Các bài báo nước ngoài về Viêt Nam

Các bài báo nước ngoài về Viêt Nam

Mình mới vào box nên không biết có topic nào tập hợp các bài báo tiếng Anh ở nuớc ngoài viết về Việt Nam chưa. Mình xin copy lại đây một số bài chủ yếu là để luyện đọc tiếng Anh, vì thấy đọc các bài về đất nước mình có vẻ dễ hiểu hơn. Nếu các bác nào thấy ở đâu thì post lên mọi nguời cùng đọc nhé

Dream of Vietnam''s coffee king
HANOI, Sept. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- "I always dream of building a well-known coffee trademark so that my country can export a large volume of processed coffee, not just green coffee beans," Vietnam''s coffee king Dang Le Nguyen Vu told Xinhua.
ã??ã??Seven years ago, Dang Le Nguyen Vu, director of Trung Nguyen Coffee Co. Ltd., was nobody but a medical student whose parents are poor workers. Nurtured by the aspiration to make a fortune for himself and his country by selling processed coffee, Vu, in 1996, opened a coffee roasting facility in Dac Lac -- the kingdom of coffee in Vietnam - with a total workforce of only four, including himself and three of his friends.
ã??ã??Having practically no money and experience, Vu struggled to make his business survive while still having to attend classes. By the time he got a Bachelor''s Degree in medicine he had already succeeded in collecting over 30 formulae for roasting, grinding and brewing coffee.
ã??ã??Time went by, and so did the money Vu invest in his small production base. His parents had to sell their own house to contribute capital to the base because their son wanted to develop it into a bigger one.
ã??ã??"I put all my life in coffee processing industry instead of working as a doctor because a poor doctor has no money to help patients who need treatment. More importantly, Vietnam needs a famous processed coffee brand for the whole world to enjoy and admire," Vu said.
ã??ã??His dream of establishing a household coffee brand name in Vietnam has now come true, given by the fact that the once half-dead facility has developed into a Ho Chi Minh City-based company with 600 employees. The firm currently has 400 Trung Nguyen-style cafes in the country''s all 61 cities and provinces.
ã??ã??He attributed the rapid development mainly to product quality and Trung Nguyen''s respect to partners and consumers. "Our mission is to create a leading trademark by bringing creation inspiration and pride of gastronomy bearing the national cultural identity to coffee and tea lovers," he said.
ã??ã??Vu has assigned himself and all of his employees to fulfill eight fundamental tasks, namely creation inspiration, trademark development and protection, Trung Nguyen style construction, consumer-oriented approach, product improvement, win-win relations with partners, manpower development, and community construction.
ã??ã??Among numerous coffee producers, both state and private, in the country, Trung Nguyen Coffee Co. Ltd. is taking the lead, mainly because it is the first local enterprise to apply franchising model both domestically and overseas.
ã??ã??The model, still uncommon in Vietnam, has been applied in a flexible way by Vu. His company supplies its own products, ways of brewing coffee, decoration design and services style to cafe owners who, in return, pay the firm a small royalty to use Trung Nguyen name first, and then part of their revenues.
ã??ã??In spite of reaping huge success in local coffee market, Vu does not want to stand still. His new dream, being a major player in the world coffee market, has appeared.
ã??ã??After having established a chain of cafes embedded with the national cultural identity in Vietnam''s all localities by 2001, Trung Nguyen started applying the franchising model in foreign countries, such as Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Cambodia. It also has many distributors and agents in the United States, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia, Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Czech Republic among others.
ã??ã??The company also planned to set up large Trung Nguyen-style cafes in China following the smooth operation of Chinese-invested cafes in the province of Yunnan in late 2000, Vu''s assistant, Le Non, revealed.
ã??ã??In the first eight months of this year, Trung Nguyen shipped six tons of coffee to China''s Hong Kong, five tons to China''s Taiwan and three tons to Chinese mainland. Besides, 16 tons of coffee entered the mainland via border trade.
ã??ã??"Although China is a tea-drinking country, its population, especially youths, are much interested in coffee, especially TrungNguyen branded one which is considered a worthy gift by many. Most Chinese consumers like filtered coffee," Non said.
ã??ã??To serve different tastes of local and foreign consumers, Trung Nguyen has turned out nearly 30 kinds of coffee products falling into four categories: filtered coffee, instant coffee, coffee bag and espresso. In ad***ion to coffee, the firm has recently introduced eight kinds of tea for local sales and export to Japan, Russia and the Middle East.
ã??ã??To cope with fiercer competition both at home and abroad, TrungNguyen has focused on renovating technology and upgrading its cafes in major cities to serve the high-end market. "Our coffee and tea processing equipment are regarded as the most modern ones in the region," Vu boasted.
ã??ã??With a special business approach, advanced facilities and strong manpower, Vu hopes Trung Nguyen will be successful in the world coffee market like it has been in the local one. En***em
2003-09-12 10:25 From Xinhuanet.com

