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Mr. Lee, the 52-year-old grandson of Samsung’s founder, received a 30-month prison sentence from a South Korean appeals court on Monday, in a retrial of his 2017 conviction for bribing South Korea’s former president. His prior time behind bars of roughly a year counts toward his new sentence. If granted early parole, Mr. Lee could walk free next year.

In a sign of his vast influence, Mr. Lee’s detainment triggered a selloff across Samsung’s affiliates, wiping away billions of dollars in market value. Samsung Electronics fell 3.4%, battery maker Samsung SDI Co. slid 4.2% and Samsung C&T Corp. , the conglomerate’s de facto holding company, dropped 6.8%.

Unlike in 2017, Samsung Electronics—the conglomerate’s crown jewel—isn’t in the middle of a historic run in memory-chip prices. That period was so fruitful that it negated the ill effects of the prior year’s embarrassing global recall of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones.

South Korean Prosecutors Seek to Arrest Samsung Head for Bribery

Jay Y. Lee, the head of Samsung Group, in a massive bribery scandal that goes all the way up to the president’s office

accusations he paid multi-million dollar bribes to a friend of President Park Geun-hye in order to secure business deals

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

Denton added. He said the media had been strong until the late 20th century because there was a lucrative classified advertising revenue stream, which meant subjects of the stories were rarely more powerful than the media companies covering them.

“Now you have monopoly profits of companies, like Facebook, funding the fortunes of billionaires, like Peter Thiel, and the media, by comparison, is financially outmatched,” he said. Thiel alone possesses a comparable market cap to that of the New York Times, with a net worth estimated to be $2.7bn, while the New York Times’ current market capitalization is $2.35bn.

“The balance of power has shifted dramatically,” Denton said. “So if we’re talking about freedom of expression, profitability has to be at the center of that.”

n his first interview since fleeing to Russia, Ukraine's ousted president said Wednesday that he was "wrong" to have invited Russian troops into Crimea and vowed to try to persuade Russia to return the coveted Black Sea peninsula.

Yanukovych denied the allegations of corruption, saying he built his palatial residence outside of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, with his own money. He also denied responsibility for the sniper deaths of about 80 protesters in Kiev in February, for which he has been charged by Ukraine's interim government.

While Russia can hardly be expected to roll back its annexation, Yanukovych's statement could widen Putin's options in the talks on settling the Ukrainian crisis by creating an impression that Moscow could be open for discussions on Crimea's status in the future.

The new Cold War, between the United States and China, is increasingly focused on access to just one industry in one place: computer chips made in Taiwan.

Over the past year, Taiwan has taken a lead in the race to build thinner, faster and more powerful chips, or semiconductors. Its fastest chips are the critical building blocks of rapidly evolving digital industries like artificial intelligence and high-speed computing.

As of now, any country looking to dominate the digital future has to buy these superfast, ultrathin chips from either Taiwan or South Korea. And Taiwan has the edge in both technology and market power.

SEOUL, South Korea — The government of President Moon Jae-in said on Friday that it would pardon former President Park Geun-hye, who is serving a 20-year prison term after she was convicted on bribery and other criminal charges.

Ms. Park, 69, who became the first democratically elected South Korean leader to be removed from office through parliamentary impeachment,

will be freed on Dec. 31 to promote “reconciliation and consolidate national power to help overcome the national crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.

Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.

Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

 Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.

Vietnam has detected a new coronavirus variant that is highly transmissible and has features of two other strains.

The announcement came on Saturday as the country is dealing with a recent spike of infections that started in May.

Since the pandemic began, Vietnam has reported 6,713 cases and 47 deaths as of Saturday. A little more than half of the cases and 12 of the deaths were reported in the last month, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

South Korea appears to have cracked the code for managing the coronavirus. Its solution is straightforward, flexible and relatively easy to replicate.

The country has averaged about 77 new daily cases since early April and recently suppressed a spike in infections. Adjusting for population, that would be the equivalent of about 480 cases a day in the U.S., where new daily cases have averaged about 38,000 over the same period.

South Korea halted virus transmission better than any other wealthy country during the pandemic’s early months. It was about twice as effective as the U.S. and U.K. at preventing infected individuals from spreading the disease to other

South Korean president behind bars​ on corruption charges

Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and ousted on charges of ​bribery and abuse of power, was sentenced to 25 years in prison by an appeals court in 2018.

In October 2018, a Seoul district court sentenced Mr. Lee to 15 years in prison, convicting him of collecting 8.5 billion won​, or $7.5 million, in bribes from various sources — most of it from Samsung, the country’s largest business conglomerate

To her mother in South Korea, SuJin Kim is a failure: She’s over 30, single and not working for a big Korean corporation.

But to her millions of followers in Latin America, she has become a relatable friend and a teacher of all things Korean. In Mexico, where she lives, they know her, in fact, as “Chinguamiga,” her online nickname, a mash-up of the words for friend in Korean and Spanish.

Her success has been propelled not just by her ingenuity and charisma, but also by a wave of South Korean popular culture that has swept the world

“The U.S. has essentially declared war on China’s ability to advance the country’s use of high-performance computing for economic and security gains,” Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at Albright Stonebridge, a consulting firm, told The Financial Times. Or as the Chinese Embassy in Washington framed it, the U.S. is going for “sci-tech hegemony.”

regulations issued Friday by President Biden’s Commerce Department are a formidable new barrier when it comes to export controls that will block China from being able to buy the most advanced semiconductors from the West or the equipment to manufacture them on its own.

The new regulations also bar any U.S. engineer or scientist from aiding China in chip manufacturing without specific approval, even if that American is working on equipment in China not subject to export controls. The regs also tighten the tracking to ensure that U.S.-designed chips sold to civilian companies in China don’t get into the hands of China’s military