South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. traded near this year's high on Friday on hopes that its latest high-end smartphone, the G3, would help pull its money-losing handset business out of the red.Shares of LG Electronics closed at 72,900 won on the Seoul bourse, down 1.62 percent from this year's high of 74,100 won, after hitting an intra-day high of 74,800 won at one point.For the past four sessions, its stock price has gained more than 6 percent as foreign and institutional investors scooped up th

SK hynix Inc., a leading South Korean chipmaker, said Friday it has signed a deal to take over the expansion card division of U.S. firm Violin Memory Inc. It did not reveal the value of the deal.The South Korean chipmaker plans to finalize the deal at the end of June, absorbing assets, personnel and patents of the division of the company based in Santa Clara, California, it said.Known as PCI Express or PCIe, the high-speed expansion card format connects a computer with its attached peripherals.

South Korea and the United States strongly indicated Thursday that their support for improvement in North Korea-Japan relations is conditional amid a drawn-out stalemate in efforts to denuclearize the communist nation. Following reports of a fresh deal between Pyongyang and Tokyo over the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea decades ago, South Korean officials warned of a possible negative impact on the troubled denuclearization process. "We understand the importance of the abd

North Korea's new top diplomat has attacked South Korea and the United States over their joint military drills as he made a debut on the international diplomatic stage, Pyongyang's state news agency said Friday. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong also claimed that war drills and other provocative acts by Seoul and Washington reached a point where North Korea could not sit idle, though he did not elaborate on what actions Pyongyang could take. Ri, who assumed his job in April, made the c

Divers searching for people missing in the Sewol ferry disaster were expected to cut open windows at one end of the sunken hull Friday while combing through compartments at the other end, officials said.The operations will take place simultaneously at set times during the day when currents virtually come to a standstill, the officials said. On Friday, those times were 8:57 a.m., 2:38 p.m. and 8:28 p.m.Divers plan to cut open windows at the back of the fourth deck in order to remove obstacles blo