Reporters on the Job

FIRST KICK: Much like the US president’s first pitch to open the baseball season, Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko christened the new Dnepropetrovsk soccer stadium Sunday by booting a ball. The stadium will be a venue in the Euro 2012 soccer finals.

Mykola Lazarenko/Reuters

September 16, 2008

Romance on a Bridge: Cairo correspondent Liam Stack had always seen the throngs of people hanging out by Nile River in the evening. But before he researched today's story, he did not realize how much these bridges also doubled as a kind of lovers' lane.

"All kinds of people were hanging out on the bridges – families with young children, office workers, fishermen – but at least half of the people there were young couples trying to avoid the condemnation of their families," he says.

He noticed that a bevy of vendors ply the bridge, catering to young lovers. "While I was conducting interviews with a female colleague, an old man with a plastic bag full of individually plastic-wrapped roses marched up to us and thrust a flower into her hand and then loudly demanded money from us."

David Clark Scott

World editor