Disturbingly, 2026 is looking even worse than 2025

The BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson has been reporting on wars around the world for some 60 years, since the 1960s. He is not a man prone to exaggeration; he is a meticulous and thoughtful journalist, and I have a great deal of respect for him and his views. So, when Mr. Simpson says he has never see a year like 2025, in terms of global conflicts, and he is worried as hell about 2026, I sit up and pay attention.

He sees 2025, and by extension, 2026, as a crucial year in world affairs. It was notable, not just because of the sheer number of major conflicts going on around the world, although that was part if it, with wars continuing in Ukraine-Russia (the total number of deaths is highly contested but it may be in the region of 400,000, with over a million in total casualties), in Palestine-Israel (over 70,000 deaths so far), in Sudan (150,000 deaths), in Cambodia-Thailand (only 50-60 killed so far but with plenty of potential for more), not to mention ongoing internal conflicts in Somalia, Myanmar, Congo, Ethiopia, and others. But what was notable to Mr. Simpson was the potential for one of those wars to bloom into a full-scale world war. (And, as I say, Simpson is a circumspect and judicious writer.)

The war in Ukraine is almost 3 years old now, and hundreds of peace initiatives have been tried and failed. With a much more pro-Russia American president in power, you can almost see Putin rubbing his hands with glee. Trump's apparent lack of interest in Europe and NATO, and America's fading influence and increasing isolationism, can only strengthen Putin's hand, as is becoming increasingly apparent. There are even references to a potential nuclear confrontation being casually dropped.

Conflicts such as the Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars and Kosovo all had the potential to tip over into something resembling a world war, but escalation was avoided. Mr. Simpson is less confident that escalation can be avoided in the case of Ukraine. President Zelenskyy himself has warned of the possibility, and Putin and some of his more hawkish henchmen have used some alarming language.

And then, of course, there is always China, whose alarming threats about Taiwan are ever-present. It has been carrying out some large-scale military drills in the area, and generally pushing boundaries to see what response it elicits from the West. It has ramped up its war of words. China's increasing influence on world affairs and its increasing economic power might give it the confidence to make a move in 2026. And America won't take that one lying down.

So, with all that doom and gloom, I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. Oh, how I wish it!

Agave is the new plastic

I had drinks today through an agave-based straw. Who knew there was such a thing?

The Sustainable Agave Company makes all those hard-to-replace single-use-plastic items like straws, cutlery and cups out of waste agave from the tequila industry.

It felt for all the world just like plastic. Definitely not going soggy anytime soon. I was impressed.

Even better, although all the stuff on their website is priced in US dollars, it turns out the company is Canadian, based in Toronto, and had been around since 2020.

Trump's top 25 lies of 2025

Well, CNN set itself a tough task: to come up with the top 25 Trump lies of 2025.

From all the many hundreds/thousands, picking 25 is not easy. They say they chose some because of the number of times they were repeated, some because of the importance of the topic, and some just because they were so bizarre or egregious.

Anyway, what they came up with was:

• Trump secured $17 or $18 trillon in investment in 2025
• "Every price is down"
• Trump was reducing prescription drug prices by "2,000%, 3,000%"
• Foreign countries pay the US government tariffs
• Portland was "burning down"
• Washington DC had no murders for six months
• "I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water"
• The Democratic governor of Maryland called Trump "the greatest president of my lifetime"
• Ukraine "started" Russia's war on Ukraine
• Trump was speaking "in jest" when he promised to immediately end the Ukraine war
• The US government had planned to spend $50 million on "condoms for Hamas"
• Every drug boat in the Caribbean "kills 25,000 Americans"
• Trump "didn't say" he had no problem releasing full footage of a September boat strike
• Numerous foreign leaders emptied prisons and mental institutions to send their most undesirable people into the US
• Trump ended seven or eight wars
• "The people of Canada like" the idea of becoming the 51st US state
• Capitol rioters "didn't assault"
• Critical media coverage of Trump is "illegal"
• Trump didn't pressure the Justice Department to go after his opponents
• Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files
• The 2020 election was "rigged and stolen"
• The US is "the only country in the world" with mail-in voting
• Babies get 80-plus vaccines at once
• Trump's big domestic policy bill didn't change Medicaid
• The domestic policy bill was "the single most popular bill ever signed"

As good a list as any, I guess, and I've covered many of them in this very blog over the months. Seeing them there all together, though, makes you realize the enormity of what Trump has been feeding the American public, and just how serious a psychological problem he has.

Should the US be involving itself in Nigeria?

Donald Trump has a new crusade to fight: hundreds of thousands of Christians are being killed by Muslim fundamentalists in Nigeria. He accuses Islamic State (IS) of "targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!", and accuses the Nigerian government of continuing "to allow the killing of Christians", which of course Nigeria denies. But that is more than enough for him to wade into a neutral country and carry out military strikes there, which is his idea of fun. Mr. Trump wished a merry Christmas to "dead terrorists".

