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Dozens of activists were detained in Vietnam's two biggest cities Sunday as they tried to hold protests calling for greater government transparency over a recent spate of mass fish deaths. Tonnes of dead fish and other marine life began washing up on central Vietnamese shores two months ago and continued to appear for two to three weeks, sparking widespread anger. Frustration has been further fuelled by a perceived lack of clarity from the communist leadership about what caused the deaths. Major streets in central Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City were temporarily deserted on Sunday morning as security forces blanketed...

BERLIN: Vietnam and South Korea are looking seriously at buying refurbished Lockheed Martin Corp P-3 and S-3 maritime surveillance planes to counter China's military buildup and repeated North Korean missile launches, the company said. Vietnam is expected to request formal pricing and availability data on four to six older U.S. Navy P-3 Orion aircraft in the next few months, Clay Fearnow, a senior executive with Lockheed's aeronautics division, told Reuters at the Berlin air show last week. The Obama administration's move to completely lift its arms embargo on Vietnam last month paved the way for such a sale, but any...

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday the United States would consider any Chinese establishment of an air defense zone over the South China Sea to be a "provocative and destabilizing act". U.S. officials have expressed concern that an international court ruling expected in coming weeks on a case brought by the Philippines against China over its South China Sea claims could prompt Beijing to declare an air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, as it did over the East China Sea in 2013. "We would consider an ADIZ...over portions of the South China Sea as...

Joe Bruno on Boxing – Muhammad Ali is Not a Hero. Muhammad Ali passed away Friday night, June 3, 2016. I wrote the article below around the year 2000. I got to know him fairly well in the 1980’s, when I was Vice President of the Boxing Writers Association. He was a real friendly man, and we had several nice conversations about what I have written below. Still, his death doesn’t change what he was, and what he did early in his career. It is with a sad heart that I stand by what is written below. It’s just the...

India is ready to sell the world's fastest anti-ship cruise missile to Vietnam. The BrahMos uses ramjet engine technology to achieve speeds of up to Mach 3, making it a deadly addition to Vietnam's arsenal. BrahMos was developed jointly by India and Russia, its name a mashup of the Brahmaputra and Moscow Rivers. The missile was developed through the 1990s and early 2000s from the Russian P-800 Oniks anti-ship missile. It is in service with the Indian Armed Forces. This is the fastest low-altitude missile in the world. The missile has two stages. The first, consisting of a solid-fuel rocket,...

President Obama went after Donald Trump again Thursday, urging his audience at the Air Force Academy graduation to reject calls for isolationism. “There’s a debate going on in our country about our nation’s role in the world,” Mr. Obama told the new Air Force officers at Colorado Springs, Colorado. “America cannot shirk the mantle of leadership. We can’t be isolationist.” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has been accused of isolationism for proposing to build a wall on the border with Mexico, among other reasons. He has rejected that criticism, saying he is focused on security, not isolationism. The

DECADES after the Vietnam War ended, the remains of 22 fallen Australian servicemen have finally arrived back in Australia for burial on home soil. Under full military honours their coffins were unloaded from two RAAF C17 Globemaster jets at Richmond RAAF base in Western Sydney, with hundreds of emotional family members, friends and Vietnam veterans watching on. Also arriving home were the remains of three servicemen killed on deployment in Malaysia, and eight dependants — partners and children of servicemen who died overseas and were interred in a Malaysian cemetery. Service personnel from all three arms of the Australian Defence...

Monday, May 30, 2016 Obama's Ho Chi Minh Trail Posted by Daniel Greenfield On his visit to meet with Communist leaders in Vietnam, Obama criticized the United States for having, “too much money in our politics, and rising economic inequality, racial bias in our criminal justice system.” He praised Ho Chi Minh’s evocation of the “American Declaration of Independence” and claimed that we had “shared ideals” with the murderous Communist dictator. Shortly after the “evocation” that Obama praised, his beloved Ho was hard at work purging the opposition, political and religious. When Obama references these “shared ideals”, does he perhaps...

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the RESULT of what happens to a nation bent on “domination or conquest” As Barack Obama finishes out the last eight months of his second term as President, he has started working through his bucket list of things to do before he leaves office. This cringe-worthy endeavor has gotten off to a treason-worthy start with his trip to Vietnam highlighted by a photo op with a picture of Ho Chi Minh behind him. And I can’t think why Obama would have made his trip to Hiroshima except to present his warped vision of...

