The first half of 2026 has been so out-there that even Nostradamus would have had a hard time foreseeing it. While full of peculiar predictions, anyone reading The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch from Good Omens – a book in which the character Agnes Nutter forecasts the future with a 100% success rate – would have taken one look at the first half of 2026 and thought it was more bonkers than usual.
It took just days for things to get started, with the US capturing former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on 3 January. Then, at the end of February, America and Israel launched strikes on Iran, leading to the closure of the strait of Hormuz and causing energy prices to spike.