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“The French may want to go home, but that might not be an easy thing,” Lynch says, adding that on the drive into Bamako Wednesday she saw two large convoys of heavy French fighting vehicles heading up the road on the way to Gao.

“They seem to be getting ready for another battle,” Lynch says.

France is anxious to begin drawing down its 4,000 soldiers from Mali. The French foreign minister said Wednesday those troops should begin pulling out in March.

This year, though, because of the war, the festival was canceled.

Still, the Festival in the Desert and its Malian Touareg leader Manny Ansar were honored Wednesday with the Freemuse Award.

It’s given each year by a Denmark-based group to an individual or organization that “has worked for freedom of musical expression in a remarkable way.”

Manny Ansar talks about the situation in Mali, and his work on the festival over the past decade.

Drone strikes by the CIA and the military increased dramatically as he worked as deputy national security adviser with President Obama, and Brennan has been described as the face of the drone program.

But Daniel Klaidman, who tracked the Obama-Brennan relationship for his book “Kill or Capture,” says that Brennan’s attitude toward drones is more complicated than the popular image would suggest.

Leaked drones memo shakes up CIA confirmation hearings: Brennan was “the principal coordinator of a ‘kill list’” slnm.us/FX8v4PH

— Salon.com (@Salon) February 6, 2013

In fact, Obama’s ambassador in Israel Wednesday morning said the president will come with an “urgent” peacemaking agenda.

Some Israelis will applaud the prospects of reviving peace talks that have been nearly non-existent for the last four years. But there’s also a potent sense of skepticism in Israeli politics when it comes to the Palestinian issue.

Newly-elected members of the Israeli Knesset took the oath of office Thursday at the parliament building in Jerusalem. Among the parties that did well in the recent national election was the Jewish Home party. Its leader campaigned on a promise to prevent the ultimate goal of the US-sponsored peace process: The creation of an independent Palestinian state.

If Obama hopes to persuade Israelis to return to negotiations with the Palestinians, he could be in for some serious push-back.

Jewish Home lawmaker Avi Wortzman said, “the results of the election in Israel show that people are asking their leaders to deal with domestic issues. Right now is not the time to try and revive the peace process.”

If the American president wants his first state visit to Israel to succeed, he would be wise to lower expectations, said political analyst Shmuel Rosner, who writes for the Jewish Journal.

“He shouldn’t aim too high. He shouldn’t make any promises,” Rosner said. “And I think by this time, Obama is probably experienced enough to know that making promises such as, ‘we are going to have peace within a year or two years,’ like he said at the beginning of his first term would not be the wisest thing to do.”

Rosner said he believes President Obama’s main focus when he comes to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be something different altogether.

“I think the timing of the visit is more about Iran than about the Palestinian peace process,” Rosner said. “The Palestinians could wait for two or three more months. However, on Iran, the president has to make sure that him and the prime minister are on the same page. Let me remind you that the prime minister spoke at the UN and draw a red line. People saw it and the red line is coming this summer. So, for President Obama to come here in the spring.”

If the administration can first avert confrontation with Iran, Rosner suggested, the opportunity for renewing peace talks could then present itself.

But on the Palestinian side, there is also no small amount skepticism about Obama’s upcoming visit. Nashat Aqtash is a professor of communications at Bir Zeit University. The American president might have good intentions, he said. But that’s not enough.

“The Israelis are not sincere about finding a two-state solution. They just want a negotiation for the sake of it, for a public relations campaign, you know. The visit of President Obama might help in this. Not more than that,” Aqtash said.

Aqtash said one problem for Obama is that the Palestinian public has lost faith in President Mahmoud Abbas – the leader most closely associated with the failed peace process. At the same time, he says Hamas – the Islamic militant group that’s opposed to negotiations with Israel – is gaining in popularity.

At Tuesday’s Knesset ceremony, Israeli President Shimon Peres suggested that the peace process needs to be on the government’s agenda. He said successful negotiations with the Palestinians are a key part of Israel’s security.

The Israeli version of the reality show MasterChef just wrapped up. The grand finale was the highest rated TV program ever in Israel. It featured a run-off between an orthodox Jew, an Israeli -Arab and a German convert to Judaism – three people who in regular life wouldn’t be near each other. Reporter Daniella Cheslow has the story.

It’s the last episode of the Israeli version of MasterChef. The reality TV show pitted 14 amateur chefs against each other.

