The country’s major automakers have cut production at various factories due to the worsening global semiconductor shortage brought about as chipmakers struggle to meet soaring demand from consumer-electronics companies. Lockdowns and travel restrictions are prompting housebound shoppers to snap up more phones, game consoles, smart TVs and laptops, which in turn has fueled demand for the chips used in those devices. That means carmakers from Toyota Motor Corp. to Volkswagen AG are at risk of not getting enough parts to fuel a fledgling recovery in their own industry. That’s forced automakers all around the world to cut back on production.…

Turkey and Mongolia are separated by some 3,400 miles (5,500 kilometers), but the two countries have a shared history and since the end of the Cold War cultural ties have provided the connections that have facilitated political and security relations, though economic ties have lagged behind given Mongolia’s distant geographic location and having two major powers as its immediate neighbors: China and Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, at which point Mongolia abandoned communism, Mongolia has applied the so-called “third neighbor” concept to counterbalance to some degree the influence of its powerful immediate neighbors and help ensure its independence. Mongolia’s outreach to…

ABSTRACT Public perceptions and attitudes are central to an understanding of the significance of corruption in Europe and in democracies generally – this for a number of reasons including the meaning of the term ‘corruption’ itself. But the investigation of perceptions and attitudes is fraught with difficulties, philosophical as well as practical. If these difficulties appear to invite the conclusion that investigation in this area is a forlorn enterprise, three challenges make it worth while to persist: The significance for democratic stability of public appraisals of official conduct deemed illegitimate; growing concerns about this conduct; and a relative lack of information in the area. Each based…

TEHRAN – In a highly provocative move, Israeli is reportedly sending a submarine to the Persian Gulf to allegedly deter Iran from taking revenge for the assassination of its top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. But this move may end up being a fatal mistake for Israel and its enablers. Last week, Israel started to play with the lion’s tail by implying that it is sending one of its submarines to the Persian Gulf, a region that has long been off-limits to any overt Israeli military presence. Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported on Monday that an Israeli submarine crossed the Suez…

A Chinese foreign ministry official recently tweeted a photo showing an Australian special operations soldier in Afghanistan holding a knife to the throat of a child. The picture was digitally altered, a contrived visual lie spread via the internet with the linked goals of provoking shock and anger in viewers worldwide -- and then politically manipulating those human emotions to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party. Sky News Australia anchor Rowan Dean called the propaganda a communist Chinese attack on the Australian military, one intended to destroy military morale. From an adversary's perspective, soldier morale is always a psychological-warfare…