> 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.