Carville, Matalin enjoy role as Big Easy boosters

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — When Mary Matalin heard a baby cry during a Super Bowl news conference this week, she paused midsentence, peered in the direction of the fussing child and asked: "Is that my husband?"

Matalin, the noted Republican political pundit, isn't shy about making jokes at the expense of Democratic strategist James Carville, who went from being her professional counterpart to her partner in life when they were married — in New Orleans — two decades ago.

This week, though, and for much of the past few years, the famous political odd couple have been working in lockstep for a bipartisan cause — the resurgence of their adopted hometown.

Their passion for the Big Easy and its recovery from Hurricane Katrina was why Carville and Matalin were appointed co-chairs of New Orleans' Super Bowl host committee, positions that made them the face of the city's effort to prove it's ready to be back in the regular rotation for the NFL's biggest game.

"Their commitment to New Orleans and their rise to prominence here locally as citizens made them a natural choice," said Jay Cicero, president of the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, which handles the city's Super Bowl bids. "It's about promoting New Orleans, and their being in love with this city, they're the perfect co-chairs."

Carville, a Louisiana native, and Matalin moved from Washington, D.C., to historic "Uptown" New Orleans in the summer of 2008, a little less than three years after Katrina had laid waste to vast swaths of the city. There was not only heavy wind damage but flooding that surged through crumbling levees and at one point submerged about 80 percent of the city.

The couple had long loved New Orleans, and felt even more of a pull to set down roots here, with their two school-age daughters, at a time when the community was in need.

"The storm just weighed heavy," Carville said. "We were thinking about it. We'd been in Washington for a long time. The more that we thought about it, the more sense that it made. We just came down here (to look for a house) in late 2007 and said we're just going to do this and never looked back."

Matalin said she and Carville also wanted to raise their daughters in a place where people were willing to struggle to preserve a vibrant and unique culture.

"It's authentically creative, organically eccentric, bounded by beauty of all kinds," she said. "People pull for each other, people pull together. ... Seven years ago we were 15 feet under water. ... This is unparalleled what the people here did and that's what you want your kids to grow up with: Hope and a sense of place, resolve and perseverance."

Carville has been an avid sports fan all his life, and Matalin jokes that he now schedules his life around Saints and LSU football.

An LSU graduate, Carville has been a regular sight in Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, often wearing a purple and gold rugby-style shirt.

In New Orleans, he and Matalin have lent their names not just to the Super Bowl host committee, but to efforts to prevent the NBA's Hornets from leaving when the ownership situation was in flux.

"I was scared to death they would leave the city," said Carville of the Hornets, who were purchased by the NBA in December of 2010 when club founder George Shinn wanted to sell and struggled to find a local buyer. "We were starting to do better (as a community). It would have been a terrible story to lose an NBA franchise at that time."

Saints owner Tom Benson has since bought the NBA club and signed a long-term lease at New Orleans Arena, ending speculation about a possible move.

Carville and Matalin also have taken part in a range of environmental, educational, economic and cultural projects in the area. Matalin is on the board of the Water Institute of the Gulf, which aims to preserve fragile coastal wetlands that have been eroding, leaving south Louisiana ecosystems and communities increasingly vulnerable to destruction. They have supported the Institute of Politics at Loyola University and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.

Carville teaches a current events class at Tulane University and he looks forward to getting involved in the 200th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans in 2015 and New Orleans' tercentennial celebrations in 2018, when the city also hopes to host its next Super Bowl, if the NFL sees fit.

Leading a Super Bowl host committee, the couple said, has similarities to running a major national political campaign, but takes even more work.

"This has been going on for three years and it's huge," Matalin said. "It's bigger, it's harder, it's more complex — even though it's cheaper."

The host committee spent about $13 million in private and public funds to put on this Super Bowl, and the payoff could be enormous in terms of providing a momentum boost to the metro area's growth, Carville said.

"For us — New Orleans — I think this is going to be much more than a football game Sunday," Carville said of the championship matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. "We'll know how we feel about it on Monday. It's a big event, it helps a lot of people, but I think we have a chance if it goes the way we hope it does, it'll go beyond economic impact. It'll go beyond who won the game. I think there's something significant that's coming to a point here in the city."