The Nigerian Foreign Minister, on the other hand, told the BBC that the multiple air strikes on Christmas Day were were part of a "joint operation" in a region of northwestern Nigeria where IS is know to have operations, and that they had "nothing to do with a particular religion". But hey, let's not quibble, Trump may have misunderstood that part. 

But - just as with his ongoing campaign against Venezuela and his characterization of the Afrikaners in South Africa - a detailed BBC report shows that it's not even clear that Trump is working from reliable information. Individuals as varied as Ted Cruz and TV host Bill Maher have been pushing the narrative that the Nigerian Jihadist group Boko Haram (not Islamic State, but hey, they're all the same, right?) has been responsible for killing "over 100,000" (or possibly "50,000"?) Christians, and burning "18,000 churches" and "2,000 Christian schools". This stuff gets disseminated widely, and elaborated upon, by the Republican social media machine.

When pressed, these activists almost all refer back to reports by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (InterSociety for short), which monitors and tracks human rights abuses across Nigeria. InterSociety claims that jihadist groups have killed 100,000 Christians between 2009 and 2025, as well as 60,000 "moderate Muslims", although it's not entirely clear where they get these figures from. The data sources they do mention do not seem to reflect the figures they publish, according to the BBC. In the first two-thirds of 2025 alone, InterSociety claims that 7,000 Christians were killed, based, they say, on media reports, even though most of those media reports do not actually mention the religious identity of victims.

Both Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa tend to operate almost exclusively in north and northeastern Nigeria, which is a predominantly Muslim region, an area where relatively few Christians live. Nigeria's huge 236 million population is pretty much evenly split between Muslims and Christians, so calling it an "existential threat" for Christians (Trump again) is clearly ridiculous, as are claims from other US Christian groups and Republican politicians that Christians in the country could be "completely wiped out".

InterSociety also includes in its figures deaths at the hands of the militant (largely Muslim) Fulani cattle and sheep herders, which researchers say are mainly protesting about access to land and water and other ethnic tensions, and are not jihadists as InterSociety characterizes them. InterSociety itself has been accused of links with the Indigenous People of Biafra (Ipob), a proscribed group fighting for a breakaway state in the mainly Christian southeast of Nigeria. The Biafra Republic Government in Exile (BRGE) has also played a key role in promoting the "Christian genocide" in the US Congress over the years.

Nigerian politics - like that of the US, but even more so - is complicated and murky. It is far from clear that any kind of Christian genocide, or even a concerted anti-Christian hostility or persecution, is happening in Nigeria. It's even less clear that the USA should be throwing its weight around there. For an administration that claims it wants nothing to do with any "forever wars", it's sure doing a lot to start them.

And where are we with robotaxis and self-driving cars?

I confess I had written off self-driving cars completely several years ago, after a series of accidents and the admission that, actually, self-driving cars were not as easy as initially predicted, and that maybe some problems (including those tricky moral ones) maybe forever outside the purview of computers.

But, undeterred, some companies have persisted with the idea, with mixed results. The biggest, best-known ones are Tesla's Robotaxi (which uses its popular Model Y cars) and Google/Alphabet's Waymo (which uses the sexier Jaguar i-Pace sports utility vehicle). But other companies are also in with a shout, including Uber's Avride, Amazon's Zoox, Volkswagen, and Aurora's driverless trucks. (Some companies, like GM, have retreated from their autonomous car aspirations.)

They are progressing, if slowly, although Tesla in particular is progressing much slower than Mr. Musk led us to believe. It has a modest 30 Robotaxis operating in Austin, Texas (which seems to be ground zero for autonomous car testing), and they all have a human in the passenger seat monitoring them, for now at least. That's a far cry from Musk's 2016 promise of cars driving themselves across the country within two years, and his 2019 promise of a million Robotaxis on the road within a year. 

Google's Waymo fleet is larger (Google actually started its self-driving car research well before Tesla), with about 200 vehicles in Austin, and another 2,300 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta, with plans to extend to 20 more cities in 2026, including Dallas, Washington, Miami, and London, England. Waymos operate without human monitors.

Mr. Musk is still saying that, after a slow, cautious start, Tesla will overtake Waymo and, for some reason, many deep-pocketed investors seem to believe him. Millions of Teslas on the road today have the hardware to convert into self-driving vehicles with just a tweak of the software. Plus, Tesla's system relies solely on cameras (lots of cameras), while Waymo and other companies use a combination of cameras, radar and laser sensors. Cameras alone are a cheaper solution, but they can easily be flummoxed by fog, snow, glare and other factors, and many commentators see Tesla's fixation with cameras as a severe limitation, especially as the cost of radar and laser sensors continues to fall.

It's far from clear that self-driving cars and taxis will ever generate trillions of dollars in revenue, as Musk insists, or that they will ever achieve profitability. There are many hidden overheads, like manned monitoring centres, special cleaning, etc, that are rarely mentioned. Power outages, as occurred in San Francisco recently, are also a potential issue, as self-driving cars grind to halt in that eventuality. They still have problems understanding hand signals, and have often been reported ignoring police officers, firefighters and emergency workers trying to direct traffic (and even, in numerous occasions, ignoring a school bus' signals), resulting in some close calls. A driverless Waymo tax in Scottsdale, Arizona went AWOL earlier this year, and started spinning in circles in a parking lot, with the hapless passenger locked in. Although no deaths for some time...

