In the gymnasium of a South London technical school, site of this year’s World Memory Championships, Norwegian Ola Kaere Risa checks his stopwatch.

Risa is Norway’s only contestant this year.

"I hope to defend the glory of my country," he says, laughing.

The 21st World Memory Championships are under way in London this weekend. About 75 competitors from some two dozen countries are vying to see who can memorize the most numbers, faces, playing cards or random words in a set amount of time.

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Dong Xun, 10, is a competitor from China. His best event? Abstract images.

"I want to remember 250 this time," he says.

Yudi Lesmana’s best trick? The competitor from Indonesia says he can memorize about 25 decks of cards an hour.

These mental athletes are boosting their brain power while most of us are outsourcing ours into the nearest memory chip.

Nelson Dellis, the U.S. memory champion, says that in practice, he can memorize a deck of cards in about 32 seconds.

Dellis is ranked 24th in the world. His grandmother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease prompted him to work on his own terrible memory, he says.

Now, he helps companies and individuals do the same.

"Because people realize that they’re not using their brains as much," says Dellis. "They notice that they don’t remember numbers or addresses because they’re always typing them into their smartphones, you know?"

At the opening ceremony of the championships, the chief statistician of the event — Phil Chambers — receives a wild round of applause, perhaps one of the few places on the planet where this happens.

"You are warriors of the mind," competition co-founder Tony Buzan tells the crowd. Buzan — an expert on the brain and the thinking process, and inventor of mind mapping — says many of the strongest competitor nations have long traditions of memory work.

"China — 10,000 years ago, they started to develop systems that helped children remember. In Japan: the same. The Indian, the Arabic nations: extraordinary memory systems," he says.

Across the hall, officials — their title is "arbiter" — shuffle decks of cards and double-check columns of words and numbers.

Co-founder and chess grandmaster Raymond Keene says few here are human calculators or prodigies born with photographic memories.

"Everybody has their own way of creating the ability to memorize the facts they want to memorize," he says. "So they aren’t machines — most of them, some of them are dyslexic, and they fought against that to get where they are."

Just ordinary people, he says, who have trained their brains to do extraordinary things.

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via Ready. Set. Memorize! : NPR.

Beginning next year, young women in France between the ages of 15 and 18 will have access to birth control free of charge, and without parental notification. The French government says the new measure is intended to reduce pregnancies in this age group that result from a mixture of ignorance, taboo and lack of access to contraception.

One place where information is available on birth control, abortion and sexual abuse is a family planning clinic in a gritty neighborhood in the east of Paris.

On a recent day, a counselor talks with a handful of teenage girls in a sitting room. Clinic director Isabelle Louis says the young women who come to the clinic aren’t necessarily poor; she says many hail from well-off families and live on the other side of Paris.

“It’s not very easy for young women to go to see her family doctor and ask for contraception,” Louis says. “A lot of them are afraid the doctor would tell the parents she came.”

Starting in January, a law will protect these girls’ anonymity at their family doctor’s office, and the state will pick up the cost of the consultation and contraception. Under current rules, teenagers wanting absolute anonymity with a doctor have to pay for the visit in cash without submitting a claim to get the money back. And birth control is only partially reimbursed by the French state. Only clinics like this one are free.

via In France, Free Birth Control For Girls At Age 15 : NPR.

This time of year, many are thinking about giving to one charity or another and wondering just how much good their donations will do.

Oxford University ethics professor Toby Ord talks with All Things Considered today about his “Giving What We Can” campaign, which encourages members to donate 10 percent of their incomes to charities, and the online calculators he’s come up with that aim to show how steady giving can produce some very positive effects.

For instance, Ord’s calculator estimates that if a 55-year-old earning $50,000 annually gave 10 percent of that income to charity each year until age 65:

20 “healthy lives” would be created (that’s somewhat akin to saving lives, but more about making lives better and less subject to such threats as chronic or deadly diseases).

There’s also a calculator that aims to show just how rich you may be. An American family of four with an annual household income of $100,000, for example, ranks among the richest 3.4 percent of the world’s population, according to Ord’s research.

