Ginanne Brownell

The road from Colombo to Kandy was a traffic jam of cars, tuk-tuks (three-wheeled taxis), and buses—along with the occasional cow—so we didn't arrive at Mackwoods's Labookellie Tea Estate until after dark, missing the scenic hills and waterfalls of Sri Lanka's central highlands.

Struggling Western musicians, actors, and artists are finding a receptive audience on the mainland.

Among the well-established galleries from New York, Paris, and London showing works at Art Basel Switzerland last month, a smattering of galleries from Central and Eastern Europe stood out, showing video installations, photographs, and huge landscape paintings. They are among those from the former East bloc fast gaining a reputation as important players on the international contemporary-art scene.

Almost two years ago London's Victoria and Albert Museum held an exhibition titled Cold War Modern, examining how the U.S. and the countries of the former Eastern bloc were fighting a proxy war in the world of design.

The April plane crash that killed 80 Polish leaders, including President Lech Kaczynski, is known in Poland as "the catastrophe." The leaders were en route to a commemoration of the 1940 Soviet massacre of Polish officers in Katyn, Russia. Poland had to call early elections, now scheduled for June 20. Kaczynski's twin brother, Jaroslaw, who heads the ultraconservative Law and Justice Party, faces Acting President Bronislaw Komorowski of the pro-European Civic Platform party.

I've never been much of a dancer. I took ballet and tap classes for years as a child but never managed to graduate to pointe shoes or the high-heeled tap shoes the cool, older girls wore.

Rwanda's just-appointed foreign minister spent 20 years in the U.S. before returning to help her country recover from genocide and become a global model for reconciliation.

When Dasha Zhukova, the glamorous girlfriend of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, opened her Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in a converted bus depot in Moscow last autumn, art connoisseurs scoffed.

Top chefs are serving it up simple—and cheap. In this economy, it's all about the food.

A late-developing player preps for her first tournament by getting advice from Wimbledon greats--and losing 35 pounds along the way.

Elvir Causevic left sarajevo in 1990, just before the war engulfed Bosnia and smashed it to smithereens. Now 33 and educated in America, a member of Yale University's research staff, he recently moved back --and continues to be amazed at the town's transformation.

For a tennis player who is impressively vocal and aggressive behind the net, hunky Rafael Nadal is surprisingly demure off the court. There is almost a little-boy-lost quality about him.