UPDATE

Of course, these are just the Western/American developments. As you might imagine, China is way ahead on this stuff. Baidu's Apollo Go driverless taxi service has been operating in dozens of colors in China for some time now, and has accumulated millions of driverless rides. Ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft have recently announced partnerships with Baidu, and Chinese robotaxis are expected to hit the streets of London and other western cities next year.

Where are we with those tariffs?

With all the comings and goings and ins and outs, and all the misinformation coming from south of the border, it's hard to know where we are with Trump's tariffs. An Associated Press article tries to make some sense of it.

Trump's overnight pivot from free trade to protectionism has resulted in double-digit taxes on American imports from pretty much everywhere, which has strained the budgets of consumers and businesses across the world, but especially in America. It has upended the global supply chain, and produced one of the most turbulent economic years in living memory.

With all the comings and goings, it's hard to get an idea of the overall "effective" tariff rate on US imports. The Budget Lab at Yale University have crunched the numbers for us, and it seems that number is currently at around 17%, about seven times high than before Trump got going at the start of this year, but not as high as mid-year.

Those tariffs have indeed raised lots of money, as Trump keeps reminding us, about $236 billion up to the end of November. But this still remains a small fraction of overall government revenue, and nothing like enough to replace federal income taxes, as Trump also claims. In fact, much of it will probably go to subsidizing US farmers for the sharp decrease in their incomes.

And yes, it has all had some effect on the US trade deficit, the single main reason for the tariffs according to Trump, but perhaps not as much as you (or he) might expect. In fact, the deficit got worse in the first quarter of the year, as panicked American companies tried to get ahead of the main tariff impositions, before settling back to around $50-$60 billion a month. Certainly, the increased tariff revenue does not come close to offsetting the trade deficit, which was also an oft-stated goal.

Imports from America's main trading partners have shifted a bit as a result of all the horse-trading that had been going on (and continues to go on). Imports from China have fallen a lot, and those from Canada a little bit; imports from Mexico, Vietnam and Taiwan, though, have increased (the latter two substantially).

So, was any of this worth all the agony, stress and disruption it has caused? Probably not. Trump would never admit that, of course. Although his popularity ratings are taking a significant hit as the effects of his tariffs start to be felt, a lot of MAGA Republicans - probably most of whom were free trade enthusiasts before they were hoodwinked and gaslit into being protectionists - still have implicit faith in the Trump method. It's a strange world we live in, particularly those unfortunate enough to live in the United States.

What is vibe-coding, and does it work?

Maybe you've never even heard of vibe-coding - it's a pretty recent phenomenon - but it's all the rage in the technology world. Essentially, vibe-coding is using an artificial intelligence (AI) platform to allow amateurs and non-coders to create functioning software and websites.

Sounds easy, eh? You just use a vibe-coding platform like Lovable or Cursor (recent start-ups already worth billions of dollars), or even more familiar large language models like Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, and use everyday conversational prompts, and the AI does the rest.

Except, of course, it's not as simple as that, as the Globe article explains. It can be a confusing and frustrating experience, and the AI is quite likely to throw out buggy software full of security risks, that doesn't bear any resemblance to the masterpiece you had in mind, and quite likely doesn't even work. One study found that AI models introduced known security flaws about 45% of the time. In fact, a whole sub-industry has grown up of humans - "vibe-coding clean-up specialists" - who can fix the errors in amateur vibe-coding projects.

In the hands of experienced coders, though, vibe-coding can be a substantial time-saver (saving several hours each week according to some). Using it, startups can grow faster, with fewer employees. Vibe-coding for individuals, though, can prove expensive, as the platforms charge for credits to use its services which, as we have seen, can be inefficient and frustrating. University computer science professors are having to adapt too, such as by insisting that students walk teachers through their code to make sure they actually understand how it works.

Some studies have found that, overall, vibe-coding does not really improve productivity. Aficionados, of course, just see this as teething problems in a new and emerging industry. The proof will emerge over time. Although, by then, some new breakthrough will no doubt have materialized, upending everything we thought we knew :(

So much for all that redacting....

A lot of people are complaining about the extent of the redactions - all those thick black lines - in the recently-released Epstein files. And, of course, some people are finding ways round them.

Apparently, if you just copy the text, and paste it into a new unformatted document, some of the redactions disappear, a known security flaw in some PDF documents. (I'm not sure why it should work for some documents and not others.) Others say that, if you take a screen shot on your phone and play around with some standard image-editing features (like brightness, contrast, etc), you can start to see the redacted text.

None of this is very lawful, I'm guessing. But, given that very few people trust the Trump administration to redact things fairly, it's not surprising that people are trying.