> This may have felt like the year of Ebola and Isil but in fact, objectively, 2014 has probably been the best year in history.

They did mention ISIS ("Isil"). There's a seeming trend of these newspapers to fail to capitalize things that should definitely be capitalized (acronyms). I've seen at least a dozen cases of it in the last week. I don't know if perhaps it is a side-effect of automating/technologizing the editor's role or if this is a new style thing or what?

Edit: in this article, it is almost surely intentional:

> The Isil barbarity in the Middle East is so shocking, perhaps, because it comes against a backdrop of unprecedented world peace.

ISIS is contained to a few countries and is largely "managed". Iran is desperate to be rid of the sanctions and a nuclear deal will be in place before this time next year. They are also becoming more moderate as each day passes.

Putin can largely be ignored now. He played his hand completely wrong and now the sphere of influence he wanted around Russia will crumble (as will the economy).

So none of the issues you mentioned are that significant. What was really big in 2014 was Ebola and the US/China's efforts on Climate Change.