Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

In "Year Zero" Ian Buruma tells these stories well, and highlights oth­ers too. He finds concentration-camp inmates who attacked their Ger­man nurses after liberation; a Jewish extremist who tried to poison 6m Germans; the 137 SS officers who "had their testicles permanently de­stroyed" by American interrogators.

Unencrypted e-mails are as open as postcards and using a mobile is the worst thing you can do. There is the data centre that the NSA is building near Salt Lake City, Utah. It is likely to cost at least $1.2 billion, and some expect its computers to provide five trillion gigabytes of storage. The agency did not build it to stand empty.

History suggests that, unless civil wars end in victory after 12 months or so, they tend to drag on for years.

A typical air-force stint is three to four years; some drone pilots have been serving for over six. Morale is low and burnout, high. Many pilots worry that their job is the object of scorn. When the idea of medals for drone pilots was aired last year, a retired Green Beret huffed to the Washington Times: "I suppose now they will award Purple Hearts for carpal tunnel syndrome."

More than 52,000 police officers were assaulted in America in 2012. That's 142 assaults on the police each day. And people wonder why they come across as jaded and gruff.

Mr. Obama is taking a risk. Step back too far from big sticks, and when America speaks, it may not be heard.

Cryptography is an arms race between Alice and Bob, and Eve. These are the names cryptographers give to two people who are trying to commu­nicate privily, and to a third who is trying to intercept and decrypt their conversation. Currently, Alice and Bob are ahead — just. But Eve is catch­ing up. The most developed form of quantum cryptography, known as quantum key distribution (QKD), relies on stopping interception, rather than preventing decryption. Once again, the key is a huge number — one with hundreds of digits, if expressed in the decimal system. Alice sends this to Bob as a series of photons (the particles of light) before she sends the encrypted message. For Eve to read this transmission, and thus ob­tain the key, she must destroy some photons. Since Bob will certainly notice the missing photons, Eve will need to create and send identical ones to Bob to avoid detection. But Alice and Bob (or, rather, the engi­neers who make their equipment) can stop that by using two different quantum properties, such as the polarities of the photons, to encode the ones and zeros of which the key is composed. According to Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, only one of these two properties can be measured, so Eve cannot reconstruct each photon without making errors. If Bob detects such errors he can tell Alice not to send the actual message until the line has been secured.

More than 2,000 years ago Greece was torn apart by Sparta's fail­ure to manage the rise of Athens. A hundred years ago Europe was torn apart by its failure to manage the rise of Germany. If the 21st century is to be more peaceful than the 20th, America and China must learn to co-operate better.

History is littered with powerful people undone by hubris. Julius Caesar should have ignored the cheers of the Roman crowd and paid heed to the soothsayer.

The American revolution itself was an episode in the long conflict between Britain and France.

Spooks do need secrecy, but not on everything and everywhere.

There are around 250 gangs in the capital alone, selling drugs, carrying out muggings and sometimes stabbing each other. Gangsterism in Britain has become mundane.

The first rule of modern conspiracies is that you do not talk about them in e-mails.

The Meiji slogan fukoku kyohei: "enrich the country, strengthen the army".

Imagine that Apple could sell iPhones in Brazil only if it ploughed 20% of its projected revenues there into local technology firms. That may sound absurd, but this is what happens when governments buy arms from foreign contractors. In procurement it is standard to supplement the main deal with a side contract, usually undisclosed, that outlines ad­ditional investments that the winning bidder must make in local projects or else pay a penalty. Welcome to the murky world of "offsets". Take the shrimp farm set up in Saudi Arabia in 2006 with backing from Raytheon, a maker of radar systems and missiles. Praised at first as a model offset, it reportedly struggled to keep its pools properly maintained in searing temperatures and eventually went bust. Turkey, for instance, now meets half its own defence needs thanks to such arrangements. Indirect (non- defence) offsets include everything from backing new technologies or business parks to building hotels, donating to universities and even sup­porting condom-makers.

To a man with a hammer, Mark Twain once said, everything looks like a nail.

He never protected himself, not with a gun, not even with a toothpick.

Was not Alfred Nobel an arms maker before he became a prize- endower?