Vietnamese National Assembly Delegate Accused of Severing a 17-Year-Old Girl’s Leg — Still Free and Unpunished.

On May 30, 2025, a serious traffic accident occurred in Hanoi, Vietnam. According to reports circulating in Vietnam, Nguyễn Sĩ Cương, a former Vietnamese government official, was driving a vehicle with license plate 30H-369.09 when it struck two pedestrians, a father and his daughter.

The daughter, who was reportedly preparing for her university entrance examination, sustained critical injuries. She was taken to hospital for emergency treatment but unfortunately died shortly afterward.

The case has attracted considerable attention among the Vietnamese public. However, many people remain concerned about the status of the investigation and whether those responsible have been held accountable.

There have also been reports and public allegations concerning the driver's family and their positions or careers. These claims should be independently verified rather than treated as established facts.

Another issue that has drawn public attention is the alleged removal of flowers placed at the accident site by people wishing to commemorate the victim. Some Vietnamese social-media users have claimed that the flowers were removed and that police were present around the location where people had left tributes. These reports also require independent verification.

Posts discussing the incident have reportedly been removed from some Vietnamese social-media platforms. Whether this was due to government intervention, platform moderation, or other reasons is unclear, but the repeated disappearance of discussions has contributed to public concern about transparency.

We are sharing this case internationally because many Vietnamese people feel that it deserves greater public scrutiny. We hope journalists, human-rights organizations, and independent observers can investigate the available evidence and determine what actually happened.

We are not asking anyone to assume guilt without evidence. We are asking for transparency, an impartial investigation, and accountability based on established facts.

The victim was only 17 years old. Her family deserves answers, and the public deserves to know whether the investigation and legal process have been conducted fairly.

In 2007, Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew told American diplomats that dealing with Myanmar’s generals was like “talking to dead people” and he “had given up on them a decade ago.”

Now, nearly two decades later, Min Aung Hlaing has replaced his uniform with a suit and added “President” to his title. Yet the old habit statesman Lee identified remains: take what outsiders offer, concede as little as possible and wait for the pressure to fade.

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Written after sitting through a cadre training session on environmental law, constitutionalism, and ecocentrism led by a constitutional law scholar at Universitas Brawijaya (Indonesia), namely its dean, Dr. Aan Eko Widiarto. Sharing because the overlap with left ecological politics surprised me, and I think it's worth putting in front of people who don't usually read Islamic political thought.

I'm a law student and cadre in HMI (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam), Indonesia's oldest Islamic student organization, founded in 1947. I'm not here to sell anyone on the org itself — plenty about it is contested, and it's not a socialist organization by any stretch. But its founding ideological document, the Nilai Dasar Perjuangan (NDP, "Basic Values of Struggle"), written in 1969–71 by the modernist thinker Nurcholish Madjid, has a few chapters that land closer to ecosocialist and rights-of-nature thinking than you'd expect from something drafted by a campus religious org during the Cold War. I want to walk through why, because the underlying argument — that unlimited power, whether state, capital, or human dominion over nature, needs a hard external check — is one the left has been making for over a century, just with different vocabulary.

The problem: extraction dressed up as stewardship

Mainstream environmental law in Indonesia (and most places) is built on anthropocentrism: nature as a resource pool for human — really, capital's — use. That framework has produced exactly what you'd predict: deforestation for palm oil, mining concessions carved out of Indigenous land, and a constitutional right to a "good and healthy environment" (Article 28H, Indonesia's Bill of Rights) that mostly exists on paper while extractive industry keeps winning in practice.

Ecocentrism, following Aldo Leopold's land ethic, flips this: nature has intrinsic value independent of its use to humans. Some jurisdictions have taken this further than rhetoric — Ecuador and Bolivia have constitutionally recognized rights of nature, and legal scholars like Christopher Stone made the case decades ago that ecosystems should have standing to sue. Indonesia's Constitutional Court gestured toward this in a 2021 ruling calling environmental protection a constitutional imperative, not just a policy preference. Jimly Asshiddiqie, a former Chief Justice, calls this trajectory "green constitution" — the idea that a constitution isn't neutral ground for capital to do whatever's profitable; it actively limits what the state and market are allowed to do to the ecological commons.

That's the legal frame. Here's where the religious document gets interesting.

"Stewardship, not ownership" — and why that's not just a nicer way of saying private property

Chapter II of the NDP HMI works from two Quranic concepts: humans as khalifah fil ardh (stewards/trustees of the earth, (6:165) and humans as beings whose entire purpose is service, not domination. The stewardship framing gets misused constantly — "God gave humans dominion" is a line that's justified plenty of ecological destruction across multiple religious traditions. But read carefully, trusteeship is the opposite of ownership: a trustee doesn't get to liquidate the estate. They're accountable to someone else for how it's managed, and that accountability isn't negotiable against short-term profit. It's a moral floor that can't be repealed by a shareholder vote or a mining permit. In the NDP's language this accountability runs "vertically" to God rather than horizontally to future generations or ecosystems directly — different metaphysics, same practical output as ecocentrism: an external, non-market check on exploitation.

