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This Happened

This Happened — February 1: The Saigon Execution

On this day in 1968, Nguyễn Văn Lém, a member of the Viet Cong, was summarily executed for alleged war crimes in Saigon during the Vietnam War. An Associated Press photographer captured the execution in one of the most iconic images in war reporting history.

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Who witnessed the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém?

When Nguyễn Văn Lém, a member of the Viet Cong, was summarily executed for alleged war crimes in Saigon during the Vietnam War, Võ Sửu, a cameraman for the U.S. TV network NBC, and Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer were there to witness and capture the event.

How did Eddie Adams photograph the execution?

Adams has said that at the time, he believed that Brigadier General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, Chief of the Republic of Vietnam National Police, was just going to threaten Lém, and took out his camera to record the event. The photograph he captured showed the moment the bullet entered Lém's head.

What happened to the Saigon execution photograph?

After being shared worldwide, the photograph electrified the anti-war movement in the United States. The photograph became famous in contemporary American journalism, and won Adams the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.

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Green

How Climate Change May Be Triggering More Earthquakes — And Vice Versa

Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.

Image of a man trying to measure the offset of a crevasse on a glacier

Crevasse on the Canwell glacier created by the earthquake that struck near Denali National Park in Alaska in November 2002

Paul Molga

PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.

Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.

Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.

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