So there's a bit of anxiety involved, to go along with the long hours. But Carville and Matalin say they've loved having a role in what they see as New Orleans' renaissance.

"I always say I'm so humbled by everyone's gratitude," Matalin said. "We get up every day and say, 'Thank you, God. Thank you, God.' It's a blessing for us to be able to be here, to live here."

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The New Old Age Blog: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently underway in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said, “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

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DealBook: Doubt Is Cast on Consultants Hired to Fix Banks’ Abuses

Federal authorities are scrutinizing private consultants hired to clean up financial misdeeds like money laundering and foreclosure abuses, taking aim at an industry that is paid billions of dollars by the same banks it is expected to police.

The consultants operate with scant supervision and produce mixed results, according to government documents and interviews with prosecutors and regulators. In one case, the consulting firms enabled the wrongdoing. The deficiencies, officials say, can leave consumers vulnerable and allow tainted money to flow through the financial system.

“How can you be independent if you’re hired by the entity you’re reviewing?” Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, said.

The pitfalls were exposed last month when federal regulators halted a broad effort to help millions of homeowners in foreclosure. The regulators reached an $8.5 billion settlement with banks, scuttling a flawed foreclosure review run by eight consulting firms. In the end, borrowers hurt by shoddy practices are likely to receive less money than they deserve, regulators said.

On Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, announced that they would open an investigation into the foreclosure review, seeking “additional information about the scope of the harms found.”

Critics concede that regulators have little choice but to hire outsiders for certain responsibilities after they find problems at the banks. The government does not have the resources to ensure that banks follow the rules. Still, consultants like Deloitte & Touche and the Promontory Financial Group can add to regulators’ headaches, the government documents and interviews indicate. Some banks that work with consultants continue to run afoul of the law. At other times, consultants underestimate the extent of the misdeeds or facilitate them, preventing regulators from holding institutions accountable.

Now, regulators and lawmakers are rethinking their relationship with the consultants. Officials at the Federal Reserve, which oversees many large banks, are questioning the prudence of relying on consultants so heavily, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

When the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency penalized JPMorgan Chase last month for breakdowns in money-laundering controls, it imposed stricter requirements, ordering the bank to hire a consultant with “specialized experience” in money laundering and to ensure that the firm “not be subject to any conflict of interest.” In a separate action against the bank related to a $6 billion trading loss last year, the agency opted not to mandate an outside consultant at all.

While the comptroller’s office will continue requiring consultants in certain cases, some agency officials are worried about the quality of the work, as well as the consultants’ independence, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

Since the financial crisis, regulators have increasingly relied on consultants. The comptroller’s office ordered banks to hire consultants in more than 130 enforcement actions since 2008, or nearly 15 percent of the cases.

It can be a lucrative business. In 2011, regulators mandated that 14 banks employ consultants to determine whether homeowners were wrongfully evicted. Over 14 months, the consultants collected about $2 billion in fees, according to regulators and bank officials.

Those fees amounted to more than half of what homeowners will receive under the $8.5 billion settlement that ended the review. As part of the deal, officials will disburse $3.3 billion to 3.8 million borrowers in foreclosure.

According to consultants and regulators, the broad review was plagued with inefficiencies. For example, Promontory initially instructed employees to calculate lawyers’ fees for each loan, to assess if borrowers were overcharged. Later, it scrapped the original procedure, only to reverse the policy again two weeks later, according to two reviewers who worked for Promontory.

“From Day 1, Promontory strove to conduct its review work as thoroughly and independently as possible,” a spokesman for the firm, Christopher Winans, said in a statement. “Our overarching concern at all times was to serve the best interests of borrowers.”

Some lawmakers question whether a consultant’s regulatory connections helped it secure contracts. PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has a stable of former Securities and Exchange Commission officials, won much of the foreclosure review work, signing deals with four banks, including Citigroup. Promontory, the firm examining loans for Wells Fargo, Bank of America and PNC, was founded in 2000 by the former head of the comptroller’s office, Eugene A. Ludwig.

When the contracts were initially awarded, some housing advocates complained that consulting firms could not objectively evaluate banks with which they had pre-existing business relationships. The comptroller’s office said it vetted the firms to spot such potential conflicts, and argued that the process provided swifter relief for homeowners than if the government had hired the companies directly through a lengthy contracting process.