The three remaining contestants sound like a bad joke: Tom Franz, a lanky German convert to Judaism; Salma Fiyoumi, an Israeli-Arab Muslim woman, and Jackie Azoulay, an orthodox Jewish woman in a long blonde wig.

For Franz, tonight’s a chance to prove more than his knife skills – it’s a way to finally arrive in Israel. He came here as a high school exchange student and later returned as a volunteer in a hospital.

Almost nine years ago, he took the plunge and moved to Israel, converted to Judaism, learned Hebrew and married a Jewish wife.

“I had some hard time in the beginning to find my way here and to get accepted,” Franz says. “I don’t know if I need to win the MasterChef competition to accomplish this. But it would be like finishing this long journey of arriving to Israel.”

Part of the journey was adapting to keeping kosher, a set of dietary laws observant Jews follow in the kitchen.

“The hardest is to give up the mixture of meat and dairy. It’s not so easy, there’s lot of things you have to take care of,” he says.

Tom Franz (right) and Salma Fiyoumi, the two final contestants, on stage as Tom is crowned Israel’s next Masterchef. (Photo: Daniella Cheslow)

“The day after the audition, I understood I was going to competition,” Franz said. “I said I would take it seriously, I bought best books I could find, and from that day I read two or three hours every day and spent an hour in kitchen.”

Tom quickly stood out in the competition for his impeccable technique, perfectly chopping his vegetables and arranging them meticulously on a plate.

German dishes were at the forefront of his first few meals. For one, he made a smoked salmon quiche. For another, a long roll of stuffed cabbage.

It was his comfort food, but European food is looked down on in Israel, where the national palate is more attuned to Mediterranean staples, like fresh herbs and grilled meats. Eyal Shani, a chef and one of the four judges, urged him to roast his vegetables.

“Tom has got a very European cooking,” Shani says. “But you know sometimes the European cooking can make you to be blind to the ingredients because it’s very complicated.

All the same, the judges appreciated his technique.

“Tom is the only competitor who uses a timer when he enters the kitchen,” says another judge, Michal Ansky. “He knows exactly the temperature of the water when he cooks potatoes. He is accurate in a way that only a German can be.

As the season wore on and Tom survived elimination rounds, he moved more toward Mediterranean dishes. His couscous wowed the judges. His trout and potatoes blew away Judge Shani.

“That was one of the best that I ever ate in my life,” Shani says. “It was real potato and real trout, they were talking between themselves.”

In the final episode, Tom found himself in the middle of an unlikely cross-section of Israeli culture. Salma Fayoumi, the nurse from an Arab village, fused traditional Palestinian dishes with Mediterranean flavors.

Jackie Azoulay, the Orthodox woman with Moroccan roots, made north African standards.

Halfway through the finale, Jackie was eliminated and Tom and Salma faced off.

Tom blackened eggplants and red pepper. He smashed the eggplants into a cream and spread it on a long white plate.

On top of that he placed slices of sirloin steak rubbed with a red pepper paste.

Finally he put tiny potato cubes across the eggplant cream. It was a marriage of his European roots – the potato, the precise slicing, the careful plating – and his new Israeli home.

“What I did in life is I left Europe and I went to Israel,” Franz says. “And in my cooking, I left Europe and went to Israel.”

His final dish went head to head against Salma’s beet and spinach pasta.

The judges gave their verdict.

“The MasterChef of Israel is … Tom,” one of the judges announced.

The final of MasterChef was the highest rated reality TV episode of all time in Israel.

At its peak, the program pulled in more than half of Israeli Jewish households.

For Tom, it was a much more personal victory.

Ich fühl’ mich wunderbar — I feel wonderful — I made a dream come true.

It is a typical Monday morning in the Barbour household. T.J. and his wife, Maythe, take turns at the bathroom sink, they make coffee, and head out to the car. And after putting T.J. puts their 10-year-old son Lucas into the backseat, he does something unusual for most families.

He lies down on the pavement and looks underneath his car. Using a flashlight, he inspects the vehicles underside for packets of drugs. Recently, drug smugglers have targeted frequent cross-border commuters, like T.J., attaching packets of drugs to unsuspecting vehicles in order to get their illicit goods into the United States.

Once that routine is done, the Barbours pull away from their Tijuana apartment. It is 3:30 a.m. They race through the dark to get to the San Ysidro border crossing before the line stacks up. T.J. has to get to work as a software engineer in San Diego, and Lucas cannot be late for fourth grade.

Maythe drives so they can sleep.

Then, when the family is just a few cars away from the border crossing, Maythe hands the wheel to T.J. She walks to a nearby bus stop alone and heads home in Tijuana.

