ An đã biết sợ.
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| Phế liệu bom mìn tại các cơ sở kinh doanh phế liệu ở Diễn Hồng năm 2005 – Ảnh: Vũ Toàn |
HANOI – Sunday, March 20, 2016 16:26
The large crater caused by the blast in Hanoi on March 19. Photo: Minh Chien
The explosion at about 3.10 p.m. at a scrap metal trading business seriously tore through 36 houses and damaged 95 others, and left a large crater in Van Phu residential area, Ha Dong District, the police said. Many vehicles along the street were damaged too.
Although the police was yet to officially pinpoint the cause of the blast, they speculated that it was ignited when the shop owner tried to cut open a bomb using a blow torch.
One of the perished victims was Pham Van Cuong, 42, who had rent the house for his scrap metal shop since 2013 and reportedly often used a blow torch to cut large scrap metal pieces, police said.
LM – Project RENEW established a mobile outreach program to provide prostheses, orthotics and education to explosive remnants of war survivors in the remote communities of Vietnam.
Susan Eckey, Former Deputy Director General for Humanitarian Affairs, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, visits with the P&O team.
Photo courtesy of Dang Quang Toan/Project RENEW.
According to a 2014 report compiled by Vietnam’s Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, Quang Tri province currently has 37,292 persons with disabilities, 13,023 of whom were disabled by Agent Orange and 5,094 by explosive remnants of war (ERW).1,2,3 Disabled persons living in rural areas often live in poverty and do not have access to basic services. For those with injuries resulting from unexploded ordnance (UXO), prosthetics are difficult to obtain. Tiếp tục đọc “Project RENEW’s Prosthetics and Orthotics Mobile Outreach Program”
Thứ tư, 20 Tháng 1 2016 16:58
Tiếp tục đọc “Chiến lược xoay trục, tái cân bằng của Mỹ đối với châu Á – Thái Bình Dương”
Editor’s note: It was 1954, and the surrounded French garrison was facing defeat in what would become known as the First Indochina War. What happened next has been a source of controversy for decades. The author of a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Vietnam gives his view, drawing on the array of materials that have slowly emerged.
thebulletin – It is one of the most tantalizing questions of the long and bloody struggle for Vietnam: Did US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the spring of 1954 offer French foreign minister Georges Bidault two atomic bombs for use against Viet Minh positions near the beleaguered French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in remote northwestern Vietnam? For decades historians have investigated the matter, with no consensus emerging. But what does the evidence actually say? The time is right for a fresh look.
At first glance, it might seem odd that the United States would even contemplate providing large-scale military aid to the French army; after all, what did America care if imperial France lost one of its colonies in remote Asia? But this was the depths of the Cold War. Anxious to prevent the “fall” of another Asian nation to communism soon after the so-called “loss of China” and a bloody three-year stalemated war against communist forces in Korea, the United States was willing to send weaponry to aid the French—even if there was considerable doubt among experts as to how committed Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh really was to advancing the cause of global communism. (“Isn’t he first and foremost a nationalist?” many analysts speculated.) Ultimately, the United States had gambled on staying with the imperial status quo and propping up a repressive French regime in Indochina, to the point that by early 1954 Washington covered the lion’s share of the cost of the war effort. Tiếp tục đọc ““We might give them a few.” Did the US offer to drop atom bombs at Dien Bien Phu?”
“Bridging Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, Transnationalizing Viet Nam is a rich and nuanced study of transnational linkages between Viet Nam and its diaspora in the United States. Through fascinating case studies of Vietnamese popular music productions, Internet virtual communities, diasporic art and community politics, Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde provides a rare glimpse into how Vietnamese have connected their worlds and made meanings for themselves.”
—Yen Le Espiritu, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
temple.edu – Vietnamese diasporic relations affect—and are directly affected by—events in Viet Nam. In Transnationalizing Viet Nam, Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde explores these connections, providing a nuanced understanding of this globalized community. Valverde draws on 250 interviews and almost two decades of research to show the complex relationship between Vietnamese in the diaspora and those back at the homeland.
Arguing that Vietnamese immigrant lives are inherently transnational, she shows how their acts form virtual communities via the Internet, organize social movements, exchange music and create art, find political representation, and even dissent. Valverde also exposes how generational, gender, class, and political tensions threaten to divide the ethnic community.
Transnationalizing Viet Nam paints a vivid picture of the complex political and personal allegiances that exist within Vietnamese America and shape the relations between this heterogeneous community and its country of origin.
BEIJING — Vietnam’s prime minister, a former child messenger for the Viet Cong, has spent his 10 years in power standing up to the Chinese and steering his country closer to the U.S.
Tipped as a strong candidate to become the head of Vietnam’s Communist Party at next week’s National Congress, Nguyen Tan Dung has already been dubbed his country’s “Putin.”
“No one in Vietnam has done a Vladimir Putin, who has served as prime minister and then president,” said Professor Carl Thayer, an expert on Vietnam affairs at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy. Tiếp tục đọc “Vietnam’s ‘Putin’ Steers Country Away From China, Toward U.S.”
World’s largest systematic identification project will use smart DNA-testing technology.
KHAM/Reuters/Corbis
Vietnam’s Viet-Laos cemetery contains the remains of thousands of people who died in the Vietnam War — but most are still unidentified.
Nature – Digging foundations for temples or schools, harvesting rice in paddy fields: these are some of the ways that the decaying remains of Vietnam War victims still turn up, 40 years after the conflict ended. Now an effort has begun that will use smart DNA technologies to identify the bones of the half a million or more Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who are thought still to be missing.
It is the largest ever systematic identification effort; only the identification of more than 20,000 victims of armed conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s comes close.
“When I was a 21-year-old in the medical corps there, I never imagined that such a project could ever become possible,” says Vietnam veteran and genomics pioneer Craig Venter, head of the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California. “We thought of body counts as statistics — now, decades later, it may be possible to put names to them.”
Although the United States has repatriated and identified most of its war dead, Vietnam has so far identified just a few hundred people, using outdated techniques. Yet people in Vietnam remain desperate to acquire the remains of family members. Tiếp tục đọc “Vietnam begins huge effort to identify war dead”
CVD 