Chinese police force

The 25 to 145-centimeter-high trees were discovered covering 800 of 4,630 square meters cultivated by Tran Hung, 38, in Chu Se District on Thursday afternoon.

Police also found a nursery where baby cannabis trees were being reared.

Hung said the nursery is owned by his grandmother and that he was assigned to manage it two years ago.

In late 2019, an acquaintance gave him cannabis seeds to grow as cattle feed, he said.

Police, having seized the entire cannabis crop, plan to expand their investigation.

Cannabis is on the list of narcotics forbidden in Vietnam.

Those growing cannabis on a small scale could be fined VND2-5 million ($86.16-215.40). Farmers found cultivating 500 to 3,000 plants could face jail terms of six months to three years, while those operating on a bigger scale could spend up to seven years in jail.

* China and India should firmly follow the right path of mutual trust and cooperation between neighboring major countries, and not go astray with suspicion and distrust nor fall back on a road of negative retrogression, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Thursday. Wang made the remarks in a telephone conversation with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, stressing that the two sides should maintain the strategic consensuses reached by their leaders.

* As COVID-19 transmission rates seemingly decline across the European Region, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge expressed health concerns over “long-COVID” or “post-COVID” symptoms at a virtual press conference on Thursday.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the situation in Armenia in a telephone conversation with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday, the Kremlin said.

* The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the US military had conducted airstrikes against infrastructure utilized by Iranian-backed militant groups in eastern Syria. The Pentagon called the operation a “proportionate military response” carried out after consultations with coalition partners.

* China approved two more vaccines for public use, raising the number of domestically produced vaccines that can be used in China to four.

* Japan on Friday is preparing to lift the state of emergency over COVID-19 for five prefectures where the situation has improved, although the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area will likely be kept under the emergency period for the time being, according to government sources.

* The Department of Health (DOH) of the Philippines reported on Friday 2,651 new COVID-19 cases, the highest daily increase since Oct. 17 last year, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the Southeast Asian country to 571,327.

* Leaders of the European Union (EU) called for an accelerated production and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines late on Thursday as the bloc is struggling with supply shortfalls.

* Brazil surpassed 250,000 COVID-19 deaths, while France and Germany said COVID-19 is here to stay after European Union leaders discussed ways to fight new variants of the virus, step up inoculations and save Europe’s tourism industry from another ruinous summer.

* Europe’s medicines regulator issued new guidance for drug makers that modify their vaccines to protect against variants of the virus to speed up the approval process.

* France will bring in new restrictions for the Moselle area around its common border with Germany, and impose measures including weekend lockdowns in Paris and 19 other regions from the start of March if signs of the coronavirus accelerating persist.

* Australia’s Victoria state will start easing restrictions from Friday night.

* Republic of Korea launched its inoculation campaign, with shots to be administered in some 200 nursing homes.

* US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to launch a campaign to educate Americans about vaccines in anticipation of a period later this year where supply may outstrip demand because of vaccine hesitancy.

* Brazil will purchase 20 million doses of the vaccine made by India’s Bharat Biotech for delivery between March and May.

* Canada’s vaccination campaign is ramping up after earlier supply disruptions and the number of inoculations last week hit a five-week high.

* Pfizer and BioNTech said they are testing a third dose of their vaccine to better understand the immune response against new variants of the virus.

* Mexico’s economy grew quicker than first estimated during the fourth quarter as the country recovered from its sharpest economic contraction in nearly nine decades.

* Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen to the lowest level since 1995 as coronavirus restrictions limited travel. Data released by the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources on Friday revealed that emissions fell by 4.4 percent in the 12 months to September 2020.

* Security personnel of the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) rescued more than 80 Rohingya refugees who had been onboard a boat drifting in the waters of Andaman Sea for 10 days, and retrieved eight dead bodies.

* Republic of Korea’s quarantine authorities said Friday that it will extend the country’s five-tier social-distancing rules at the third-highest level in the Seoul metropolitan area for two weeks.

* US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he would work to make US-Saudi relations “as strong and transparent as possible.” Biden made the remarks in the first phone conversation with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud since Biden’s inauguration.