But concerns persisted. Deloitte, which won the contract to review JPMorgan’s loans, had previously audited Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, two firms JPMorgan acquired during the financial crisis. In May, the comptroller’s office replaced Allonhill, the consultant for Aurora Bank, after the firm disclosed that it had already reviewed some “of the same pool of loans” as part of an earlier contract.

“It’s clear from the foreclosure settlement that oversight over consultants was inadequate and the review process was deeply flawed,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who recently pressed regulators to detail how consultants were paid. People close to the review say consultants relied on a process that the comptroller’s office designed in 2011, under previous leadership.

“This was a very complex process,” a spokesman for the comptroller said. “Throughout the process, regulators provided continuous oversight, guidance and were available to discuss issues.” The agency also performs spot checks on the consultants.

Still, the foreclosure review highlighted broader concerns about the role consultants play.

Since the financial crisis, the comptroller’s office has issued nearly 20 enforcement actions against banks that had already hired consultants to help iron out problems, according to government documents. While consultants cannot be expected to remedy every last issue at the banks, the actions raise questions about the effectiveness of their work.

When HSBC, the British bank, was sanctioned in 2003 over porous money-laundering controls, the bank turned to Deloitte to review its compliance, an official briefed on the matter said. Deloitte also worked for HSBC from 2006 to 2008, the person said, building a system to monitor money flows more effectively. But the bank ran into trouble in 2010 over similar issues, as highlighted in a recent scathing report by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

As part of a regulatory order, HSBC again hired Deloitte, this time to assess the number of times the bank failed to report suspicious transactions. Deloitte, three officials said, generously bundled hundreds of missed transfers into a single report. That helped save the bank from some government fines.

Despite the undercounting, HSBC still paid a record $1.9 billion last year to settle accusations that it enabled drug cartels to move money through its American subsidiaries.

In a statement, a spokesman for the firm said, “Deloitte fully stands behind the quality and integrity of its work on behalf of regulatory authorities.”

Deloitte has also been suspected of helping institutions cloak illicit transfers of money to rogue nations around the globe. In August, New York’s top banking regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, accused Deloitte of helping the British bank Standard Chartered flout American sanctions.

The consulting firm was hired to flag suspicious transfers routed through Standard Chartered’s New York branches. Instead, it instructed bankers on how to escape regulatory scrutiny, according to state court documents.

Deloitte turned over “highly confidential information” from which the bank gleaned insight into “regulators’ concerns and strategies,” the court documents said. The firm later doctored its report to regulators, Mr. Lawsky said, deliberately removing some illegal transfers on behalf of Iranian clients. In an e-mail, a Deloitte partner admitted that a report on the transactions was a “watered-down version.”

The authorities never took legal action against Deloitte, and federal officials noted in a separate settlement agreement that Standard Chartered employees withheld critical information from the consulting firm.

Despite these concerns, regulators are turning to a familiar source to help Standard Chartered. As part of a $327 million settlement last year, the bank is required to hire “an independent consultant.”

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India Ink: Air Pollution in New Delhi Was Much Worse Than Beijing Thursday, But Indian Government Is Not Acting

Manish Swarup/Associated Press A thick blanket of smog over New Delhi on Thursday morning.

NEW DELHI—Beijing’s air pollution has reached such toxic levels recently that the Chinese government is finally acknowledging the problem – and acting on it.

But in New Delhi on Thursday, air pollution levels far exceeded those in Beijing, only without any government acknowledgement or action. It is not the first time pollution in India’s capital has outpaced that in China.

The level of tiny particulates known as PM 2.5, which lodge deep in the lungs and can enter the bloodstream, was over 400 micrograms per cubic meter in various neighborhoods in and around Delhi Thursday, according to a real-time air quality monitor. That compared to Beijing’s most-recent air quality reading of 172 micrograms per cubic meter. (The “Air Quality online” link to the left of the Delhi website gives you real-time monitoring of Delhi’s pollution levels.)

At the University of Delhi’s northern campus at 12:30 p.m., the reading for PM 2.5 was 402 micrograms per cubic meter; in the eastern suburb of Noida it was 411; at the Indira Gandhi International airport it was 421.

