TUCSON — And just as I was writing about hope for a better year...

Queen Elizabeth called 1992 an "annus horribilis" to describe royal family scandals and a fire at Windsor Castle. Small-bore stuff compared to 2025, when those words sounded like a Latin translation that sums up Donald Trump. A horrid anus.

The man's preposterous buffoonery at times deserves a good laugh, my draft began. Descending toward his level of discourse only plays into his grasping small hands, further inciting his cultists. We need to look up.

Then I woke up to big, bold type in the New York Times, what old-time editors call a war head: U.S. CAPTURES MADURO, TRUMP SAYS. Terrific. Back to the Colossus of the North days when the United States was roundly despised. But worse.

Trump made no bones about his purpose: "There is a lot of oil in Venezuela, and we need it for ourselves and the world," he said. Basically, it was a midnight gas station stickup writ large.

He said nothing about democracy or improving people's lives. He dismissed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize he covets. as incapable and too unpopular to be president.

Venezuela declared independence from Spain in 1811 and fought its own revolutionary war. Now Trump says he will "run" the country, harking back to Hitler who remotely "ran" Poland, then most of Europe.

The country's 29 million people include diehard "Chavista" loyalists in city slums, eager for vengeance. Vicious cartels and criminal gangs based in mountainous jungle await to fight back.

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Colin Powell warned, "You break it, you own it." He was a battle-hardened general who revered the Constitution. Pete Hegseth is a toy-soldier loose cannon, whose motto is FAFO. Fuck around and find out.

Trump says big U.S. companies will exploit Venezuela's oilfields. That means American engineers and workaday "oilies" in remote places would be vulnerable to kidnap as hostages or terrorist attacks. What could go wrong?

MORE

TUCSON — I've stayed silent on what I know about that spine-chilling Associated Press photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc running in pain and panic with two little brothers from napalm flaring behind them 53 years ago down a road in Vietnam.

It is time for some clarity.

That single image portrays why war is hell in a way no words can. Yet today as countless Kim Phucs suffer worse in much of the world, trust is fast diminishing in all "journalists," even those who risk their own lives to get their stories straight.

"The Stringer," a new documentary on Netflix, provides exhaustive forensics and emotional corroborating testimony to make a case that Nguyen Thanh Nghe, another Vietnamese photographer, took the picture for so long attributed to Nick Ut.

Accurate credit is important for history and the photographers involved. What matters far more is what AP labeled the photo: "The Terror of War."

Heated public comment, much of it by people who have not seen the film, illustrates the damage of today's open mic mediascape. When anyone with a keyboard or a microphone can chime in, truth is a moving target.

This is what I know — and what I don't. I have no case to make, one way or the other. June 8, 1972, was long ago. But one crucial moment is burned indelibly into my memory.

Horst Faas emerged from the AP photo section in Saigon to show bureau chief Richard Pyle and me, then alone in the newsroom, the negative he had selected from pictures that Ut and others had taken in Trang Bang.

We both said AP would not show frontal nudity. He shook his head, then messaged the photo chief in New York, who agreed the picture was too powerful to ignore. It went to newspapers around the world before I saw anyone else come into the bureau.

Controversy rages over which photographer was where on Route 1. For me, truth comes down to a single question. Did Faas purposely attribute someone else's picture to Nick Ut? For complex reasons, I believe he probably did.

Horst was a German photomeister for whom the word, legendary, falls short. I loved the guy, but not blindly. Only Nick knows who took that photo. The Pulitzer is still his. The World Press Photo award is in limbo. AP stands by Nick but admits some doubt.

Those who take journalism seriously need to consider hard facts with open minds.

MORE

PARIS — Before Thanksgiving cranberry sauce and football, American families might want to watch Ken Burns' stunning PBS series on the long brutal war to break free from a king. If time is short, its final words are enough: "The revolution is not over."

Donald Trump slithered back into office to do exactly what the founders most feared. He sees the people he is sworn to serve as subjects, not citizens. He wants obstreperous enemies of the people — even the Public Broadcasting Service — to be muzzled.

With all the charismatic grace of a rabid warthog boar, he jabbed an index finger at a seasoned Bloomberg reporter who asked why he did not simply release the Jeffrey Epstein files. "Quiet!" he snapped at her. "Quiet, piggy."

His handlers posted a clip of that scene aboard Air Force One. They meant to elicit sympathy for a great leader they say is badly treated by an "insubordinate" press corps that fails to parrot his preposterous assertions.

That began a monstrous 10 days of cruel excesses in the United States, at times maniacal, with reverberations across an imperiled planet.

In a democracy edging toward tyranny if not anarchy, American voters need hard facts set in broad context. Professionals up to the job face withering fire from a porcine president with a gift for exploiting cupidity and stupidity.

Trump is a useful-idiot warmup act for a cabal of sane but soulless autocrats preparing to undo America. He has already corrupted courts and the civil service, politicized the Pentagon and given free rein to ill-trained, overbearing law enforcement agencies.

Despite what he says, America is largely detested and feared abroad, no longer able to defend basic human values by example. China, Russia and smaller despotic states are reshaping the world in their own image. Climate collapse is at its tipping point.

Still, the national mood is changing fast as once apathetic voters see their own families feel the brunt of his folly. It is time to act now before it is too late.

All the president's menagerie needs to go. And next year, as America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, voters can begin to shitcan them into history.

I am placing no bets. A nation of sheep is no match for circling wolves and cowardly jackals led by Orwellian pigs who walk on two legs. It all depends on whether enough deep-digging reporters at home and abroad can wake the flock up.

We have all seen enough.

MORE

PARIS — A headline in Le Monde over a chilling photo spread stopped me cold. It read: "We're buying time, but we won't win the fight; Senegal's Saint-Louis faces the inexorable rise of the sea." Oh lord, I thought, déjà vu all over again.

I am not much of a Hemingway fan, but his tale of old Santiago finally wrestling in a giant marlin and then struggling back to port with only a skeleton savaged by sharks turns out to be the perfect metaphor for what we hapless humans are now up against.

For me, it hits home hard. After 40 years of trying to report on what now threatens to be the most crucial global story ever, I've come up with bare bones. Overfishing and sea change are vastly complex issues. Yet few people care about what they can't see.

Reporting focuses mostly on shipboard slavery, brutality and crime. All are important, but they miss the main point. The ocean that sustains us all is rising and dying.

In 2014, The New York Times Magazine sent me to do a cover story from Senegal, already a stark vignette of the big picture. The editor liked my draft and asked for more. But a staff shakeup replaced him. Younger editors wanted more human drama and less fish.

By the time my story was spiked many months later, it was too outdated to take elsewhere. I kept at it in other ways, including a book proposal and an attempt to form a small cluster of specialized reporters. A generous foundation grant helped a lot.

Finally, I decided that old men and the sea are also an endangered species. I'm only a parttime piker with a small hook. Yet even David Attenborough's spectacular new film, "Ocean," his swan song at age 99, sank beneath the waves after its flurry of acclaim.

It includes some of the most sickening footage I've ever seen. Submerged cameras follow trawler nets on steel cables that scrape the ocean floor at high speed, ripping away breeding grounds, rich ancient coral beds and every sea creature in their path.

“It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,” Attenborough says. “Over three quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away.” Large fleets heavily subsidized by governments are destroying Earth's most valuable common resource.

This is a saga of many parts, and I'll tell it as it unfolded, Papa Hemingway-style. But first, the backdrop.

MORE