Brent crude fell by almost US$3, reaching a two-week low near US$111 on investor pessimism that economic growth will slow in the wake of Japan's earthquake and tsunami, while easing unrest in the Middle East threw the focus back onto ample oil supplies.

The devastation in Japan is set to worsen the negative short-term sentiment gripping a vulnerable US stock market, with companies exposed to Japan and the nuclear energy sector likely to take the biggest hits.

A second explosion has hit the nuclear plant in Japan which was damaged in Friday's earthquake, but officials said it had resisted the blast.

Apple's next-generation iPad contains chips made by Toshiba, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, according to an initial tear-down report by gadget-repair site iFixit. Toshiba supplied the device's storage chips, iFixit said, while Broadcom made the chips used for wireless Internet access. TI chips were used to control the iPad's touchscreen.

The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) lifted a tsunami warning at 6:40 p.m. Friday as tidal waves triggered by a magnitude-8.9 earthquake that struck off Japan's northeastern coast earlier in the day were no longer believed likely to create damage in Taiwan.

Like the oil spike that roiled markets in recent weeks, Friday's quake offers yet another reminder of how vulnerable aging, slow-growing, debt-burdened economies are to a shock even in what is supposed to be a period of global economic expansion.

Figures show US retail sales in February 2011 rose for the eighth month in a row and January's figures were higher than thought.

The two Toshiba-SanDisk JV semiconductor manufacturing plants, Fab 3 and Fab 4, were down for a short period of time due to the earthquake and were back up and operational as of Friday morning, Pacific Time. SanDisk's current assessment is that there has been minimal immediate impact on wafer output due to the earthquake.

Japan's biggest-ever earthquake halted production briefly at Toshiba's chip plants on Friday and could delay crucial shipments. Toshiba and SanDisk share cutting-edge facilities in Yokkaichi, where they make NAND chips increasingly in demand by Apple and other mobile device makers.

China has offered to send earthquake rescuers and extended its "deep sympathy and solicitudes to the Japanese government and people" on Friday, marking some of the first sober words exchanged between the two nations in months. Last fall relations between Beijing and Tokyo reached their worst point in years.

Fusion-io, a maker of NAND flash memory cards that enhance the performance of data center servers, has announced that it plans an initial public offering it hopes can raise US$150 million.

Korea-based chipmaker MagnaChip Semiconductor is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 11 under the symbol "MX."

Japan's Nikkei 225 Stock Average plunged 1.7% in Tokyo, extending declines after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck northeast of the capital.

Microsoft may be struggling against Apple and Google to win the hearts of consumers, but the company can take pride in at least one achievement: Kinect, its hands-free controller for the Xbox 360, is now the world's fastest-selling consumer electronics device.

But the app selling experience, especially for MLB and other premium publishers, is still much better at Apple's iOS App Store than Google's Android Market.

The tech sector is well represented on this year's list, which overall includes 1,210 people who together control US$4.5 trillion in wealth. The highest-ranked Taiwanese tech execs are the husband-and-wife team of Cher Wang and Wenchi Chen.

The Taiwan government's plan to increase the penalties against employers who violate maximum work-hour regulations has drawn expressions of concern among industrial associations, which called for further assessment of the proposal.

"Hard disk drives will serve the bulk of the laptop market for many years to come as makers of solid state drives remain overstretched to meet ever-growing demand for laptop storage..."

Hynix Semiconductor will collaborate with engineers in Sematech's 3D Interconnect program at CNSE's Albany NanoTech Complex to address industry infrastructure and technology gaps in materials, equipment, integration and product-related issues for high-volume adoption of through-silicon-vias (TSV).

In the short term, this deal certainly favors Nokia. The company will still be spending money on Symbian development-the company is expecting to ship 150 million of the handsets in the next couple of years-but will be able to scale back this expenditure, as its operating system development costs are increasingly pushed onto Redmond. This, plus the cash infusion, gives the company instant savings.

For downloading data, the Verizon iPhone is slower than the AT&T iPhone, and it's also slower than most other Verizon smartphones, according to a study published Monday.

Korean carrier SK Telecom announced earlier this week that it will launch Apple's CDMA iPhone 4 on March 16, making it the first international network to carry the handset.

If true, this report confirms the February statement of Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who said Microsoft has paid Nokia an "incredible" amount of money for the smartphone deal.

A gauge of manufacturing in the euro region rose to 59 last month from 57.3 in January, London-based Markit Economics said in an e-mailed report. That's the highest since June 2000. A reading above 50 indicates expansion.