What were two members of a violent Basque separatist group doing with 11 members of Colombia's narco-Marxist insurgency in a remote corner of southwestern Venezuela in August 2007? According to a blockbuster indictment handed down by a Spanish judge last week, they were participating in a kind of intercontinental terrorist training camp held under the aegis of the Venezuelan military.  

Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks

Edited by Daniel Esterman

(Getty Research Institute, 243 pp., $39.95)

I.

Europe is a mess. Greece is the country on the continent closest to utter wreck. (And, if not for statements yesterday by Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, there would literally be no hope for a life raft anywhere near Athens soon. This morning's FT smothers even those wan hopes.) Spain, Portugal and Ireland are not far behind ... or under.

Each of these countries has views on how Israel deals with the Palestinians, and they don't like it at all. Neither do the past and present "foreign ministers"—so to speak, but not exactly—of the European Union. The previous one also a past foreign minister of Spain, Javier Solana, whose main claim to distinction is that he is the grand nephew of Salvador de Madariaga, historian, politician and chief of the ill-fated League of Nations mission for world disarmament. It's a shame, neither Hitler nor Mussolini (nor Tojo) wanted to cooperate. So Solana's blood runs thick with hope and thin with achievement. He did spend his six years as a physics graduate student at the University of Virginia, with a good deal of his energy there siphoned off to march against the Vietnam war. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ha. Ha.

Solana's successor, the Baroness Ashton of Upholland (neé Catherine Ashton), was Labor leader of the House of Lords, testimony to the diminishing stature of the peers. In the eighties, she was treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); this was long after nutty but brilliant Bertie Russell was dead but in the midst of the deepest financial machinations of the Soviet Union in the atomic or anti-American atomic effort. Of course, she didn't know about that—although it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of the campaign's money came from Moscow. And, if she didn't know that, she is capable of knowing nothing.

Monday marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is worth pausing to recall just how momentous, and unanticipated, this event and those that followed were. My students today have no memory of the cold war; to them, Prague and Budapest, just like Paris and Madrid, are simply places to visit or study in Europe. For the people who lived under communism, however, the system's collapse ushered in an economic transformation unlike any the modern world had ever seen: inflation wiped out the savings of millions of people; unemployment went from being (officially) non-existent to a chronic problem; and homes, businesses, and entire industries passed from state hands to private ownership. At the same time, consumers suddenly had access to goods and services that hadn't been available behind the Iron Curtain, and, for the first time in decades, entrepreneurs were able to start their own companies. Along with these economic changes--at least, in most of the countries--came elections and the potential for democracy, so long denied to citizens in the communist world.

We, like everybody else, have a lot of interest in the nature, size, and costs of developing a "green economy," and so are interested in understanding the existing scholarship. One of the most influential scholars on the subject recently has been an associate professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Gabriel Calzada Álvarez. Unfortunately for the quality of the debate, his much-touted findings fail to hold up under some fairly simple scrutiny and provide an extremely flimsy basis for policy-making.

In recent testimony he gave a rather bleak assessment of the Spanish government’s effort to spur green jobs through fiscal policy: “For every one green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost....Since 2000, Spain has committed €571,138 ($753,778) per each ‘green job.’”

These dismal numbers are based on an unpublished working paper that he wrote with two co-authors in March of 2009. This work has been discussed widely in various advocacy and media outlets (including last week’s Washington Post) and even critiqued by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. While some have pointed out that his jobs data understate those published by the UNEP (by almost a quarter) and Spanish government sources, he obtained his figures from a 2003 study from the European Commission’s Monitoring and Modelling Initiative on the Targets for Renewable Energy (MITRE), a reputable source. As it happens, many other issues have been raised, but I will focus on one that generally has not been discussed, his cost calculation.

Keep reading for the full breakdown of the assumptions and estimates, but the first thing to realize is that Calzada’s calculation that 2.2 jobs are “destroyed”--the opportunity cost--for every green job comes from this simple formula:

Victoria Burnett of The New York Times recently wrote a fascinating piece about Spain's entry into the wild world of high-speed rail. The country's first route, between Madrid and Seville, opened in 1992. Since then, the national rail network has grown to some 2,000 kilometers of track, and it's proven so wildly popular that politicians from all parties are tripping over themselves to bolster service—the current plan calls for 10,000 kilometers of track by 2020.

Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996.

George Best, arguably the greatest British soccer player of all time, once said of David Beckham: "He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle, and he does not score many goals. Apart from that, he's all right." Best minced his words at a time when Beckham was a runner-up for the 1999 FIFA world player of the year and at the peak of his career, having successfully recovered from vilification following a mindless tantrum that led to his expulsion from a 1998 World Cup game against Argentina.

In September, the world watched the ringleader of the July 7 London terrorist attack, his voice inflected with a West Yorkshire accent, preach jihad in English. Al Jazeera aired the communiqu? of 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, which Khan recorded to explain why he helped murder over 50 of his fellow Britons on a bus and in the Underground. "Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment, and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight," Khan declared. "We are at war. I am a soldier.

I.

Why is it, in fact, that so many Jews have become doctors? Here follows a twice-told tale that bears telling once again.

My Life By Bill Clinton (Alfred A. Knopf, 957 pp., $35) Click here to purchase the book.