Every Sunday, Chinese tutor Kirill Burobin begins work in the early morning and is kept busy until midnight. As Russia seeks to tighten ties with China amid Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine, the number of Burobin’s students has tripled over the past year. “Sunday is the busiest,” 20-year-old Burobin, who …
Read More »Endangered tiger skins found in Hanoi taxis
Police found three tiger skins as they inspected two taxi cabs in Hanoi’s Hoang Mai District on Friday. The drivers were on their way to deliver the skins to a bus station when they were stopped by police. Each of the tiger skins stretches about three meters in length. One …
Read More »Da Lat expansion to absorb neighboring districts
Da Lat Town, a tourist attraction in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, will be expanded by merging it with four neighboring districts. A plan approved recently by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh aims for Da Lat to encompass a total area of 335,000 hectares by 2045. The resort town and former hill …
Read More »Putin makes surprise trip to Mariupol, first to occupied Donbas in Ukraine
President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to Mariupol, Russian state media reported on Sunday, in what would be the Kremlin leader’s first trip to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine’s Donbas region since the start of the war. The visit came after Putin traveled to Crimea on Saturday in an …
Read More »Georgian man detained for swindling $30,000 from money changer
Police in the northern city of Hai Phong detained a Georgian man Saturday for cheating a money changer out of US$30,000 by switching it with envelops of paper. Sordia Gia, 55, is under investigation for “fraudulent appropriation of property.” Police said Gia has stayed in Vietnam for several years on …
Read More »Putin visits Mariupol, Russia-occupied city in Ukraine
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin made a working trip to Mariupol, a Ukrainian city in the Donetsk region which has been occupied by Moscow forces since May of last year, Russian media reported on Sunday. Putin flew to Mariupol by helicopter, the TASS agency reported citing the Kremlin. Driving a car, …
Read More »Saigon’s addresses are a riddle wrapped in a mystery
HCMC’s chaotic style of numbering addresses and multiple streets having the same names are a constant source of headache for citizens. After motorbike-taxi driver Nguyen Van Nam dropped off his passenger at No. 60 Truong Dinh, he received an angry call from the person for dropping them off “at the …
Read More »Funny old world: The week’s offbeat news
From zombified Indonesian teenagers to Canadians getting the right to be rude. Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world. Only in New York New York’s 311 non-emergency hotline is there to log complaints about noise or rats, but it also has to field some pretty bizarre requests …
Read More »WHO, advisors urge China to release all Covid-related data after new research
Advisors to the World Health Organization on Saturday urged China to release all information related to the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic after new findings were briefly shared on an international database used to track pathogens. New sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as well as additional genomic data based on …
Read More »Japan, Germany pledge closer ties as Scholz visits Tokyo
Japan and Germany pledged closer defense ties and cooperation on diversifying supply chains as Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met in Tokyo Saturday. Scholz is on his second trip to Japan in less than a year, and came with six ministers for government-to-government talks as Berlin works …
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