Vietnam's women's union plans to set up 40 information centers to teach prospective brides about the risks of overseas marriages arranged via illegal match-makers, state media said yesterday.
Concern over the practice of Vietnamese women -- most from poor backgrounds -- wedding wealthy foreigners through illegal brokers heightened after the death of one bride in the home of her South Korean husband.
She was found with 18 broken ribs earlier this month. Police arrested her husband.
Excerpts from a letter kept by the woman, a former rice farmer and factory worker, describing her sadness and loneliness in South Korea were published across the Vietnamese media.
The women's association plans to set up the information and legal advice centers countrywide at a cost of US$3.5 million, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.
The project -- to be run with the Vietnam Culture and Women's Center in South Korea -- is expected to support nine similar existing facilities and serve about 15,000 women over the next five years, VNA reported.
Vietnam has become a popular destination for bachelors from South Korea and other Asian countries searching for wives, often on week-long arranged trips that include medical checkups, visa procedures and speedy honeymoons.
COMMERCIALISM
The commercial match-making operations have stirred anger amid reports of potential brides being paraded and humiliated before their suitors, and of isolation and abuse suffered by many women in their new home countries.
The head of a parliamentary committee for social issues, Truong Thi Mai, said Vietnam should consider changing rules on foreign marriage.
According to the South Korean National Statistical Office, the number of Vietnamese brides in South Korea totalled over 10,000 last year, up 74 percent from the previous year, with most married to farmers and fishermen.
In South Korea, thousands of agencies now offer marriage tours to China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, often subsidized by rural authorities battling declining populations.
The international marriage market has been fuelled by a preference for sons in parts of Asia, exacerbated by technology that allows pregnant women to screen the sex of their baby, which has left proportionally more bachelors fighting over fewer women.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS