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Holsteins and home-run hitters may soon be headed to Cuba from Vermont, the latter possibly as early as August.

Lt. Governor Brian Dubie met in Washington, D.C., last week with Jorge Alberto Bolanos Suarez, head of the Cuban Interest Section, the country’s equivalent of an embassy, to discuss, among other things, a Little League sports mission between the two countries.... Read more

There’s a best-of list for everything, including countries. The U.N.’s Human Development Index uses life expectancy, adult literacy and gross domestic product to calculate national success. But there’s more to life — a good life, anyway — than reading, making money and surviving. Last October, a new study commissioned by Reader’s Digest added environmental health to the equation to rank “the planet’s greenest, most livable places.” The U.S. came in at number 23 on the list of 141 countries.... Read more

BURLINGTON — Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with The New York Times. In 1990, he and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, became the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. According to his Times biography, Kristof has lived on four continents and reported from six.... Read more

Derby Line and adjoining Stanstead, Québec, have been so closely connected for more than 200 years that three residential streets run seamlessly across the invisible line demarcating their respective countries. The Haskell Library and Opera House, built smack on the border in 1904 as a symbol of Canadian-American friendship, attracts tourists who enter the handsome stone-and-brick building from Vermont and walk across a painted diagonal line to the checkout desk in Québec.... Read more

The Middle East: It's hard to imagine a place more frequently in the news and less understood by most Americans. Yet the fate of that troubled region is inextricably linked with our own, and not only because of the war in Iraq. So if you find a couple of experts in your neighborhood, why not put them together, eavesdrop on their conversation, and learn something?... Read more

Remember "Piss Christ"? In case you've forgotten, that was Andres Serrano's 1987 photo of a crucifix submerged in a glass of his own urine. Two years after the photo was taken, it set off a firestorm of public controversy, particularly because Serrano was the recipient of a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Alfonse D'Amato (R-New York) called it "a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity," and tore up a copy of "Piss Christ" on the Senate floor.... Read more

For most Vermonters who watched Viktor Yushchenko being sworn in as Ukraine's president, the news likely felt far removed from the Green Mountain State. But for the staff of the Montpelier-based Institute for Sustainable Communities, the event had personal resonance. The nongovernmental agency has been building Eastern European democracy since just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.... Read more

Where to begin? With the fact that Chechen medical student Ali Tepsurkaev was held in a pit in the ground for six weeks -- beaten and burned by Russian soldiers, shocked with electricity until he passed out? Or with his brother, a crusading journalist, who was assassinated and bled to death in his arms? Or with Tepsurkaev's escape to America last year and the kindness of strangers?... Read more