Maythe and T.J. married in San Diego a dozen years ago.

But Maythe is barred from the US.

The Barbours are just one of thousands of families stuck apart like this because of a little-known rule included in an immigration reform package passed by Congress in 1996. The rule was designed to discourage undocumented immigrants, like Maythe, from staying in the US, as well as thwart fraudulent marriages by individuals hoping to receive legal residency.

It can happen like this: An undocumented immigrant spouse returns to his or her home country for a mandatory interview at a US consulate to complete the green card application process. But if that person entered the US illegally and lived here for more than six months, he or she is barred from the US for three or 10 years, or life, depending on the circumstances.

In March, a change ordered by President Barack Obama will bring some relief. It lets undocumented spouses to apply for what’s called a hardship waiver before they leave the United States for the mandatory interview, instead of after they have left the US, as the policy stands now. The change is designed to reduce the time that couple and families are separated and remove some of the uncertainty from the process.

But the change will not help the Barbours and thousands of couples like them who still will not qualify for hardship waivers.

That is because when Maythe crossed the border in 1997—she crossed twice. The Border Patrol caught her on her first try. That disqualifies Maythe from getting a waiver, along with many other undocumented immigrants who have followed a similar path.

Further, the change is not retroactive. Maythe’s case cannot be revived.

Maythe says that, living in the mountains in Mexico, she did not know about the intricacies of US law and how crossing the border twice in the late 1990s would impact her entire life. She arrived here as a single mother, with her daughter in tow, wanting the best for her child.

And, when Maythe got work at a Burger King in San Diego and fell in love with her husband, T.J., who is a US citizen, the couple thought that marriage would solve immigration issues.

“I was aware of her immigration situation,” T.J. said. “And I, like most people, was under the impression that she gets married to me, we’re set.”

Not so. Maythe’s past with the Border Patrol meant she was out of luck.

Instead of risking years of separation, the Barbours, like many other families, went underground to stay together. Then, Maythe was caught in 2010. A policeman pulled her over for driving too slowly. He handed her over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I was sure we would be able to work it out,” T.J. said. “I was like, okay, come on, she has got an American citizen husband, an American citizen child. I kept thinking, you have bigger fish to fry.”

Maythe fought her case from an immigration detention center for five months. She lost and was deported to Tijuana.

And here is where our story began, with the Barbour family’s new reality.

Maythe stays in Tijuana, separated from T.J., her kids, and her family in southern Mexico. It takes a toll. Every day the same image haunts Maythe at 3 p.m. That’s when her son Lucas gets out of school in San Diego.

“Lucas would climb the same tree every day after school. He’d say, ‘Catch me if I fall!’ It’s terrible for me to think that I’m not there,” Maythe said.

Seven Republican Congressman who support the immigration bars declined interviews for this story. However, they have publicly criticized President Obama for circumventing Congress to relax immigration rules.

It is unclear if comprehensive immigration reform will address such penalties.

Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California San Diego, hopes it will. “The only thing that is going to allow people to adjust their status in the US is a broad legalization program, the type which we had back in 1986 to 1988,” Cornelius said.

Meanwhile, Maythe Barbour is so lonely in Tijuana she sells cosmetics door-to-door just to talk to people during her 20-year bar from re-entering the US.

The Barbours have also turned to religion and have become Jehovah’s Witness. T.J. likes the religion’s concept of a celestial government, which is framed as fair and just.

It is treatment, T.J. says, that he has yet to find in the United States.

If you’ve ever been to Mexico City, chances are you’ve sat in an old Volkswagen Bug taxi, painted in muted red and gold, stuck in Mexico City’s notorious traffic.

“Here we call them ‘Donkeys,’” says Victoriano Luna, a taxi driver who has been driving a Bug for 32 years. “A horse can run fast, but it doesn’t endure. A donkey does endure, just like this car.”

Volkswagen first came to Mexico in 1967, when it opened a plant in Puebla, a few hours drive from Mexico City. For decades, the Bug was the biggest-selling car in the country.

Today, the Peubla plant has expanded to become the largest auto factory in North America, employing 18,000 people. It’s a state-of-the-art facility full of industrial robots and blinking computer equipment. The plant has the capacity to produce 2,500 cars a day, in popular models such as the Jetta and Golf.

After rolling off the line, the cars are packed into trains and shipped off to retailers. Most of them are sold abroad. Mexico is now the eighth biggest auto producer in the world, as well as the world’s fourth biggest exporter, according to the Mexican Automotive Industry Association.

