Keeping up with the news is hard. So hard, in fact, that we spent the whole of 2018 rounding up the most 10 mind blowing stories for you each and every week, because we’re nice like that. With New Year’s approaching, now feels like the perfect time to look back on 2018 in news and pick the ten stories this column considered the most important of all.
1 Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Nomination Got Real Ugly
No sooner had Donald Trump taken office than he was pressed to put forward his first Supreme Court pick. Neil Gorsuch sailed through the Senate in April 2017 with a vote that split along party lines but didn’t generate a fiery spectacle.
The second nominee, however, turned the whole process into a full‑blown circus. Brett Kavanaugh, slated to replace swing‑vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, initially seemed like another Gorsuch‑type conservative—steady, predictable, and largely uncontroversial.
That calm shattered when Professor Christine Blasey Ford stepped forward, accusing Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a teenage party. The allegation hit the nation while the #MeToo movement was still reverberating, turning the confirmation hearings into a battlefield for America’s cultural identity.
Our coverage from that period captures just how ugly the showdown became. Hearings were summoned, the FBI launched a probe, and the fate of a woman’s testimony and a judge’s career hung in the balance. Though Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed by a narrow margin, the episode stands as the most vicious nomination fight in a generation, exposing deep fissures in the country’s soul.
2 Armenia’s Velvet Revolution Stunned The World
The first time we mentioned the protests gripping Armenia, it was April 21, and they’d been rolling for roughly a week. At that point we explained the basics: corrupt President Serzh Sargsyan had sidestepped his constitutionally mandated two‑term limit by shifting presidential powers to the prime minister’s office and then appointing himself as prime minister.
We guessed the unrest would be sizable but probably wouldn’t spark any real transformation.
We were spectacularly wrong. Within the next week, a third of the nation was out on the streets, and the momentum only grew. A week later Sargsyan stepped down. Two weeks after that, the entire government collapsed without a single shot being fired—a truly bloodless revolution.
The primary beneficiary was Nikol Pashinyan, who began the protests as a lone, angry activist and ended up as prime minister. In December he called a snap election that swept Sargsyan’s party from parliament and ushered in a wave of pro‑revolution ministers. The shift was a dazzling reversal for a country long held under an authoritarian grip, offering a bright, hopeful narrative.
3 The US Was Paralyzed By Mass Shootings
The close of 2017 was dominated by two of the deadliest mass shootings in recent American history—Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas. Yet it was 2018 that saw a relentless stream of gun‑fueled carnage finally push the nation to a breaking point.
The first major tragedy struck early in the year when former student Nikolas Cruz opened fire at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 students and wounding another 17. It was the worst school shooting in the United States since Sandy Hook.
May delivered another horror when Santa Fe High School in Texas was attacked, leaving ten dead. Later in the year, a rampage in Thousand Oaks, California, claimed 13 lives, and a racist assault on a Pittsburgh synagogue resulted in 11 deaths—the deadliest anti‑Semitic attack in U.S. history.
In total, nearly 70 people lost their lives to mass shootings across the United States in 2018.
That grim tally sparked a wave of activism. In late March, the Parkland student‑led March for Our Lives protest blossomed into the largest youth‑driven demonstration the country had seen since the Vietnam era, demanding stricter gun control.
4 Russia Killed A British Citizen With A WMD (And The World Just Watched)
2018 proved a mixed bag for Russia. While the nation basked in the euphoria of a successful World Cup campaign, the Kremlin was simultaneously orchestrating a dark, covert operation on British soil.
In March, former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were discovered near death on a bench in Salisbury, England. Investigations quickly uncovered that they had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, allegedly on orders from President Vladimir Putin.
Novichk, a lethal chemical weapon, created a cascade of complications. A police officer who responded to the Skripal incident nearly lost his life. The tragedy deepened on June 30, when Dawn Sturgess, a British citizen, inadvertently came into contact with a discarded Novichok container left behind by the assassins. She succumbed to the poison on July 8, becoming the first civilian in the UK to die from a nerve agent.
Although the international community condemned Putin’s actions, concrete punitive measures against Russia remained limited.
5 The Iran Nuclear Deal Was Dramatically Ripped Up
On July 14, 2015, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany, signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a historic accord aimed at curbing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon. It stood as one of President Barack Obama’s signature foreign‑policy achievements, promising to open Iran to Western commerce and reshape Middle‑Eastern geopolitics.
Fast forward to May 8, 2018: President Donald Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the agreement, immediately followed by sweeping sanctions against Tehran. While the European Union, Russia, and China scrambled to keep the deal alive, the withdrawal effectively killed the pact.
The JCPOA had long been a point of contention, with critics arguing it did too little to curb Iran’s other destabilizing activities. Nevertheless, its abrupt termination was a dramatic spectacle. Once again, America’s allies found themselves scrambling to stay afloat as the United States yanked the diplomatic boat from under them. The long‑term fallout of the deal’s demise remains to be seen.
