YVONNE EPPS WRITES — Vietnam’s media has a track record for jailing every person it does not like, but what happens when it fines one of its own state-run newspapers? Looks like this double-edged sword has finally drawn blood. Recently, the Associated Press found that the government fined the state-run newspaper…
Tag: vietnamese
VIETNAM: Flap Your Way Into a Lawsuit Pipe
YVONNE EPPS WRITES — Ah, Flappy Bird. You’ve soared into the mainstream’s heart as millions potentially tapped holes into their iOS and Android devices, driven by addiction. You may not flap anymore, but your existence and death is a good sign within Vietnam’s constrictive media. The Vietnamese-developed mobile game Flappy…
VIETNAM: Relationship Status with the UN — It’s Complicated
YVONNE EPPS WRITES — We’re already familiar with Vietnam’s war on peaceful protest and “Internet dissent.” But really: Is it wise to attack a journalist en route to a UN human rights review? Vietnamese authorities kept independent journalist, civil society advocate and prospective UN speaker Pham Chi Dung from leaving…
VIETNAM: Paracel Islands for the Silenced People
YVONNE EPPS WRITES — It’s a new year and with Tet rounding the final corner, Vietnam can finally turn over a new leaf. Or it can indulge in more media constriction, give or take. This week marked the 40th anniversary of China’s invasion of Vietnam and its taking of the…
VIETNAM: Guerrilla Warefare on the Internet
YVONNE EPPS WRITES- Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, they just did. Vietnam’s war on peaceful protest has reached guerrilla warfare of the monetary kind. Hey, Uy’s atrocities were unforgivable, so why not take the rest of the Internet down, right? Two decrees have been posed against social…
VIETNAM: The Human Rights War Continues! Article 258 Strikes Again
YVONNE EPPS WRITES — The results are in and, what do you know? Vietnam isn’t stepping forward to receive the award for Most Hypocritical Media Censorship! I’m sorry Mama Dinh; we really tried our best. Blogger activist, Dinh Nhat Uy, was given a 15-month suspended sentence and home arrest along…
VIETNAM: The Article 258 and Human Rights War
YVONNE EPPS WRITES- It’s Throwback Thursday and, while other people are throwing back to their embarrassing baby pictures, one mother throws back to the summer where she lost her two sons to Article 258. The mother of arrested blogger, Dinh Nhat Uy, is urging several media outlets, including Voice of…
VIETNAM: Good Night Giap, Wake Up Vietnam!
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – If Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam’s superhero, then General Vo Nguyen Giap was his trustee sidekick. Befitting such a person of honor, Vietnamese turned out in the thousands for a two-day national funeral to help send the the general to his final resting place. General Giap, a…
VIETNAM: Like a Virgin (Insured)?!
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – Cultural icons can get away with insuring the body parts that made them famous, but when someone starts insuring their virginity, things can get dicey. The king of nhac vang, a genre of music, Ngoc Son, is reported to tell the media that he’s insuring his virginity for…
VIETNAM: An Extreme Obsession with Tourism
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – What do police patrols, food, and WiFi have in common? No, it’s not cops eating donuts while browsing Tumblr on their smartphones, but rather Vietnam’s obsession with tourism. From promoting the country as the “kitchen of the world” to protecting tourists from robbers, Vietnam is concerned…
VIETNAM: Beautiful Bodies, Uterus Required
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – The next Vietnam beauty may be just around the corner, but the government will only except the most feminine of them all, literally. Based off America’s Next Top Model, the fourth season of Vietnam’s Next Top Model has come under fire after advancing transgendered contestants in…
VIETNAM: 50 Shades of Chains and Apple Lawsuits
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – Trashy fiction is an increasingly popular guilty pleasure, making one writer’s trash a corporation’s treasure. Racy Vietnamese novel Soi xich (The Chain) was sold on the Apple App Store without author and actress-singer Le Kieu Nhu’s permission, violating the copyright laws protecting the work. Although the…
VIETNAM: A Win for LGBT, but a Loss for Activism
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – Vietnam’s LGBT community got a morale boost on International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia May 17, but the big picture of social freedoms in the country is uneven. Viet Nam News reported that the United Nations praised the country for cutting anti-gay discrimination through local media’s spread…
VIETNAM: American Reporting Trivial to Vietnamese Readers
YVONNE EPPS WRITES – The United States prides itself on being “number one” in most areas, but it seems that social culture is its main point of interest to outsiders nowadays. A quick search on the Vietnamese language version of ThanhNien News Network reveals that American social reporting seems to…