In 2012, the country produced almost 3 million cars, a national record. Experts say those numbers are on track to keep growing.

“Mexico is becoming quite an automotive powerhouse,” says Thomas Karig, a vice president at Volkswagen Mexico. Karig says Mexico is an attractive place for car companies to set up shop for several reasons: a great location for exporting to North and South America, an open trade policy, and experience in the work force.

Last September, Audi, a Volkswagen subsidiary , announced the construction of a new plant nearby. They’ll be assembling the luxury Q5 SUV. Eduardo Solís, president of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association, says it’s a watershed moment for the country.

“There is an important element here where Mexico is, currently in the automotive industry, associated with good quality, with good products,” says Solís. “We have been scaling up in the value chain.”

VW Factory in Puebla, Mexico (Photo: VW Mexico)

Hector Muñoz, a 48-year-old technician at Volkswagen, is a living example of that change. Muñoz comes from a family of street vendors, and scored a job at Volkswagen after an uncle got him interested in fixing up cars.

After 20 years working on the VW line, he makes 12,000 pesos a month. That comes out to only about $30 US a day, but its six times minimum wage in Mexico, putting him squarely in the country’s middle class. Thanks to this job, he’s been able to put his kids through college. Two of them are now engineers, a fact he’s really proud of.

“Before there weren’t as many opportunities as there are now,” says Muñoz. In my case, being at Volkswagen has really encouraged me to push my kids to learn more, to get better educations.”

There are a lot of others like Muñoz. According to the World Bank, 17 percent of Mexico’s population joined the middle class between 2003 and 2009, now making up almost a quarter of the population.

But there’s a long way to go – half of Mexico still lives below the poverty line. Victor Piz, editor of Mexico’s chief financial newspaper El Financiero, says those people are being left out this high-tech boom.

“I think the main problem in Mexico is the distribution of revenue coming into the country,” says Piz. “None of it goes into the pockets of Mexico’s poor. This wealth doesn’t matter to them because they’re not receiving any benefit from it.”

Piz also warns that Mexico could have a problem sustaining its recent growth – almost 4 percent for two straight years – because it relies too heavily on one trading partner, the US. Mexico has free trade agreements like NAFTA with 44 countries, but still overwhelmingly exports to its neighbor to the North.

“When the United States turns off its engines, inevitably, Mexico also has to turn off its engines as well,” says Piz.

Today, Mexico City traffic is no longer a sea of VW Bugs. There are the gleaming Lexuses of the wealthy, and the Nissans of the country’s middle class – not to mention the mini-buses that transport the working poor. But taxis are still being made in Mexico. New York City’s brand new taxi fleet is currently in production at a Nissan plant in Cuernavaca.

This story was produced in collaboration with reporter Javier Risco and Round Earth Media’s Mexico Reporting Project.

Mary Fenton (Photo: Leo Hornak)

Thousands of women and girls were locked up against their will, and forced to perform unpaid labor in workhouses managed by Catholic nuns.

The popular notion was that many were prostitutes or unwed mothers.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Mary Fenton.

She was just 16 when she was sent to the Magdalene Laundries.

The US Postal Service has announced it plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays. The financially struggling agency says the move could help it save as much as $2 billion a year.

But it could delay letters a bit. Of course that delay might not matter all that much if you’re sending a letter to one of the country’s most remote neighborhoods: for instance, the South Pole.

Yes, there is a US Post office at the South Pole. It’s located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Letters sent there go by way of New Zealand where they’re loaded onto US military cargo planes bound for Antarctica.

And believe it or not, the place has its own zip code.

For Wednesday’s Geo Quiz, what’s the zip code for the South Pole?

The zip code we’re looking for is not 90210.

That of course is reserved for ritzy Beverly Hills.

Nor is it 12345 which belongs to General Electric, in Schenectady, New York.

Then there’s ours here at The World newsroom in Boston, 02135.

Nope, the one we’re looking for is at 90-degrees latitude South, at the southernmost post office in the world.

The zip code for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is an undistinguished 96598.

Duffel bags of letters to 96598 travel to the South Pole via New Zealand on US military cargo planes usually stuffed in between scientific gear and vital supplies.

Of course deliveries can be unpredictable. Depending on the weather and logistics, packages can take up to six weeks. We haven’t heard yet on whether the ending of Saturday deliveries will be enforced at the South Pole.

One more thing.

Do not use foam peanuts. Styrofoam is banned on the frozen continent.

