WHAT makes news can be either events that are fortuitous or those that are foreseeable. Each week there is a lively competition for our space between the news we can prepare for (the museum opening, whose exhibits we can photograph in advance in color, for example) and the disaster that catches everyone unaware. Each week the leisurely and reflective must contest with the latest and most urgent happening--and each has its adherents: without the reflective, TIME would be too much like the daily newspapers; without the urgent, TIME would lose much of its vitality.

How the fortuitous and foreseeable contend can be seen in our cover story on South Viet Nam, and in this week's Medicine section.

o Weeks before the American Heart Association convened in Los Angeles and the American College of Surgeons gathered in San Francisco, Medicine Editor Gilbert Cant had scanned their scheduled programs and read abstracts of important papers to be delivered. He, and other medical reporters, also benefited from advance briefings in lay language by key scheduled speakers, and had a chance to cross-question them. And so, from California, Cant cabled four stories--a controversy over freezing the stomach to lessen ulcer pains, the results of a remarkable Red Chinese surgical operation, the use of a pump to relieve a diseased heart, and a bowel operation to lower the blood's content of cholesterol. These stories, edited and checked in New York, are on top of the week's medical news--having gained from advance preparation.

o Successful military coups, by their very nature, must come by surprise. Yet an attempt to overthrow the Diem regime in Viet Nam has been "in the wind" for months, as TIME readers know. Last September, in a five-column story, TIME discussed the dissatisfaction in the army and illustrated it with photographs of five generals and one colonel. Our top two pictures were of Generals Minh and Don, who led last week's coup. In Saigon, TIME Correspondent Murray Gart watched the attack on Diem's palace lying flat on his belly on a rooftop less than 200 yards away. Knowing the chaos in communications that he could expect, and the delays that military censorship might impose, Gart grabbed the first available plane from Saigon to Bangkok to file his dramatic report.

Senior Editor Edward Hughes, who wrote the story, had talked to a number of the generals on a ten-day trip to South Viet Nam last summer. It is his second cover story in a row. He also wrote last week's on German Chancellor Erhard.

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