Vietnam jails five journalists for posting criticism online

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MOSCOW, Oct 29 (Bernama): Five Vietnamese journalists were jailed for between two and four-and-a-half years on Thursday (Oct 28) for posting stories online that criticised the communist government, media reported.

A district court near the southern city of Can Tho convicted the journalists of "abusing democratic freedoms" with their social media posts, Sputnik quoted the VnExpress newspaper report.

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

The Vietnamese authorities reportedly said that the group’s articles "masqueraded as anti-corruption" pieces but were "corruption itself". All five were banned from working as journalists for three years.

On another note, Southern Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City (HCM) had already started vaccinating children against Covid-19, becoming the first locality in the country to do so, local media outlet VnExpress reported.

The inoculation campaign began in Cu Chi district, where over 1,500 high school students were vaccinated, two weeks after the country's health authorities approved the inoculation for children aged 12 to 17.

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

The northern Quang Ninh province announced that it would start vaccinating nearly 119,000 children against Covid-19 on Saturday (Oct 30), Vietnam News Agency reported.

Over 76 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered across Vietnam, including over 22.2 million second doses, according to the country's Ministry of Health.