SocoSIX Behind the Scenes Highlights for July 2025
PANDORA’S BOX AND THE IRAN-ISRAEL WAR When Israel attacked Hizballah last September with exploding beepers and a broad assassination campaign, one of the overriding reasons that dictated the timing was Israel’s concern (according to sources in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) that Hizballah was about to discover that its internal paging instruments had been boobytrapped—part of […]
2025 June SocoSIX Behind the Scenes Report
ELECTION ROUND-UP IN AUSTRALIA, ROMANIA, AND PORTUGAL Like Canada on April 28, Australian voters opted for stability and retained center-left Anthony Albanese in office during the snap election he called on May 3, 2025. Not only had his Liberal party been behind in the polls prior to the vote, his was the first Australian government […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for May 2025
CANADA BETS ON CARNEY AS LIBERALS WIN ELECTION As expected, Canada’s Liberal Party won a fourth consecutive term in office on April 28 in a race which was broadly seen as a referendum on U.S. President Donald Trump’s provocative, if not demeaning, calls for Canada to join the U.S. as the 51st state and his […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for April 2025
TURKEY’S ONE STEP FORWARD AND TWO STEPS BACK Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seemed to be on an incredible roll at the beginning of the month with the prospect of an historic end to the decades old conflict with the PKK. This prospect arose in response to the February 27 call by the group’s imprisoned […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for March 2025
TRUMP AMBUSHES ZELENSKYY, BUT WILL HIS NEW POLICY WORK? February saw American policy on the war in Ukraine turned “upside down” as President Trump sought to satisfy election promises to end the war in Ukraine promptly. The month began with the President speaking with both Russian President Vladmir Putin and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for February 2025
TIK TOK SAGA As TikTok moves through the 90-day grace period offered to it by President Trump to find a solution to its ownership dilemma in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court decision backing an overwhelmingly bipartisan act of Congress banning it, we thought it might be a good idea to find out why […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for January 2025
SYRIA UNRAVELS The regime of Bashar al-Assad, for decades Syria’s brutal dictator, was toppled in less than two weeks. Rebels, led by an Islamist group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), began their offensive from Idlib Province in the north-west on November 27th. By December 8th they had reached Damascus, the capital. President Assad fled to […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for December 2024
SUMMARY As we approach the end of a tumultuous year, November 2024 has proven to be a consequential month with the (surprising for some) election of a more provocative U.S. president; the collapse of the so-called “traffic light” coalition in Berlin and the call for new German elections in February; the impressive performance of China’s […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for November 2024
GOING NUCLEAR? Google has announced it’s inked a deal with Kairos Power to buy small modular reactors (SMRs) to help power the tech giant’s investments in data centers and AI. Google says it chose SMRs due to their small size and modular nature, which in turn can “reduce construction timelines, allow deployment in more places, […]
SocoSIX Behind the Scenes for October 2024
WAR WIDENS IN THE MIDDLE EAST COMMENT: Israel may be calling them “small, tactical incursions,” but in fact, the invasion of southern Lebanon and the purging of as much Hizballah infrastructure, personnel, and weapons from the Litani River southwards has begun as has, in fact, the broader war. This is the third such attempt to […]