Vietnam jails five journalists for posting reviews online

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MOSCOW, October 29 (Bern): Five Vietnamese journalists were jailed between two and four and a half years Thursday (October 28) for posting articles online criticizing the Communist government, media reported.

A district court near the southern town of Can Tho convicted the journalists for “abusing democratic freedoms” with their social media posts, Sputnik quoted as quoting the VnExpress report.

The five started a group called Clean Journalism in August 2019 with a Facebook page and a YouTube channel. It was dissolved after the arrest of one of the suspects in late 2020.

Vietnamese authorities have reportedly said the group’s articles “camouflage themselves into anti-corruption pieces” but were “corruption per se”. All five were banned from working as journalists for three years.

In another register, Ho Chi Minh City (HCM) in southern Vietnam had already started vaccinating children against Covid-19, becoming the first locality in the country to do so, local media VnExpress reported.

The vaccination campaign has started in Cu Chi district, where more than 1,500 high school students have been vaccinated, two weeks after the country’s health authorities approved vaccination for children aged 12 to 17.

About 780,000 children aged 12 to 17 in HCM will be vaccinated, according to a childhood vaccination plan issued by the Municipal Steering Committee for the Prevention and Control of Covid-19.

The northern province of Quang Ninh announced that it would start vaccinating nearly 119,000 children against Covid-19 on Saturday, October 30, the Vietnamese news agency reported.

More than 76 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered across Vietnam, including more than 22.2 million second doses, according to the country’s health ministry.

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