Your favorite stories from 2024

… plus curiosities from The Hague, Hollywood blockbusters, and more.

Hi all 👋,

Welcome back to another edition of The Detour — a weekly U.S. and global affairs newsletter. The Detour is proudly a work of independent journalism. If you’re on board with what we’ve been doing, please consider the promotion below, which is only active until December 31. It offers 50% off a yearly subscription to The Detour, allowing you to read the newsletter in its entirety so that you can stay informed and curious about the world throughout 2025.

The newsletter begins with The World In Numbers, followed by a selection of sections that rotate from week to week, including: Quoted (important words from consequential corners), The Quiz, Snapshot (impactful images from underreported places), Extremely Online (key updates from the annals of internet culture), The Week Ahead (tips on future goings-on around the world), and Concepts with Ben (curious turns of phrase from Frame Media’s founder and CEO).

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Thank you for reading. Now, onto the good stuff!

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Here’s what’s on deck this week: 

🛰️ Declassified satellite images, Syria’s new caretaker cabinet, and Vanuatu’s climate gambit

📽️ Film critics pick the top movies of 2024

❤️ Your favorite stories from The Detour all year

Source: Canva Graphics, Wikimedia Commons

500,000+ — The number of craters left behind from exploded bombs during the Vietnam War identified by scientists using recently declassified satellite photos from the KH-9 HEXAGON and KH-4a/b CORONA space missions. The majority of these craters are in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province and near the borders of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Last week, the researchers presented these findings at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in efforts to identify the likely locations of unexploded ordnance that still haunt the region, killing 40,000 Vietnamese since 1975.

This declassified satellite image shows craters of exploded bombs across Vietnam, shown here as white spots. // Source: U.S. Geological Survey

0 —The number of women out of 11 total ministers that have been appointed to help lead Syria’s new caretaker cabinet. The head of the government, Mohammed al-Bashir, will rule alongside his cabinet designates until March 2025. These elected ministers were once part of the original Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) in Idlib, a province in northwest Syria, that al-Bashar led before becoming Syria’s government leader today.

Syria plans to hold a “national conference” to allow people from across Syria to shape the country’s future, the leader of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, told an almost completely male group of journalists during the caretaker government’s first-ever press conference Monday. Al-Jolani did not elaborate on Syria’s future system of government, explaining “they would be set by experts and defined in a constitution,” the New York Times reports.

132 — The number of countries that have joined Vanuatu in presenting a legal case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague this month. They argue that major polluters such as the United States, China, and Russia should be held legally responsible for the environmental harm they cause to the planet. The two-week-long session came to a close last week and was punctuated by the dozens of developing nations pleading the case that the climate crisis that we face today is the result of the historical actions of industrialized nations, which have reaped the benefits of rapid economic growth and have left poorer nations to bear the most extreme environmental consequences.

Now, 15 ICJ judges will deliberate on the legal obligations, if any, that countries have regarding their contributions to climate change.

“The outcome of these proceedings will reverberate across generations, determining the fate of nations like mine and the future of our planet.”

— Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, to ICJ judges on December 2.