Delacour’s langur, a monkey found only in the limestone hills of northern Vietnam, now has legal cover for one of its last strongholds. Scientists found the Kim Bang group in 2016 with about 40 animals, and state media counted 128 last year. About 4,500 acres are strictly protected and another 3,400 are set for restoration. But no buffer zone has been proposed, and quarrying and poaching still threaten the forest.
Vietnam death penalty reform marks one of the most significant shifts in the country’s criminal justice history, removing capital punishment from eight categories of offenses including economic crimes and corruption. The revised penal code introduces a restitution pathway allowing convicted individuals to have death sentences commuted to life imprisonment by returning illegally obtained assets, prioritizing recovery of public funds over retribution. This structurally novel approach creates transparent, measurable criteria for sentencing rather than leaving mercy to judicial discretion. The reform aligns Vietnam with a growing global movement to narrow the scope of capital punishment, even where full abolition remains politically difficult.
In 2020, the only countries that installed more solar than Vietnam were the U.S. and China.
Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines have canceled nearly 45 gigawatts of proposed coal power projects, a figure equal to more than one-quarter of the total installed capacity of Germany.
On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese forces rolled into Phnom Penh and ended the Khmer Rouge regime, closing nearly four years of rule that had killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians — roughly a quarter of the population. The road to justice was long, but the day itself broke the nightmare.
Vietnam’s independence was declared on September 2, 1945, when Ho Chi Minh stood in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square before a crowd of hundreds of thousands. He opened with words borrowed from the American Declaration of Independence — a pointed move from a leader who knew his audience. The moment launched a decades-long struggle that reshaped Southeast Asia.
In 1009 CE, a general named Lý Công Uẩn took the throne of Đại Cồ Việt with the backing of court officials and Buddhist monks, founding a dynasty that would last 216 years. A year later, he moved the capital to a riverside plain he named Thăng Long — the city we now call Hanoi.
Funan, Southeast Asia’s earliest known kingdom, took shape in the Mekong Delta in the first century C.E., trading with Rome, India, and China from its port at Óc Eo. Its people engineered a vast canal network linking inland cities to the coast. Much about them, including what they called themselves, remains unknown.
The Hùng kings ruled Văn Lang, an early Vietnamese kingdom along the Red River Delta, with traditions dating back to around 2500 B.C.E. From their capital at Phong Châu, they oversaw 15 regional divisions and a rice-farming society whose bronze drums still astonish today. Millennia later, Vietnam honors them as founding ancestors.
