1. “About 30,000 metres of public electric cables worth about 4 billion VN Dong has been illegally removed from the netwrok in the first five months of this year, according to HCMC Public Lighting Co”. Now, I reckon it wouldn’t be too hard to just remove 30,000 metres of cable from an operating urban power system and put it in the back of a truck. Not sure what you do with it then.
2. “The Ha Noi Market Watch confiscated 20,000 packets of cigarettes and 320kg of clothing, worth a total of VND500m (US$27,800) from a lorry yesterday. The owner of the goods and the lorry driver fled the scene.” Now, even if the value of the cigarettes was only $1.20 a pack, that leaves just $3,800 for 320 kilos of clothes, or $12 a kilo. I have never weighed a kilo of clothes but I reckon you could get a lot of lightweight clothes (which is the only type of clothing worn here) for a kilo. But they all would have turned up in the markets as Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren genuines.
3. “Pham Thi Trinh, 38, from Can Tho, aid that she caught three toads last Friday and cooked soup for her family with them. She did not know that their eggs were poisonous. After the meal, she and her two children were hospitalised with stomach aches and vomiting”. Don’t have soup at Trinh’s house.
4. “Hanoi on Monday launched a pilot project to install mobile automatic barriers and fences to regulate traffic and reduce gridlock in the city”. It won’t work with the bikes – they will just go around them. Up on the footpath, around the fence and away they go.
5. “Hanoi’s Department of Construction has chosen contractors to move underground 127,000km of wires and cables currently hanging over the streets of the capital. ‘The biggest obstacle is finding the real owners of them because the companies have no maps of their wires’. The source for as much as 50% of the cables or wires cannot be identified.”. This could be real fun.
6. A local wrote an article about stolen motor bike plates. In order to get new plates, the application can only be made by the original owner, and the bike was at least third hand. And once that person had been found it would take a month at least involving several day-ling trips to the registration office. A friend told her about the Heavenly Black Market, where they sell all kinds of stolen things, including number plates.
So off she went. She asked a shop keeper and 10 minutes later she had her plates back. The shopkeeper said, “Usually the plates will get here about half an hour after they’re stolen, depending on how far from the market they were stolen.”. She asked at the local police station how they could allow this to happen. She was told that the plates are small enough to be well hidden in the market. They had cleaned it out a few times but the trade always grows back. If they catch a thief there is nothing they can do, as the plates are worth less than US$30 and holding stolen goods worth less than that is not chargeable.
It cost her 500,000 Dong (about US$30) to get her plates back. As she left a man approached her to make a fake version for her for 200,000 Dong. That way she could keep the real ones safe. She thought that was cheaper than paying 500,000 each time they were stolen.
7. “Hanoi police are considering formal criminal charges against eight employees of the Finance Academy, including several officials and lecturers, as they were caught red-handed playing cards with cash of about VND30 million (about A$2,100) seized at the scene”. Nothing like learning how to handle the nation’s finances properly.
8. “Hanoi police on Sunday uncovered a workshop making false monosodium glutamate under the brand name of OMO”. Makes the sweet and sour sauce whiter than white.
9. “A big fire at the chopstick production workshop in Quang Ngai province has burned down 280 tons of material and chopsticks worth about VND800 million (A$57,000)”. The entire country will fall apart. No dodgy MSG and no cheap chopsticks.
10. “A contest to gather creative ideas of teenagers in HCMC this year has welcomed 64 projects, tripling last year’s, in many fields like ….household appliances”. I’m not entirely sure why a contest that attracts just 64 entries in a city of 8 million people and where the kids go to school 6 and sometimes 7 days a week should be front page news, but I am intrigued by the prospect of our kids coming up with a creative idea about a household appliance. Just turning it on and using it would be a creative idea most of the time.
VietGeoff 