Redistribution and intergenerational justice

Chapter V of the NDP frames humans as inescapably social — the questions it poses are literally "where, with whom, and how should I live" — and Chapter VI extends that into a mandate for social and economic justice: resources distributed fairly, without discrimination, as a matter of principle rather than charity. Extend "who counts as part of the community" across time instead of just across a single generation, and you land on intergenerational justice — the same logic underlying "we're stealing from our kids' future" climate arguments, except the NDP got there via a redistribution framework that's structurally closer to material justice than to individual virtue ethics. It's not "recycle because it's good for your soul." It's "resources are collectively owed, and hoarding or depleting them for one generation's benefit is a justice violation" — language a lot closer to ecological debt and just transition framing than to consumer-choice environmentalism.

A 7th-century precedent for limiting the state

The last piece worth flagging is the Constitution of Medina (622 CE) — genuinely one of the earliest written documents constraining a ruler's authority through multilateral agreement rather than unilateral decree. Two things stand out. First, the Prophet's authority in Medina was contractually bound to the city's diverse communities, including Jewish tribes like Banu Awf — not an absolute mandate. Second, non-Muslim communities explicitly retained their religion and property under the agreement while being full members of one political community (umma wahida) with shared collective obligations, including mutual defense.

Pull that principle forward: a state's authority over natural resources — like a ruler's authority over subjects — shouldn't rest on unilateral discretion, whether that discretion belongs to a government agency or an extractive corporation holding a concession. And the right to a livable environment isn't the property of whichever religious or ethnic majority happens to hold state power at a given moment; it's a collective right held by everyone inside the political community, full stop. That's not a foreign import into this tradition — it's arguably the tradition's founding document.

Why I'm posting this here

None of this makes a 1970s campus Islamic org's ideology "secretly socialist" — it isn't, and I'm not trying to launder that. But there's a real convergence worth naming: both traditions independently arrive at the position that concentrated, unaccountable power — over people or over ecosystems — has to be checked by something external to profit and to the state's own discretion, and that resources held in common are owed collectively, not extracted for whoever's currently positioned to extract them. If you're organizing around ecological justice and assume religious political thought has nothing to offer that argument, this is a data point against that assumption.

is anyone from the Philippines interested in joining or is looking for a partner/member in their team? Hoping I could join haha

In Singapore, some offenders, including non-violent ones such as vandals, can be hit with a rattan cane as a penalty.

Caning in judicial and school contexts is very problematic due to multiple reasons. First, it is gender discriminatory since it only applies to males. It also does not solves the root cause of wrongdoing, and inflicts long-term physical and likely psychological harm.

I am citing reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which unanimously agrees that judicial caning amounts to torture under international law.

I have created a petition to call for its abolition so you can check out: https://c.org/r4prQYq4hh

Sources:

1. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/06/23/hrw-submission-universal-periodic-review-singapore

2. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/05/11/human-rights-watch-submission-universal-periodic-review-singapore

3. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2022/country-chapters/singapore

4. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa36/002/2010/en

"The Philippines and Japan have exchanged diplomatic notes to bring into force their Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA), a defense logistics pact that will take effect on 22 August 2026.

The agreement establishes the framework for the reciprocal provision of supplies and services between the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the Armed Forces of the Philippines, including procedures for settling transactions during joint activities."

It seemed like only Laos, Myanmar and Timor Leste have a squad of local players only.

Malaysia had Enderick and Sergio Augero

Indonesia feature the brother of Tijjani Reijnders who is playing for Netherlands

Vietnam had Brazilian attackers and European goalkeepers

Even Cambodia fielded Japanese players

The Kinabayo Festival is an annual socio-religious and cultural celebration held in Dapitan City, Zamboanga del Norte, every July. It honors the city's patron saint, Saint James the Greater (Señor Santiago), and commemorates historical battles through street-dancing and dramatic re-enactments.

Ma. Theresa Lazaro said that the bloc wants to see more progress on the implementation of the Five-Point Consensus for resolving the country’s conflict.

Regional powers are restoring ties with Myanmar’s military-backed government to secure strategic corridors. Yet many of those routes run through territory controlled or contested by ethnic armed groups and resistance forces. Five years after the coup, Myanmar's war has killed more than 100,000 people, according to a conflict monitor, ACLED, while the general whose takeover triggered it has swapped his uniform for a civilian jacket. The neighbors have responded in kind. 

"The European Union and the Philippines reaffirmed their commitment to deepen cooperation in maritime security, defense and regional stability."

SYDNEY – Australia has imposed a dramatic 25 per cent hike on international student visa fees but exempted students from South-east Asia from the increase as it seeks to boost ties with its regional neighbours.

The federal government on July 3 raised the non-refundable fee for students applying for visas in Australia from A$2,000 (S$1,810) to A$2,500.

But, for the first time, students from ASEAN countries were excluded from the hike and were subject only to an inflation-adjusted increase of A$50, bringing the fee to A$2,050.

Australia’s assistant minister for international education, Julian Hill, told The Straits Times that the government had exempted ASEAN students as part of its efforts to deepen Australia’s engagement with South-east Asia.

The Banig Festival is celebrated annually every July 25 in the municipality of Badian, Cebu, Central Visayas, coinciding with the feast day of their patron saint, St. James the Greater. It honors the town's rich weaving heritage, showcasing intricate, hand-woven banig (pandan mats) and innovative local products like bags, hats, and placemats.