Beijing’s government on Wednesday introduced emergency measures to curb pollution, ordering cars off the roads and factories to shut down, and warning citizens to avoid activity outside. The measures came after two straight days that the readings were higher than 300, a level the United States Environmental Protection Agency considers “hazardous.”

The forecast for Delhi’s air pollution Friday is “critical,” according to the Ministry of Earth Sciences. So far, though, Delhi’s government has made no announcements about the city’s air pollution, nor introduced any emergency measures, a spokesman for chief minister’s office said. Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister, said in an interview in December that the city could not keep up with the factors that cause air pollution.

Beijing’s air quality is so bad that living there is like living in a smoking lounge, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The levels of air pollution Bloomberg cited as Beijing’s average were half that of New Delhi early Thursday afternoon.

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Dr. Phil says Manti Te’o hoaxer admits to love for linebacker

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A California man who has admitted to fabricating Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te‘o’s fake girlfriend in an elaborate hoax told talk show host Phil McGraw he felt a deep romantic love for the football player, McGraw said on Wednesday.

“Here we have a young man that fell deeply, romantically in love,” McGraw told the television morning show “Today” to discuss his two part interview with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, which will air on “Dr. Phil” on Thursday and Friday.

“I asked him straight up, ‘Was this a romantic relationship with you?,’ and he says yes. I said, ‘Are you then therefore gay?’ And he said, ‘When you put it that way, yes.’ And then he caught himself and said, ‘I am confused,’” McGraw told “Today.”

Te’o has said in a previous media interview he is not gay.

The fake girlfriend hoax involving Te’o, who was a finalist for college football’s highest individual honor the Heisman trophy, caused a sensation when it was revealed earlier this month on news website Deadspin.com.

Tuiasosopo says he played the part over the phone of Lennay Kekua, the fictitious woman who was Te’o's girlfriend in the hoax. Te’o, 22, had spoken about the woman in media interviews, and reports described her surviving a car accident and then dying of leukemia in September.

Te’o has said since the hoax was exposed that he was the victim of an elaborate prank, that he never met Kekua and that his acquaintance Tuiasosopo admitted to him that he was the one who played the part of Lennay.

Dr. Phil said in a segment on “Today” on Wednesday that after an extensive interview with Tuiasosopo, he believes Te’o had no role in creating the hoax.

“Absolutely, unequivocally, no,” McGraw said, in pinning the blame for the scheme on Tuiasosopo.

The NBC morning program also showed some comments Tuiasosopo made in his interview for the “Dr. Phil” daytime program.

“There are many times where Manti and Lennay had broken up,” Tuiasosopo told “Dr. Phil.”

“But something would bring them back together, whether it was something going on in his life or in Lennay’s life, in this case in my life,” Tuiasosopo said.

Tuiasosopo, 22, is from southern California and played high school football in 2005 at Antelope Valley High north of Los Angeles, according to media reports. Tuaisosopo’s attorney had previously told reporters his client was behind the hoax.

Before the hoax was exposed, a photo of a woman who was described as Lennay Kekua was presented in media reports about Te’o and his struggles to overcome her death and that of his grandmother, who actually did pass away.

But the photo of Kekua was taken from a Facebook profile of a California woman who said she was unaware of the scheme, according to Deadspin.com.

Te’o told Katie Couric in a broadcast of her show “Katie” last week that he received a telephone call from the person claiming to be Kekua on December 6 – two days before the Heisman presentation. But he said he was not really certain she never existed until Tuiasosopo’s later confession to him.

The linebacker, during the Katie Couric interview, presented a voice mail he received from the person he said he thought was Kekua. “Doesn’t that sound like a girl?” Te’o told Couric.

Te’o also told Couric he is not gay. “No, far from it,” he said.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Andrew Hay)

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2 NFL seasons since agreement, still no HGH tests

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Count Baltimore Ravens defensive end Arthur Jones among those NFL players who want the league and the union to finally agree on a way to do blood testing for human growth hormone.

"I hope guys wouldn't be cheating. That's why you do all this extra work and extra training. Unfortunately, there are probably a few guys, a handful maybe, that are on it. It's unfortunate. It takes away from the sport," Jones said.