Toby Ord, founder of Giving What We Can.

Toby Ord, founder of Giving What We Can.

Giving What We Can

via How Much Good Can You Do? There’s A Calculator For That : The Two-Way : NPR.

Three incidents in areas in which the United States is active; one of the three may be the explosion of a long-buried land min. The lethality of land mines is no less than an IED or factory-produced munitions. One difference is that, because they’re clustered, more or less, in known areas, they’re easier to find, their relative age means that, however volatile, they don’t contain new technology and, if identified during demining operations, there’s at least the possibility of an information advantage.  Plus robots, ground-penetrating  radar, and other technologies. None of which makes a fraction of a difference in the absence of a commitment to clear mines in countries like Afghanistan.

From Afghanistan, Reuters via The New York Times:

Blast Kills 10 Afghan Girls Collecting Firewood – NYTimes.com – JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A blast killed 10 Afghan girls as they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, government officials said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion in volatile Nangarhar province. It could have been a bomb planted by Taliban insurgents or a landmine left over from decades of conflict. The girls, between nine and 11 years old, were collecting wood in remote Chaparhar district, near the porous border with Pakistan, which is infested with some of the world’s most dangerous militant groups. “Unfortunately, 10 little girls were killed and two others wounded but we don’t know whether it was planted by the Taliban,” said Ahmadzia Abdulzai, provincial government spokesman. It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion in volatile Nangarhar province. It could have been a bomb planted by Taliban insurgents or a landmine left over from decades of conflict. The girls, between nine and 11 years old, were collecting wood in remote Chaparhar district, near the porous border with Pakistan, which is infested with some of the world’s most dangerous militant groups. “Unfortunately, 10 little girls were killed and two others wounded but we don’t know whether it was planted by the Taliban,” said Ahmadzia Abdulzai, provincial government spokesman.

Posted on the NYTimes.com website within an hour of the Reuters piece referenced above, Car Bomb Kills at Least 17 in Pakistan Tribal Region by Declan Walsh And Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud. The headline – horrifying enough – understates matters. The piece in fact reports not one but two incidents, the second being the first “concerted attack” on the Peshawar airport. Excerpted from that piece:

Regarding the Car Bomb:

A powerful car bomb exploded near government offices in a town in the northwestern tribal belt on Monday, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens, local officials said.

….

In Monday’s attack, officials said that a vehicle loaded with an estimated 90 pounds of explosives was detonated by remote control in Jamrud town, close to Peshawar, which borders the tribal belt. Although the blast occurred near the offices of a senior government official, its immediate force ripped through the women’s waiting area of a bus stop, said Jahangir Azim, a senior official in the Khyber agency. The dead included four Afghan woman and three children, he said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which damaged shops and vehicles across a wide radius. The dead and an estimated 44 wounded people were rushed to local hospitals.

The Airport attack:

“At the moment we are not in position to allege someone for the blast or to tell exactly what was the motive behind the attack by the perpetrators,” said Asmatullah Wazir, a local government official, by telephone. The Taliban attack against the Peshawar airport saw five militants die during a failed attempt to break through the airport perimeter wall on Saturday night, while another five died during a shootout with security forces at a nearby house on Sunday morning. At least five other people, including three civilians and two police, died in the attack, which marked the first concerted attack on the Peshawar airport. Although the Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack, officials identified several of the attackers as Uzbeks, suggesting that Al Qaeda-linked elements had also participated. Together, the two attacks killed at least 32 people and wounded more than 80, highlighting the challenges facing the security forces in the run-up to general elections that are due in the next six months.

Attack on Nearby House:

(Notice that the following quote is contained within the “airport attack” excerpt above). The Taliban attack against the Peshawar airport saw five militants die during a failed attempt to break through the airport perimeter wall on Saturday night, while another five died during a shootout with security forces at a nearby house on Sunday morning. (emphasis supplied).