* Germany’s Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure said on Wednesday that more than EUR5 billion (US$6.1 billion) would be invested in the modernization of over 3,000 railway stations across the country.

* Colombian President Ivan Duque announced a decision Thursday night to extend a declared national health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic by three more months, as the vaccination drive entered its eighth day.

* AstraZeneca boss Pascal Soriot said he hoped to meet the EU’s expectations on the number of vaccines the company can deliver to the bloc in the second quarter.

* The Czech prime minister said people’s movement needed to be “radically” limited over at least the next three weeks.

* Portugal extended until at least mid-March a nationwide lockdown.

* The African Union is backing calls for drugmakers to waive some intellectual property rights on COVID-19 medicines and vaccines.

* Israel has frozen its programme to send vaccines abroad to buy international goodwill, Defence Minister Benny Gantz said, after the initiative came under legal scrutiny.

* Bahrain has approved Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine for emergency use.

The Japanese trading house will pull out of the 2-gigawatt Vinh Tan 3 project, planned to be located in the southern province of Binh Thuan, because of climate change targets, Reuters reported, citing two anonymous sources.

Without mentioning Vinh Tan 3 specifically, Mitsubishi said in a statement that it was committed to reducing its investment in coal power in line with international climate goals.

The 2-gigawatt plant was originally scheduled to come online in 2024.

OneEnergy, a joint venture of Mitsubishi and Hong Kong’s CLP group, holds a 49 percent interest in the $2 billion project. State-owned utility Vietnam Electricity owns another 29 percent. Chinese companies are handling materials procurement, construction and equipment delivery.

This marks Mitsubishi’s first withdrawal from a coal plant project. The trading house has said it will not build any new facilities of this type after Vung Ang 2, a Nikkei report said.

Mitsubishi still has a stake in the Vung Ang 2 coal power plant being built in the central province of Ha Tinh, which is more widely known after being subject to critical scrutiny by environmental and other groups as well as investors.

With five groups of solutions and 25 tasks, the plan puts forward that by 2030, the State’s management methods will be reformed in a fundamental and comprehensive manner and aligned with international principles and practices in a bid to create a favourable business climate for all economic sectors, thereby helping achieve all targets relevant to the private economic sector as stated in Resolution No 10-NQ/TW, developing the private economic sector into an important driving force of the socialist-oriented market economy.

During the course of the three years implementing the resolution, Vietnam’s private economic sector has seen robust development and has gradually become a driving force in promoting national economic growth.

Private businesses, particularly large scale ones, have made remarkable strides in establishing their roles and position in the national economy. Many private enterprises have shown performance levels as effective as or even more so than State-owned and foreign-invested enterprises.

More and more major private corporations and domestic joint stock companies have invested abroad in developed countries to expand their markets and promote their brands such as Vingroup, Vietjet Aviation Joint Stock Company, Truong Hai Auto Corporation (Thaco), T&T Group, Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Company (Vinamilk), and FPT Group.

Private enterprises made up only 20% of the 500 largest enterprises in Vietnam (VNR500) in 2017, the figure then reaching 57.8% in 2019. The proportion of overall revenue from private enterprises also increased to 37.51% in 2019 from 27% in 2016.

These figures were made possible thanks to the efforts of enterprises themselves as well as Government policies designed to create a favourable and equal business environment in recent years.

However, according to the General Statistics Office, private enterprises only contribute about 9.1% of GDP.

To address the problem, the 13th National Party Congress’s Resolution was adopted with many new viewpoints and orientations for the State’s economic management, aimed at making major breakthroughs in developing the private economic sector.

The resolution stresses the development of a strong entrepreneurial force, the restructure of State-owned enterprises, and the strengthening of links between domestic and foreign-invested enterprises.

To achieve these goals, State management activities must respect the law of the market in order to promote the socialist-oriented development of the private economic sector. It is also necessary to remove hindrances facing production and business activities, including those in the private sector, in order to facilitate businesses’ operation and encourage them to make even bigger contributions to the country’s development.