Hanoi - Flash floods, heavy rain and landslides triggered by Typhoon Hagupit have killed at least 42 people and left 4 missing and 61 injured in northern Vietnam, the National Steering Committee for Storm and Flood Control said Monday.

Disaster officials said heavy rains and landslides triggered by the typhoon swept through villages, washing away nearly 20 thousand homes and 18 schools.

Over 600,000 poultry and 18,000 cattle were killed.

About 5,000 Vietnamese soldiers were dispatched to evacuate people in vulnerable areas.

Hanoi - Hanoi police have arrested a man who was found illegally transporting a tiger skeleton in his car, a police official said Friday.

Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van Hung said police had been tipped off by an informant who identified the arrestee as a dealer in tiger bones for use in traditional oriental medicine. When police stopped the suspect's car, they found a tiger skeleton in it.

The 36-kilogram skeleton is believed to have belonged to a tiger weighing some 400 kilograms, and would have been boiled down into tiger-bone paste for sale on the black market.

According to government customs officer Nguyen Thi Lan, 1 kilogram of tiger bone paste sells for 800 to 1,000 dollars.

Hanoi - Vietnamese authorities have detected the H5N1 avian flu virus in a flock of ducks on a farm in the southern province of Ca Mau, a government official said Friday.

Hoang Van Nam, deputy director of Vietnam's Animal Health Department, said inspectors had found on September 22 that bird flu had killed more than 50 of 500 ducks on a Ca Mau farm.

All the ducks at the farm were ducklings under 45 days old, and had thus not been vaccinated yet, Nam said.

Authorities have culled all the ducks at the farm.

Hanoi  - Vietnam's largest technology company, FPT, has suspended two students in its corporate training programme who performed wearing only loincloths at a show celebrating the company's 20th anniversary, a company official said Thursday.

"The decision has been made," said Le Truong Tung, director of the corporate training program, known as FPT University. "All the relevant people have been punished."

According to the decision, the two trainees in FPT's Multimedia Artistic Training Centre, both named Nguyen Viet Anh, have been suspended from their studies for one year.

The director of the multimedia center, Mai Thanh Long, and the manager of the show, Pham Viet Long, have been fired.

Hanoi - Vietnam will suspend operations of a Taiwanese-owned Vedan condiment factory in southern Dong Nai province that was found to be emitting illegal pollutants, a senior government official said Wednesday.

"We will halt Vedan's operations until the company remediates its environmental effects," said Deputy Minister of Natural Resource and Environment Tran Hong Ha.

Inspectors said Vedan is accused of discharging a total of 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated effluents over the past 10 years, effectively killing a 12-kilometre stretch of the Thi Vai River.

Hanoi - Vietnam's inflation rate in September dropped to 0.18 per cent from August's 1.56 per cent because of falling food and fuel prices, Vietnamese government officials said Tuesday in a preliminary reading.

"This is the lowest inflation to date [this year]," said Nguyen The Hung, a senior official in the Planning and Investment Ministry.

Petrol prices fell on lower world oil prices, and rice prices fell because of a bumper autumn rice harvest in the Mekong Delta, but prices of several other kinds of goods rose faster than 1 per cent month-on-month.