Of these three attacks – we should keep in mind the possibility that they’re related  – either as a show of the ability to coordinate multiple attacks, as a means of diverting resources and attention.  That’s chilling, of course. And it’s hard to say which would be worse – one well-organized organization,  or a community with many groups willing to shed blood, with no reservations about the blood of civilians, including noncombatant women and children.

Third, the Reuters report Bombs and Blasts Kill 11 in Iraq’s Disputed Areas, which was moved onto the New York Times website at 0453  Eastern time, describes at least 11 bombings and shootings over two days in the area in which Iraqi Kurdistan borders Iraq proper.  It’s probably safe to say that the combined resources of Reuters, the Times, and the Washington Post in Iraq don’t permit covering a dozen incidents at the same time in any detail.

It seems to us  fairly obvious that the international community, including the United States, ought to try to brokera deal  which protects the Kurds’ interests – since the only thing all of their neighbors have in common is antipathy towards the Kurds and a commitment to deny them a homeland. The other inferences we draw from this slice of recent events are that things aren’t improving in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakista; that things are likely to worsen with the departure of United States forces; and that are likely to worsen even if United States and NATO  forces were, tomorrow, to radically increase military and civil assistance.

There is one set of steps we could take, at relatively low cost: address the matter of land mines in Afghanistan:

• Continue funding research into safe technologies for detecting and making safe land mines, including controlled detonations; we might find that, with some adaptations, our UAV (“Unmanned Aerial Vehicle,” or “drone”) technologies, may lend themselves to precisely targeting minefields and use the drones’ munitions to “cook off” the buried ordnance – with, of  course, the permission and cooperation of local communities
• If we can’t eliminate them in the near term, our armed forces – with the assistance of NGOs and contractors – could mark and fence off minefields, essentially child-proofing them. Where minefields block critical routes,  we can do both:  clear a path sufficient for vehicle, farm equipment, animal, or  pedestrian passage, and secure the uncleared portion of the area.
• If Afghani children are risking death to collect firewood, we can, as we plan our exit from Afghanistan, use our military and civilian engineers to make it unnecessary for children to die or be maimed because of Afghanistan’s energy poverty. What can we do?

1. Help communities insulate housing with available materials, from the environment and using discarded materials. For instance, walls built with automobile tires filled with dirt have been used to construct sturdy, highly insulated and wind resistant-walls;
2. Solar ovens are inexpensive, can be built with scrap metals, and permit cooking with little or no wood;
3. There are a variety of systems  – again, relatively low-tech – which convert solar energy to heat and/or hot water;
4. Photovoltaic  solar panels and low-speed wind turbines can provide enough energy for the essentials: light, refrigeration, and wireless communications. This means we can help Afghanis build a telecommunications and Internet infrastructure with reasonable bandwidth;  the cost of digging  trenches and burying fiber-optic cable – except perhaps in major cities – is an excuse for inaction.  Giving Afghanis an information infrastructure makes possible distance learning and telemedicine  (think remote diagnostics with general  practitioners and specialists).
5. The proposals above are, or should be- non-controversial.  Our final proposal we make knowing that it will disturb many, but with the certainty that it is the least worst of available options: take steps to wards the decriminalization of opiates. The illicit market in opiates has, at different times,  financed the Taliban (who were clever enough to ban small-scale opium growers in order to force the price upwards), various warlords whose allegiances are, at best, available only for short-term rental, and made great fortunes for Pakistani military and intelligence officers, and well-connected members of Pakistan’s political elites. None of these men – and, apparently, they are all men – are allies of the United  States. Nor do they have the welfare of Pakistani or Afghani citizens in  mind.  These  are, for want of a more sophisticated phrase,  the bad guys.  Let’s do to them now what we did to the Mob when we ended Prohibition in 1933: take away their primary source of income.

Then, when we need the cooperation of a Pakistani official or an Afghan warlord, they may still be corrupt, but we’ll have reduced the likelihood that they’re already taking money from the Taliban, for whom opium revenues were and are unrivalled, even by the fortunes of Osama bin Laden before his family and the Saudi government  cut off access to his trust fund income (if not “trust funds” in the narrow Western legal meaning,  Osama was still, even with many brothers, a beneficiary of one of the largest estates or bequests in Saudi Arabia, larger than the estates of many Saudi royals).