"It would be fair to do blood testing," Jones added. "Hopefully they figure it out."

When Jones and the Ravens face the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl on Sunday, two complete seasons will have come and gone without a single HGH test being administered, even though the league and the NFL Players Association paved the way for it in the 10-year collective bargaining agreement they signed in August 2011.

Since then, the sides have haggled over various elements, primarily the union's insistence that it needs more information about the validity of a test that is used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball. HGH is a banned performance-enhancing drug that is hard to detect and has been linked to health problems such as diabetes, cardiac dysfunction and arthritis.

"If there are guys using (HGH), there definitely needs to be action taken against it, and it needs to be out of (the sport)," Ravens backup quarterback Tyrod Taylor said. "I'm pretty sure it'll happen eventually."

At least two members of Congress want to make it happen sooner, rather than later.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland wrote NFLPA head DeMaurice Smith this week to chastise the union for standing in the way of HGH testing and to warn that they might ask players to testify on Capitol Hill.

Smith is scheduled to hold his annual pre-Super Bowl news conference Thursday.

"We have cooperated and been helpful to the committee on all of their requests," NFLPA spokesman George Atallah said. "If this is something they feel strongly about, we will be happy to help them facilitate it."

Several players from the Super Bowl teams said they would be willing to talk to Congress about the issue, if asked.

"I have nothing to hide. I can't speak for anyone else in football, but I would have no problem going," said Kenny Wiggins, a 6-foot-6, 314-pound offensive lineman on San Francisco's practice squad.

But Wiggins added: "There's a lot more problems in the U.S. they should be worried about than HGH in the NFL."

That sentiment was echoed by former New York Giants offensive lineman Shaun O'Hara, who now works for the NFL Network.

"Do I think there is an HGH problem in the NFL? I don't think there is. Are there guys who are using it? I'm sure there are. But is it something Congress needs to worry about? No. We have enough educated people on both sides that can fully handle this. And if they can't, then they should be fired," said O'Hara, an NFLPA representative as a player. "I include the union in that, and I include the NFL. There is no reason we would need someone to help us facilitate this process."

Issa and Cummings apparently disagree.

In December, their committee held a hearing at which medical experts testified that the current HGH test is reliable and that the union's request for a new study is unnecessary. Neither the league nor union was invited to participate in that hearing; at the time, Issa and Cummings said they expected additional hearings.

"We are disappointed with the NFLPA's remarkable recalcitrance, which has prevented meaningful progress on this issue," they wrote in their recent letter to Smith. "We intend to take a more active role to determine whether the position you have taken — that HGH is not a serious concern and that the test for HGH is unreliable — is consistent with the beliefs of rank and file NFL players."

Atallah questioned that premise.

"To us, there is no distinction between players and the union. ... The reason we had HGH in our CBA is precisely because our players wanted us to start testing for it," Atallah said. "We are not being recalcitrant for recalcitrance sake. We are merely following the direction of our player leadership."

Wiggins and other players said no one can know for sure how much HGH use there is in the league until there is testing — but that it's important for the union's concerns about the test to be answered.

"The union decides what is best for the players," said Ravens nose tackle Ma'ake Kemoeatu, who said he would be willing to go to Capitol Hill.

"I feel like some guys are on HGH," said 49ers offensive lineman Anthony Davis, who would rather not speak to Congress. "I personally don't care if there is testing. It's something they have to live with, knowing they cheated, and if they get (outplayed) while they're on it, it's a hit on their pride."

___

Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

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Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Royal Dutch Shell Posts $5.6 Billion Profit

LONDON — Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, disappointed the markets Thursday with fourth-quarter earnings of $5.6 billion after one-time items and inventory changes.

The results were 15 percent above the previous year but well below analysts’ expectation of around $6.3 billion.

Stuart Joyner, an analyst at Investec Securities in London, described the results as “a substantial miss.” Shell’s stock price was down about 1 percent in morning trading in London.

The company’s earnings for the year were $25.1 billion, up 2 percent over 2011.

The disappointment was largely due to lower earnings in Shell’s core exploration and production business, mainly because of weak performance in the Americas, where Shell’s multibillion Alaska drilling program has encountered multiple snafus and delays.

