EIU-VN-Country-Report-2009-06+2.
Vietnamese rights lawyer jailed over call for democracy. A dissident lawyer and son of a Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader has been sentenced to seven years in prison and a further three years' house arrest for calling for an end to Vietnam's government and its one-party system.
Cu Huy Ha Vu was sentenced after a dramatic one-day trial in Hanoi in which one of his defence attorneys was ejected by the judge and his other three lawyers walk out in protest. Vu was left alone to defend himself and had several heated exchanges with the judge.
Coffee%20Annual_Hanoi_Vietnam_5-24-2012. Children of Agent Orange - People & Power. Fifty years ago this month, in the early stages of the Vietnam War, the US military began spraying rural areas of the country with the herbicide, Agent Orange.
The programme's goal was to defoliate forested land, depriving the enemy Viet Cong of cover and driving peasants to the cities, thus destroying the Viet Cong's support base and food supply. Over the next 10 years more than 80 million litres were deployed across 7.4 million hectares of Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia. They were an effective defoliant, but there is strong evidence that the deadly dioxins contained in Agent Orange also had a catastrophic effect on the health of millions of Vietnamese – killing hundreds of thousands and causing dreadful diseases and birth defects in subsequent generations right up to this day.