These are the people we should remember on Memorial Day. Hard fighting. Up close and personal, at a big cost.

VENICE (CBSLA.com) — Vandals defaced a memorial to Vietnam war veterans in Venice – an awful sight on this Memorial Day weekend. Stewart Oscars welled up as he looked at the vandalized mural located on Pacific Avenue near Sunset Court. It was covered in graffiti from end to end. “This knocked me out. So sickening. Just sadness…think of all these people. They’re gone,” Oscars said. “I remember the Vietnam war and how friends went to war, and bodies came back. Somehow, it has to be taught that this is not a good idea. This is actually stupid.” The memorial was...

The social network was blocked several times earlier this month The Vietnamese government restricted access to Facebook Inc inside Vietnam for several days this week as part of a broader crackdown on human rights and political dissidents during a visit by President Barack Obama, two activist organizations said on Thursday. Officials of Access Now, a digital rights organization, and Viet Tan, a Vietnamese pro-democracy group, said the social media site was restricted and at times blocked inside Vietnam from Sunday to Wednesday, citing reports from people inside the country on Twitter TWTR -0.76% and to Access Now’s digital security help...

In an address to the people of communist-ruled Vietnam on Tuesday, President Obama made a case for the importance of upholding human rights, prefacing it by saying that the United States, too, “is still striving to live up to our founding ideals.” “No nation is perfect,” he said at the National Convention Center in Hanoi. “Two centuries on, the United States is still trying to striving to live up to our founding ideals.” “We still deal with our shortcomings – too much money in politics, and rising economic inequality,” Obama continued. “Racial bias in our criminal justice system. Women still...

Barack Obama has wrapped up his historic visit to Vietnam by throwing down some beats for a Vietnamese rapper. The President was taking questions at a town hall-style meeting in Ho Chi Minh city when a young woman introduced herself as a hip hop artist before asking her question. Mr Obama immediately invited her to show off her talent, asking "do you need a few beats?" The woman, named Suboi and renowned as Vietnam's "queen of hip hop," then serenaded Obama with Vietnamese lyrics about whether people are really happy if they have lots of money. Seemingly delighted with the...

Littoral Combat Ships and F-18 Super-Hornet jets will probably top Vietnam’s shopping list for US-made weapons now that President Barack Obama has lifted Washington’s 50-year-old arms embargo on Hanoi, former US diplomat Jim Jatras told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Obama announced in Hanoi on Monday the lifting of the US embargo on Vietnam during his three-day visit. "Among the systems Hanoi reportedly is interested in are Lockheed Martin’s F-16 jets, Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet jets, competing littoral combat ship designs from Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and precision-guidance munitions from Raytheon and Boeing," Jatras said on Tuesday. Jatras dismissed Obama’s...

More than four decades after the fall of Saigon, Washington is still holding on to various classified details about its fight in Southeast Asia. Among the Pentagon media arm’s still-secret records are photos and video of updated World War II-era bombers the U.S. Air Force sent to hit Laos. In May 1966, pilots and crews from the 603rd Air Commando Squadron brought eight B-26K Invaders from their base in Louisiana to Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand. Desperate to stem the flow of troops and supplies flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam, the flying branch had...

HANOI, Vietnam — The United States is rescinding a decades-old ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Vietnam, President Obama announced at a news conference in Hanoi on Monday, ending one of the last legal vestiges of the Vietnam War. “The decision to lift the ban was not based on China or any other considerations,” he said, with the Vietnamese president, Tran Dai Quang, standing stiffly by his side. “It was based on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process of moving toward normalization with Vietnam.”

This to me, is a total disgrace to America and our Veterans that served during Viet Nam. We have a wall with names of fallen Veterans that served this Country for it's freedoms and making it safe, and this President goes there and offers them weapons and other things... Maybe I am upset because a lot of people I knew served there, people I grew up with, boys that I dated, men that I rode with, that never came back home... I was privledged to see the "Viet Nam Wall" when I went with the Rolling Thunder out of PA....

....Obama has announced that the United States is fully lifting the ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam, which has been in place for decades. In a joint news conference with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, Obama said that the removal of the ban on lethal weapons w

President Obama is visiting Vietnam today and paused for a picture with communist party President Tran Dai Quang in front of a bust of Ho Chi Minh. Perhaps it’s just me, but given the nature of the diplomatic relationship this specific optic seems rather inappropriate.