Even if we have to buy opium to keep it off the market – we need to stop  the big-time  drug dealers – who, like their distant cousins in Mexico – are dependent on the illegal  status of drugs and its corollary – fantastically high prices for an agricultural commodity.

We’ve cut the head off of every  Al-Qaeda member who’s taken the top operational spot. Let’s take away their money, too. Bin Laden couldn’t have hid in Abbottabad for so long without lots of money to buy land, build a house with high  walls, and finance the travel expenses of a network of couriers. Front companies, office rent, disposable mobile phones, buying and renting lots of vehicles, bribing  the odd official – running a covert operation is pricey.

So – if we’re going to leave Afghanistan – let’s leave the citizenry safer and healthier – and take the drug money away from the bad guys on our way out.

xxx

Leslie Patton of Bloomberg News has reported a 1:1,000,000 ratio of pay between a McDonald’s workers ($8.25 per hour, and, between the two McDonald’s restaurants in which he works, not given the opportunity to hit 40 hours, much less get a few hours of overtime at time-and-a-half). See McDonald’s $8.25 Man and $8.75 Million CEO Shows Pay Gap

If Mr. Johnson, of whom Ms. Patton writes. were able to get 40 hours of work a week, he’d be grossing $330 per week.

In 2008, British lawyer Sergei Magnitzky, after

after allegedly uncovering a web of corruption involving senior officials, while working for London-based Hermitage Capital Management.

[Dominic] Raab [Member of British Parliament and Raab, a former Foreign Office lawyer] said: “Between 2007 and 2008, working for Hermitage Capital, he exposed the biggest tax fraud in Russian history, worth $230m US (£146m).

“His legal team was then subject to varying forms of intimidation and, while other lawyers left Russia in fear of their lives, Magnitsky stayed on to make a stand for the rule of law in Russia and strike a blow against the breathtaking corruption that has taken place there.”

Mr Raab added: “That bravery cost him his life. He was arrested in 2008 on trumped up charges of tax evasion. Iin Putin’s Kafkaesque Russian justice system the very tax investigators that Magnitsky exposed turned up to arrest him.”

‘Stark reminder’

After eight months in prison his condition deteriorated and he was taken [pullquote]Magnitzky died in custody aged 37. His cause was taken up by human rights groups as one of the most glaring examples of corruption and prison abuse in modern Russia. He had suffered from pancreatitis and gallstones, and had been found with broken fingers and bruising to his body, the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council said in July 2011.[/pullquote] to hospital for emergency surgery. But he was not treated, but instead handcuffed and beaten, Mr Raab said. “Doctors found him an hour later lying on the floor. He was dead.” Despite 60 people implicated in the abuse of Mr Magnitsky and the original tax fraud, “the Russian authorities blocked all attempts to bring those responsible to justice”, Mr Raab said. “All the suspects were cleared by Russian investigators. Some have been promoted, some decorated. In fact, the only people on trial are Magnitsky’s employer and Magnitsky himself, now the subject of Russia’s first ever posthumous prosecution.” Mr Raab’s motion also covered other cases “wherever there is evidence that a state official anywhere is responsible for torture, extra judicial killing, some other gross human rights abuse or is complicit in covering it up”. Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt said: “The death of Sergei Magnitsky serves as a stark reminder of the human rights situation in Russia, and questions about the rule of law there.”

MPs urge government sanctions against Russia over Magnitsky death (BBC)

The BBC reports we’ve read so far don’t address Sergei Magnitsky’s citizenship – Russian, British, dual or other. And perhaps his nationality is, or should be irrelevant. At a minimum, as a British attorney, he was an officer of the United Kingdom justice system. He uncovered serious corruption in Russia, he was arrested on what appear to be false allegations, and killed in prison. We think that this evidence, taken together, is overwhelming evidence of at least probable cause of a crime and cover-up.