6 Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder Shocked The World
The episode reads like a thriller straight out of a pulp novel. On October 2, Washington Post journalist and Saudi‑exiled dissident Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, never to emerge again. As his wife alerted the media, it became clear that a meticulously planned murder had taken place inside the consular walls.
Details unfurled rapidly: CCTV captured a look‑alike exiting the consulate, an audio recording of Khashoggi’s final screams surfaced, and reports indicated that Saudi intelligence agents had tortured and dismembered him, dumping his body parts across Istanbul.
The alleged mastermind behind the killing was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). In a chilling photo‑op, MBS shook hands with Khashoggi’s son, who was living in Saudi Arabia. The murder sent shockwaves through the Middle East, igniting diplomatic fallout.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, no stranger to silencing journalists, seized on the incident, while in the United States the episode sparked a fierce backlash against the Trump administration’s cozy ties with MBS. Though Khashoggi is gone, his legacy continues to reverberate across global politics.
7 Facebook’s Woes Put Data Privacy In The Spotlight
Has anyone ever seen a tech CEO testify before Congress with the non‑chalance of a seasoned sociopath? In April, Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Capitol Hill, fielding questions about his company’s misdeeds with the unsettling calm of a character from a thriller, while the nation watched.
The testimony was sparked by a massive scandal that erupted on March 17, 2018. A joint investigation by The New York Times, The Guardian, and Britain’s Channel 4 revealed that Facebook had allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest data from 80 million users, data later used to influence elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
The fallout was monumental. Facebook stumbled from scandal to scandal throughout the year, and ordinary users began to awaken to the extent of their personal data exploitation. Rumors even swirled that Zuckerberg might be subpoenaed. Many wondered whether Facebook was on a trajectory similar to the extinct MySpace.
8 Brexit Became An Utter Omnishambles
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “omnishambles” as a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations. If any single word could encapsulate the Brexit saga of 2018, it would be that.
At the year’s start, Brexit barely made the headlines in our weekly round‑ups. Summer brought the Chequers Plan—a roadmap for leaving the EU that somehow managed to combine every negative aspect of staying in the bloc with every drawback of exiting it.
Although the government held together a little longer, the writing was on the wall. As the deadline for voting on the plan approached, sanity in Westminster evaporated. In the final two months, the country witnessed two coup attempts against Prime Minister Theresa May, a no‑confidence motion that resulted in a pyrrhic victory, and the first ever series of three consecutive defeats for a sitting government since the 1970s.
Parliament even found the government in contempt for the first time in British history. The withdrawal agreement vote was pushed into January, making clear that a hard Brexit—or even any Brexit—was looming. Watching May and her Conservative Party flail felt like watching a circus of clowns slipping on banana peels while shooting themselves in the foot. With less than 100 days left, anything could happen, and the drama promised to continue into 2019.
9 North Korea Came In From The Cold
Our previous year‑end roundup warned that the Korean peninsula could erupt into war, placing North Korea at the forefront of global anxiety. In 2017, the hermit kingdom had been testing ever‑more powerful nuclear weapons and missiles capable of striking the continental United States, even threatening to bomb Guam.
Fast forward to the final days of 2018, and the narrative had flipped dramatically. Kim Jong Un appeared to bring his nation out of the cold.
It began with North and South Korea agreeing to field a joint team at the Winter Olympics, which blossomed into broader cooperation agreements. President Donald Trump entered the fray, expressing openness to meeting Kim in person. By summer, the seemingly impossible became reality: Kim, Trump, and South Korean President Moon met in Singapore, where Kim pledged to dismantle nuclear stockpiles and pursue a more conciliatory stance.
Since then, North Korea has returned U.S. war dead, found new channels of cooperation with Seoul, and signaled a willingness to open up. Considering the dire forecasts of the previous year, this thaw represents a staggering reversal, offering hope for a lasting peace.
10 We Discovered The Sickening Scale Of Abuse In Pennsylvania’s Catholic Churches
In mid‑August, the long‑awaited report into sexual abuse within Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic churches finally landed. To call its contents horrific would be a massive understatement. Since the 2016 inquiry launched by Attorney General Josh Shapiro, we knew something terrible would surface, but no one could have imagined the full extent.
Over 300 abusers. Over 1,000 victims. Those were the shocking headline figures from the Tuesday report, which detailed abuse spanning seven decades.
Across the state’s eight dioceses, six failed to protect children, allowing priests to repeatedly assault minors with near‑impunity. The scandal ranks among the worst in U.S. history, with reports of priests raping children in hospitals and even forcing young boys into oral sex acts.
The most chilling revelation came at the report’s conclusion: of the 301 named abusers, only two were arrested. The remainder were either deceased or had escaped prosecution thanks to a statute of limitations that capped the window for these crimes at a mere five years.
Among all the 2018 stories we covered, this was arguably the most gut‑wrenching, forcing many to question the basic goodness of humanity. Yet it was also a necessary exposé. A massive conspiracy had let pedophiles operate unchecked for decades, and institutional leaders appeared indifferent. Thankfully, the Justice Department has now launched a probe under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute—typically reserved for organized crime—offering a glimmer of hope that justice may finally be served in 2019.