Vietnam wants to boost visitors from last year’s 6 million to 23.5 million, reports Vietnam News. The regional tourism industry was urged to on low-budget package tours such as the “Three Countries One Destination” program for travellers interested in visiting Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Category: Vietnam
Like millions of immigrants before them, the Cham of Southern California are trying to hold onto their identity in a strange land. The Cham, descendants from the Ancient Kingdom of Champa located on the coastline of present-day Vietnam, have spent generations looking for a place to call home.
For centuries, they have been chased from place to place — from the highlands of Vietnam to the rivers of Cambodia and, in the bloody aftermath of genocide, to the United States, where thousands have settled.
Bilateral trade between China and Vietnam hit US$16.6 billion in the first ten months of 2008, reported Xinhua.
The BBC reports that just hours before the deadline expired, negotiating teams from Vietnam and China announced a consensus on their border demarcation negoiations. However, it appears that nothing has been signed yet.
Speaking to BBC from Hanoi, Dr Nguyen Hong Thao from the State Border Committee, who was also a member of the Vietnamese negotiating team, insisted that “everything was agreed” at the final round of talks.
He said there remained only small technical details to be worked out.
Not everyone is especially happy with the negotiations it seems, and the event is getting almost no play in Vietnam.
“It seems they (Vietnam and China) were under huge time constraints to finalise the deal, even when not all was agreed and done,” [Bui Tin, a former army colonel and newspaper editor now in exile] said.
“The question is: who pressures whom?” added Mr Tin.
Many in Vietnam believe that their government has been pushed by Beijing into finalising agreements that are only beneficial to China.
Some also fear that Hanoi has conceded too much land, their concerns fuelled by the fact that no detailed map of the agreed boundaries has been made available to the public.
Yet another reason to stay in bed:
The Vietnam Home Shopping Network is launching the first integrated television shopping network in the country.
reports Xinhua:
Foreign ministers of 10 ASEAN nations will meet in Jakarta next week to formalize the ratification of the ASEAN charter, ASEAN Secretariat said here Tuesday.
The group planned to formalize the charter when Thailand holds the 14th ASEAN summit meeting on Dec. 15-18 in Chiang Mai, but the political unrest in the country led to the postponement of the schedule.
“The entry into force of the Charter is a historic milestone for the organization, repositioning ASEAN to better meet the challenges of the 21st century,” Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said in the statement.
Vietnam was determined to finish planting markers along the border with China ahead of the December 10 deadline.Over the past seven years, the taskforces from both countries had finished demarcation along 1,400km of the common border, with almost all locations for border markers fixed and some 1,800 markers planted, said the Vietnam News Agency.
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Hanoi, Moscow mayors meet for closer ties
Officials from Hanoi and Moscow signed a joint statement and an agreement of cooperation between their friendship associations in Hanoi on November 26, the first day of a three-day visit by a senior delegation from Moscow, reports the Vietnam News Agency.
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Cambodian PM visits Laos
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has arrived in Laos ahead of a planned meeting of the leaders of former French Indochina: Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
For the first time in their at-times turbulent history, a ship from the Chinese Navy visited Vietnam. The Chinese naval training ship Zheng He arrived at the Vietnamese central Tien Sa port in Danang yesterday Chinese state media reported.
Vietnam has hosted a number of foreign navies in recent years including ships from the United States.
Vietnam and China fought a short-lived border war in 1979.