Reporters on the Job

• Another Ukraine: Contributor Helen Womack has been reporting from Moscow for the past 15 years, and has visited Kiev, Ukraine, many times during that time. "'Stolid' was the term most often used to describe Ukraine in the Soviet days. Stolid, bacon-eating, slow-moving," she says. But as she covers the disputed elections in the capital, Helen is seeing another Ukrainian personality (this page).

"It's a carnival here that rivals anything Brazil could put on. I've never seen anything like this," she says. "The Yushchenko supporters are involved in one enormous street party, with pop concerts, street vendors, and an endless array of orange fashions."

Orange was reportedly chosen because it reminded pro-West candidate Viktor Yushchenko of the color of the sun rising over the Carpathian mountains. "You see hair dyed orange, orange blankets, orange rubber gloves as hats, and orange clothes in shop windows. It's an orange carnival," Helen says.

• The Great One? The state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) announced this week that the public voted Tommy Douglas - a Prairie politician from the 1930s to 1960s who founded Canada's universal medicare system - as the greatest Canadian.

As reported on May 11, the CBC polled the public as part of an effort to get Canadians to do some soul-searching about what - and who - defines them.

A close second to Mr. Douglas in the poll was Terry Fox, a cancer victim who tried running across Canada to raise money for cancer research. Also in the top 10 were Wayne Gretzky, Don Cherry (hockey commentator), John A. Macdonald (first prime minister) and Alexander Graham Bell (www.cbc.ca/greatest/).

David Clark Scott
World editor