Hanoi  - Police will prosecute the poachers who killed two rare langurs in central Vietnam last month, officials said Tuesday.

On January 21, forest wardens stopped a man transporting animal carcasses out of the forested Hon Heo Peninsula in central Khanh Hoa province. Mixed in among several goat carcasses were those of two rare black-shanked Douc langurs.

Hanoi  - Construction workers building a luxury hotel in downtown Hanoi had to halt their work temporarily when they uncovered two unexploded bombs dropped by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War, a military official said Monday.

The bombs were discovered Friday by workers digging the foundations for a four-star hotel across the street from Hanoi's main railway station, which was heavily targeted by US bombers.

"We moved the bombs out of the construction site on Saturday," said Lieutenant Colonel Tran Dinh Oai, commanding officer of the local Army Steering Committee.

Hanoi - Vietnamese media and consumers Thursday criticized government authorities over a food safety scandal in which milk products with falsified protein content were sold for months after inspectors discovered the fraud.

Health authorities in Ho Chi Minh City revealed Friday that dozens of Vietnamese-made and foreign dairy products they had tested beginning in October, including infant formula, contained almost no protein, despite advertising high protein levels on their packaging.

Nutrition officials said up to half of the products tested contained less than 2 per cent protein, far below the 11-14 per cent required for basic nutrition for small children. But authorities did not begin removing the products from stores until last week.

Hanoi  - Vietnamese police plan to soon shut down a popular website run by a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur for violating rules on copyright and political content, a police official said Wednesday.

"The leaders of the company have admitted their wrongdoing," said Dinh Huu Tan, deputy head of the Hanoi Police Department for Ideological and Cultural Security.

The search portal, timnhanh. com, belongs to VON, a company owned by Paul Nguyen Hung.

Hanoi  - Engineers have discovered two new cracks in the body of a 130-metre-high dam under construction in the province of Son La, Vietnamese media reported Wednesday.

The newspaper Thanh Nien (Youth) reported the cracks were in addition to another one discovered in September 2008. The largest is 31.5 metres long and 1 millimetre wide, and runs 6 metres deep into the body of the dam.

The paper reported Nguyen Kim Toi, director of the construction project, said the cracks could be due to shrinkage following temperature changes when the concrete encountered rain.

Hanoi  - Police in Ho Chi Minh City have broken up an illegal marriage brokerage that matched Vietnamese women and South Korean men, Vietnamese press reported Wednesday.

Police Monday raided a house where a marriage broker was parading 31 Vietnamese women before two South Korean men and arrested three people, Huynh Van Khai, Nguyen Van Hoa and Do Thi Kim Van, on charges of organizing the presentation.

When the police appeared, the 31 women were jammed into a tiny 20-square-metre house that served as an office for the illegal marriage agency.