Exploration and production earnings were $4.4 billion compared to $5.1 billion the previous year, with the U.S. exploration and production business reporting a $69 million loss, partly due to low natural gas prices.

In another disappointment Shell estimated that it only replaced 44 percent of the reserves of oil and gas that it produced in 2012. That indicated that the company’s exploration effort, despite increased emphasis and spending in recent years, is still not performing well.

The capital investment forecast for 2013 was increased by 10 percent to $33 billion — another worry for the markets, as it suggests that Shell may be having trouble controlling costs.

On the positive side, Shell’s huge Pearl gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar is now fully operational and adding a hefty 235,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent to Shell’s production for the quarter.

Shell said that it was likely to increase its dividend in the first quarter of 2013 to 45 cents a share, a 4.7 percent increase over the first quarter of 2012.

“Shell is competitive and innovative,” the company’s chief executive, Peter Voser, said in a statement. “We are delivering on a strategy that others can’t easily repeat.”

Shell also had cause for relief on Wednesday when a court in The Hague dismissed most aspects of lawsuits brought against it by Nigerian farmers and fishermen seeking damages for pollution from oil spills in the Niger Delta.

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French Forces Pressing Mali Campaign Seize Rebel Stronghold

BAMAKO, Mali — French troops took control overnight of the airport at the last major northern Mali town still in rebel hands, officials said on Wednesday, after Islamist militants abandoned two other principal settlements in the vast, desert region where residents’ relief and elation has given way to some measure of reprisal and frustration.

A French military spokesman in Paris, Col. Thierry Burkhard, said French troops reached the airport at Kidal, in the remote northeast of Mali, in an ongoing operation that is ongoing.

Haminy Maiga, a local official, told news agencies that French forces met no resistance when they arrived aboard four airplanes that landed late on Tuesday. France also sent helicopters, he said.

Kidal is the capital of a desert region of the same name. Secular Tuareg rebels claim to be in control of the town after Islamists fled. A newly formed Islamist splinter group that broke with the main Ansar Dine Islamist force also claims to have a power base there.

The new group calls itself the Islamic Movement for the Azawad and is led by Alghabass Ag Intalla, a prominent leader of the Tuareg ethnic group from the Kidal region who has said he wants to negotiate a settlement with the central government in Bamako, 800 miles to the southwest. Azawad is a Tuareg term for northern Mali.

Mali has been in turmoil since early 2012, when junior officers in the south staged a coup to protest the government’s tepid response to an uprising in the north by Tuareg separatists who were subsequently pushed to the side by Islamic extremists bent on imposing an extreme form of Shariah law.

Earlier this month, the Islamists suddenly advanced toward the capital, threatening to engulf the south, topple the weak central government and destabilize a vast area of northern Africa.

After a series of punishing French airstrikes in recent days, French and Malian troops launched a lightning campaign on the ground, entering the northern towns of Gao and Timbuktu as Islamist rebels seemed to melted away to far-flung hide-outs, possibly in the Kidal Province.

In Gao, groups of residents were reported on Tuesday to be hunting down suspected fighters who had not fled ahead of the French-Malian military forces who took control of the town over the weekend. Other residents expressed concern that Gao remained unsafe and was acutely short of food and fuel after a prolonged isolation.

“The city is free, but I think the areas close by are still dangerous,” said Mahamane Touré, a Gao resident reached by telephone from Bamako, the capital. “These guys are out there.”

Mr. Touré, who spent the evening watching soccer on television and listening to music with friends, said that although everyone was enjoying the new freedoms, the legacy of Islamist occupation was evident in the hardship of everyday life.

“The price of gasoline is almost double, and the price of food is very high,” Mr. Touré said. “There are still things in the market, but no one has any money and there is no aid.”

Reporters and photographers in Timbuktu, the storied desert oasis farther north that the French-Malian forces secured on Monday, saw looters pillaging shops and other businesses, with some saying the merchants were mainly Arabs, Mauritanians and Algerians who had supported the Islamist radicals who summarily executed, stoned and mutilated people they suspected of being nonbelievers during their 10-month occupation.

Alex Crawford, a television correspondent for Britain’s Sky News, said, “This is months and months of frustration and repression finally erupting.”

