A new magazine titled Asies featuring Asia has just hit bookstores all over France since the beginning of this month. Its first edition covers a culture corner consisting of five-page article Mon Hanoi (My Ha Noi) by Vietnamese writer Nguyen Viet Ha, which provides various angles of life in Viet Nam’s capital. The magazine will be published once every three months with the contributions of correspondents living and working all over Asia. The online edition of the magazine will be officially opened this September. Journalist Laurent Passicousset, who works as the magazine’s president and editing director, spent eight years in Viet Nam between 1992 and 2000. He speaks Vietnamese very well and understands Ha Noi thoroughly. He is the co-writer of a book in French titled Vivre avec le Vietnamiens (Living with Vietnamese People) published last year together with Prof Philippe Papin, a scholar from the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient (French School of the Far East), based in Paris. Source: VNS