Developing countries have embarked on a dangerous "arms race" with huge sums ploughed into combat aircraft in unstable parts of the world in the past five years, a top defence think-tank has said. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in an annual report to appear Monday that global arms sales had soared 22 percent in the period from ...

International ratings agency Fitch Ratings said Friday it had placed a negative outlook on Vietnam's debt rating, citing deteriorating confidence in the dong currency and growing inflation risks. The agency said it had placed the country's long-term foreign and local currency issuer default rating of BB minus on watch for a possible downgrade. The rating is a few ...

A Vietnamese lawyer and dissident vowed on Wednesday to carry on her struggle for democracy days after leaving jail, where she spent three years for challenging the Communist authorities. Le Thi Cong Nhan, 30, told AFP she would not let up in her campaign for democracy despite already having been called in by police for breaking the terms of her ...

Researchers said Tuesday that papaya leaf extract and its tea have dramatic cancer-fighting properties against a broad range of tumors, backing a belief held in a number of folk traditions. University of Florida researcher Nam Dang and colleagues in Japan, in a report published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, documented papaya's anticancer effect against tumors of the cervix, breast ...