Samsung to inject $500 mln in Xian plant

Samsung Electronics, the world's leading chipmaker, will be strengthening a part of its operations in China by injecting an additional $500 million into its envisioned plant under construction in the city of Xian.The move came after the company started work on a semiconductor plant in the central Chinese city in September 2012 as a part of its move to diversify production lines and meet growing demand for NAND flash memory chips.The construction project was aimed to be completed by next year, pr

Sept. 12, 2013

KT tops sustainability index

Mobile service provider KT said Thursday that it was named one of the world’s most sustainable telecommunications companies for three consecutive years in a review by Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.S&P Dow Jones Indices, one of the world’s largest providers of financial market indices, and RobecoSAM, an investment company focusing on sustainable investment, announce the review every year that evaluates 2,500 global firms on their financial and non-financial performance including supply chain m

Sept. 12, 2013

IT exports jump 11.4% in Aug.

South Korea’s exports of information technology products rose from a year earlier in August, continuing their on-year growth for the 12th consecutive month, the government said Monday.Outbound shipments of IT products reached $14.5 billion last month, up 11.4 percent from the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.The country‘s trade surplus in the IT sector widened to $8.13 billion, the second highest in the country’s history, as its imports only ga

Sept. 11, 2013

Logging threatens Monarch butterflies

MEXICO CITY (AP) ― A new study of the Monarch butterflies’ winter nesting grounds in central Mexico says small-scale logging is worse than previously thought and may be contributing to threats facing the Monarch’s singular migration pattern.The reserve’s 13,550-hectare core zone lost 16.6 hectares of pine and fir trees so far in 2013, about half of that because of illegal logging, said the study by Omar Vidal, head of Mexico’s chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, the WWF, and other authors. The r

Sept. 11, 2013

Solar boat reaches Paris after crossing Atlantic

PARIS (AP) ― The world’s largest solar-powered boat has docked on the banks of the Seine River, its final port of call after a three-month voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to study how the Gulf Stream and climate change could influence each other.The 31-meter-long Turanor PlanetSolar catamaran looks like one of Darth Vader’s TIE Fighters turned on its side.Starting from Miami in June, University of Geneva scientists sailed up the eastern seaboard of the United States, then across the Atlantic, t

Sept. 11, 2013

Fireball lights up sky over southern states

ATLANTA (AP) ― NASA officials say brilliant lights seen at an outdoor rock concert in Alabama and by eyewitnesses as far away as Georgia and Tennessee came from a meteor that streaked across the night sky.Officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville said a baseball-size fragment of a comet entered Earth’s atmosphere above Alabama at 8:18 p.m. Central Time on Monday.NASA officials say the meteor traveled at a speed of 122,310 kph. They say that just three seconds after hitting the

Sept. 11, 2013

Mobile operators to accept preorders for Galaxy Note 3

South Korea's three mobile carriers -- SK Telecom Co., KT Corp., and LG Uplus Corp. -- said Tuesday they will begin taking preorders this week for Samsung Electronics Co.'s latest Galaxy Note 3, which is expected to hit the local market later this month.South Korean customers can preorder the smartphone on the operators' websites starting Wednesday. Preorders for the newest Galaxy line-up can also be made at the mobile carriers' local retail stores, they said.Samsung, the world's largest smartph

Sept. 10, 2013

Financial firms ramp up measures against cyber fraud

Financial companies in South Korea will step up their identification process for online users in a broad move to prevent cyber fraud, which is becoming a rampant problem here, the financial regulator said Monday. All financial companies, including banks, insurers, brokerage firms and savings banks, must have their online users identify themselves through either a text message or an automated response system, starting from Sept. 26, according to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS). An online

Sept. 9, 2013

LG to release latest tablet G Pad in 30 countries

LG Electronics Inc., the world's No.3 smartphone maker, said Monday that it plans to roll out the LG G Pad 8.3 tablet, the latest addition to its G Series lineup of premium mobile devices, in some 30 countries by the end of the year.LG Electronics last week unveiled the G Pad 8.3, which has the Full HD display. The tablet runs on Snapdragon 600 Processor with 1.7GHz Quad-Core CPU, which helps enhance the viewing experience with powerful performance, the company said in its release.One of its key

Sept. 9, 2013

SK Hynix resumes partial operations at China plant

SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chip maker, on Sunday said it had resumed partial operations at its Wuxi plant in China that was hit by a fire last week. The blaze caused the chipmaker to suspend its operations at the plant. No casualties were reported but the company said it was investigating the exact cause. One of the production lines that had been left untouched by the fire began operations as of Saturday after completing safety inspections, SK Hynix said.The company added it was

Sept. 8, 2013

Out of oil comes ‘Jurassic Park’

Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.Oil companies’ surveys of the soil have uncovered a trove of fossils dating from 14,000 to 370 million years ago.Many of the 12,000 recorded specimens from different eras are now kept in a tiny office of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research.A strong smell of oil fills the room as Ascania Ri

Sept. 8, 2013

Half of wild weather linked to global warming

WASHINGTON (AP) ― A study of a dozen of last year’s wildest weather events finds that in about half the cases, man-made global warming increased the likelihood of their occurrence.Researchers with the United States and British governments concluded that the other cases reflected the random freakiness of weather.They said climate change had made these events more likely: U.S. heat waves, Superstorm Sandy flooding, shrinking Arctic sea ice, drought in Europe’s Iberian peninsula, and extreme rainfa

Sept. 8, 2013