The rapidly shifting developments came less than three weeks into the military effort led by France, the former colonial power whose helicopters and warplanes began arriving here at the Malian government’s invitation on Jan. 11. Since then other West African countries have started to send troops. Britain is preparing to send more than 300 military trainers, and the United States is providing aerial cargo and refueling help.

In Washington, Pentagon officials said that as of Tuesday 17 sorties by United States Air Force C-17 cargo jets had flown 500 French troops and 390 tons of equipment into Bamako. In addition, there has been one aerial refueling operation by an American KC-135 tanker aircraft, which provided 33,000 pounds of fuel to several French warplanes, the officials said.

At the same time, a meeting of international donors was getting under way on Tuesday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as part of an effort to provide more than $450 million in long-term financing for the military intervention in Mali.

The French-led effort has met surprisingly little resistance from the array of Islamist militias that occupied the northern part of Mali, an area about twice the size of Germany, in the spring of 2012 in the midst of a national political crisis.

It remains unclear how long the foreign military occupation will last. Most of the Islamist fighters have melted into the desert and could be regrouping to fight again.

In a bid to consolidate the gains, troops from Mali and neighboring Niger arrived Tuesday in the small town of Ansongo, about 50 miles south of Gao, one day after President François Hollande of France urged African countries to take a more prominent role in the operations.

Just as in Gao two days before, residents filled the streets there to greet the arrival of the African troops as they toured Ansongo and its environs.

“Everyone is very, very, very happy,” said Ibrahim Haidara, an Ansongo resident reached by phone. “They chanted, ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘Long live African armies!’ ”

But like his counterparts in Gao, he worried that the fighters might not have gone very far.

“They are in the bush. They are hiding,” he said. “One must be careful.”

Peter Tinti reported from Bamako, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Alan Cowell from London. Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris, John F. Burns from London, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington.

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Facebook Graph Search Still Doesn’t Speak Human

Despite hiring a couple of linguists to get its new search engine to move “beyond ‘Robospeak” and actually understand how people talk, Facebook hasn’t actually taught Graph Search how to do that very well just yet. And that’s a problem, no matter which way the social network spins it. Unlike Google‘s pattern-matching search engine, Facebook’s new recommendation-based social search platform tries to understand full sentences. And that takes context, something that’s very hard to teach even the smartest computers, as one of the linguists that worked on the project, Amy Campbell, told The New York Times‘s Somini Sengupta. 

RELATED: Why Facebook’s Graph Search Can’t Give Users What They’re Looking for… Yet

In order to think more like a person the Graph Search team taught the engine 25 synonyms for “student” so that when someone types in “Stanford Academics that work at Facebook” the engine knows to look for “students” — 275,000 different ways in fact. But it turns out that an English class isn’t the future of machine learning: a grammar and vocabulary lesson proves a lot easier than complex sentient thoughts, and that’s where Facebook’s new product breaks down in practice.

RELATED: Why Google Isn’t Scared of Facebook’s Graph Search

For example, Graph Search doesn’t get vague pronouns. My query today for “photos Elle Reeve likes that she commented on” confuses Facebook’s beyond-robo engine. Instead, Graph Search results track down photos that my Atlantic Wire colleague “likes” but that I commented on:

RELATED: The Bad News-Good News of Tech Trademark Infringement

But Facebook’s ambiguity problem extends beyond “I” and “she.” Graph Search also has problems with double entendres, or sentences with nuance. The phrase “sports fans that like Lady Gaga play” has multiple meanings, notes the Times, especially because the word “fan” has its own special meaning on Facebook. (People with “Pages” have “fans.”) 

It’s not impossible to fix these specific issues. Facebook can add more relevant “context” to Graph Search as more people use it (beta testing rolled out over the last week). But never once has a machine perfectly understood our natural language. IBM’s Watson has come close, but it still made an embarrassing mistake every so often, and newer robots like Georgia Tech’s Simon are still getting there. Messups are okay (and entertaining) for a computer on a gameshow, or robots that might end up really helping bridge the computer-human divide. But, if I’m really going to use Graph Search as a way to find things in my day-to-day life, right now, those kind of hiccups should happen rarely to never — and Facebook’s slow phase-in excuse isn’t cutting it. If Graph Search can’t understand what humans want, it’s simply not doing its job. 

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