Bad news for all you ski bums out there. Summer glacier skiing has been called off at the French resort of Alpe d'Huez - which, coincidentally, is French for "ratify Kyoto." The Alpe's Sarenne glacier has become unstable due to melting - a particularly worrying development, since the glacier sits at a relatively "safe" altitude of 9,000 feet. (A 2003 United Nations report on global warming warned that rising snow lines would make most low-lying European resorts disappear in the coming decades.)

I have just returned from a week in Paris. After spending a week eating, drinking and consuming mass quantities of art and culture, I returned to the States slimmer, clear-skinned, and brimming with a sense of history, proportion and an inner calm I haven't attained without meditation in years. What is this magic? What is it that makes French (and most of European) society so balanced, so reasonable, so healthy?

With France's wine industry in an economic slump, grape growers are looking at new markets for their crop. One possibility: biofuel. According to a Reuters story, French winemakers are exploring ways to produce more alcohol from the grapes, making them a plausible substitute for sugar beets as a source of ethanol, which can be used on its own or mixed with gasoline to create a cleaner fuel. France is already Europe's third largest producer of ethanol. The country currently has a wine surplus of four billion liters, the largest in a decade, thanks to overproduction and increasing competition from other countries.