Trần Vũ Hải Anh Blog

 William Nguyen and Michael Nguyen don’t know each other, but their lives are intertwined. William Nguyen, an American citizen, participated in a political protest in Vietnam last summer, a rally that Michael Nguyen, an American who lives in Orange, was accused by Vietnamese officials of helping to organize. And as a result of the protest — staged June 10, 2018, in Ho Chi Minh City — both men were arrested. Initially, William Nguyen was detained for 40 days. When he was convicted, following a brief trial, he faced up to seven years in Vietnamese prison. Instead, authorities ordered his deportation, which meant returning to his then home town of Houston. Michael Nguyen was detained for nearly a year before he got his own four-hour trial late last month. He was found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the Vietnamese government, allegedly by seeking out protesters who would go to demonstrations and occupy government buildings, using Molotov cocktails and slingshots. He was sentenced to...

  Arrested in 2018, Michael Nguyen was sentenced to 12 years. On Monday, he was home in Orange. Roxana Kopetman October 27, 2020 at 8:45 p.m. Michael Nguyen, a U.S. citizen shown during his trial in Vietnam in June 2019, returned to his home in Orange County. He served part of his 12-year sentence. (Photo by Vietnam News Agency/AFP/Getty Images) An Orange County man sentenced to spend 12 years in a Vietnamese prison was released by the Vietnam government and is back home with his wife and four daughters, a family spokesman said Monday. Michael Nugyen, an Orange resident who was arrested in July 2018 during a trip to Vietnam and charged with attempting to overthrow the government, returned home last Thursday. His family learned of the surprise release only a day earlier. “He looks fabulous,” said Mark Roberts, his brother-in-law. “It’s so hard to believe.” Nguyen’s wife, Helen and their four daughters are “as happy as can be,” Roberts added. The family began campaigning for Nguyen’s...

  Facebook touts free speech. In Vietnam, it’s aiding in censorship By  David S. Cloud , SINGAPORE — For months, Bui Van Thuan, a chemistry teacher turned crusading blogger in Vietnam, published one scathing Facebook post after another on a land dispute between villagers and the communist government. In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village outside Hanoi where residents were fighting authorities’ plans to seize farmland to build a factory. For the record: 3:28 PM, Oct. 22, 2020 An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a comment to a Facebook official. The official did not say: “We want to preserve our ability to operate in Vietnam ... so we lean in the direction of complying with their requests.” The comment was part of a question posed to the official. Believing a confrontation was inevitable, the 40-year-old Thuan condemned the country’s lea...