Vietnam''s tourist numbers begin to recover

HANOI - The arrival of 195,000 visitors in August shows the tourism industry in Vietnam is beginning to recover from the effects of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), according to the Vietnam National Administration for Tourism (VNAT).
The tourism authority also reported occupancy rates of 80 percent in the country''s luxury hotels last month.
To make up for losses in the second and third quarter of this year, VNAT is urging travel companies, hotels and other related businesses to make the most of the 22nd Southeast Asia Games in December. Tourism officials said that tourist agencies were preparing tour packages to coincide with the SEA Games.
Tourism officials expect about 400,000 foreign visitors to arrive between September 1 and December 31, and said 1.42 million arrived in the first eight months of the year.
The Vietnamese government has also adjusted its annual tourist arrival target from 2.8 million to 2.1 million as a result of the SARS outbreak earlier this year.
VNAT aims to achieve an annual tourism growth rate of 11 percent by 2010, when it expects to welcome 6 million foreign visitors and about US$4.5 billion in tourism revenue. Much of this tourist growth will occur in four major tourism zones: Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island in the north, Lang Co, Non Nuoc, Bach Ma and Canh Duong as well as Van Phong and Dai Lanh in the center, and Dan Kia and Suoi Vang in Tay Nguyen (the Central Highlands).
To fast-track tourism development in these areas, the government will increase its spending on public works, training and management restructuring.
Sep 13, 2003 From Asia Times

MIT Everyware
Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style.
By David Diamond
Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City''s relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor''s metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs."
In a huge brick house that Evan Hoff shares with three other guys in Nashville, the 20-year-old brings up the MIT Web site and connects to the same material Lam is studying halfway around the world. "This is the lecture on data abstraction," Hoff explains. "I went over this in community college, but that class only took it so far. This teaches you about the three different specification con***ions, the things you put in documentation to let future programmers know how to use it. In community college we covered only two of them."
When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program - dubbed OpenCourseWare - would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT''s audacity - and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required.
"It''s a profoundly simple idea that was not intuitive," recalls Anne Margulies, the former Harvard assistant provost and executive director of information systems who was hired to be OpenCourseWare''s executive director. "At the time, the world was clamping down on information, limiting it to those who could pay for it." Soon foundation money was gushing in *****pport the initiative. MIT earned the distinction as the only university forward-thinking enough to open-source itself. To test the concept, the university posted 50 courses last year.....
Lam Vi Quoc
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Smart and upbeat, Lam, 22, is the first member of his family to attend college. He is the youngest of six children of Chinese-Vietnamese parents who are retired from the business they ran making cartons. A student in the information technology department of Vietnam''s Natural Sciences University, in Ho Chi Minh City, he received a $500 scholarship to buy his computer and a $100 scholarship toward his studies. Lam, who spends six days a week at school, was introduced to Laboratory in Software Engineering - aka 6.170 - when one of his professors downloaded the course materials onto the university''s server and made it required reading. As leader of his software lab team, Lam helped create a program that allowed city residents to find bus routes by destination. After graduation, he hopes to continue his studies in either Singapore or England, but to do so, he''ll need another scholarship - something he says is unlikely unless he is one of three students chosen to be a graduate assistant at his own university. If that doesn''t happen, he''ll shoot for an IT job in Vietnam. "Maybe if I work for three years," Lam says, "I will be able to have my own house and a car."
September 2003 From www.wired.com

Vietnam honours "good" hackers
Correspondents in Hanoi
SEPTEMBER 09, 2003

A UNIVERSITY in Vietnam has organised a competition to honour "good" internet hackers and to market them for web security jobs against the cyber-criminals, or "bad" hackers.
The competition, launched by BugSearch, a group of IT experts in Ho Chi Minh City''s National University, started on Friday and will last until September 15, the Lao Dong newspaper said Monday.
The competitors will have to break into the server of a mock website in the University''s computer network.
"The goal of the competition is to raise the people''s vigilance about the web security. You always have to prepare yourself against the cyber-attacks," the paper quoted an organiser as saying.
"It is also an occasion for companies to find out ''good'' hackers to work for them and protect their websites. They can not only discover the site''s shortcomings but also propose solutions to protect it," he added.
In August, the university had to postpone a similar contest.
Too many hackers managed to get into the website, leading to a massive traffic jam on the main university site which was presenting at the time some exams'' results.
Last month, tens of thousands of computers in Vietnam were attacked by the Blaster virus that also hit hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.
Agence France-Presse