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The story of mariachi music in Texas schools begins with Belle San Miguel Ortiz.

“There are several names that they’ve given me, from godmother to the queen of the mariachis, to la madrina, which is the same thing,” said Ortiz. “I was the very first teacher of mariachi anywhere in the world.”

That’s a tough thing to prove. But Ortiz stands by that claim. “A lot of people will say you’re not the first. Yes, I am.”

When Ortiz first started teaching music in Texas high schools, some people didn’t like what she was doing. “We’re talking about the late 50’s, when discrimination was at its highest. And many of my colleagues reported me saying that I was teaching choir but everything was in Spanish.”

As a Mexican American living in Texas though, she thought Mexican folk music was important. “I couldn’t understand why mariachi music was not taught, especially I thought in this area.”

Finally in 1970, Ortiz got permission to teach a high school mariachi class. It’s come a long way since then.

When I met Ortiz, who is now 79, she was judging a regional competition for a statewide high school mariachi contest.

Ten bands from South Texas participated in the competition. Each had about a dozen members. The boys wore ornate, embroidered suits and the girls wore floor length skirts, sashes, and jackets. The outfits were sewn with elaborate patterns and shiny buttons. The kids looked sharp.

They played violins, trumpets, and guitars. Students also played the two key mariachi instruments: The guitarrón – essentially an enormous guitar – and the vihuela, a small guitar. There was also the occasional harpist and flute player.

High school junior Jonathan Rivera nailed a fantastic harp solo.

“I went up there, and we were playing, and I was like okay, calm down, you’ve done this before,” said Rivera after his performance. “And then we started the song, it wasn’t even close to the solo, we just started the song, and I was already like, ooooh, it hit me, and I was like ‘Oh My Gosh,’ and I got nervous.”

If Rivera and the other students were nervous, it didn’t show. The students also took turns walking to center stage and belting out solos. I kept forgetting that I was watching 15, 16, and 17-year-olds up on stage.

They were great.

“Mariachi is more performing,” said Rivera. “You’re actually like a Broadway show, you go and you sing, and you act. When you go into mariachi, you could have the worst day of your life, your dog died, your parents are in the hospital, and your girlfriend left you, and you’re like oh you have a performance today, forgot about that. And you can’t go on stage, with your face all frowning and what not, you gotta go up there and smile, you gotta do that.”

Rivera also plays in a rock band. But like many of the students I met, he said he gravitated to mariachi because it connects him to his Mexican roots. Senior Celia Vallez chose mariachi as an elective in the sixth grade.

“And the primary reason was that the majority of my family doesn’t speak English, so I felt it was really a way for me to connect to them and back to my Mexican roots and heritage.”

Like other students I met, Vallez’ Spanish was not the best.

“Spanish is actually my first language, but over the years, I haven’t been able to use it as often. It still comes, but it’s not as naturally,” said Vallez. She said mariachi “definitely” helps.

Still, there are some who don’t understand this embrace of mariachi. I heard tales of parents who were upset that their children were wasting their time on this cantina music. It’s seen as kind of a joke by many, not worthy of musical study.

Texas State University in San Marcos is trying to change that attitude. It’s offering classes in mariachi methods and history. Undergraduates can earn a teaching certificate in mariachi music. And the school plans to offer a summertime masters program in mariachi in the near future.

When mariachi was first introduced there in the 1990’s, it was student taught.

“Then I went to the school of music and said, we need to take this class seriously like any other ensemble. You would never do this to orchestra, orchestra would never be student run with a faculty adviser,” said John Lopez, the coordinator of Latin Music Studies at Texas State.

He said putting mariachi in the classroom isn’t just culturally important for Latino students. It’s important musically; it’s a challenging genre.

“All other ensembles are either instrumental or they’re either vocal. But a mariachi is unique in the fact that every single person does sing and every single person does play, and they’re woven almost all the time together.”

Belle Ortiz, (left) “the godmother of the mariachis in Texas,” congratulates students from Southwest High School who advanced to the state finals. (Photo: Jason Margolis)

Mariachis face another challenge: They have to memorize their music. That’s the way mariachis have always done it. The guys at the Mexican restaurants don’t get to have sheet music.

“They know a lot, a lot of songs. They need to be prepared at any time to play a song that somebody requests,” said Lopez.

That can be anything from Elvis to Lady Gaga, to pretty much everything in between.

There was none of that at the Texas high school competition though, just traditional Mexican folk music. And that made Belle Ortiz, the godmother of the mariachis, quite proud.

“How more beautiful can you get when students coming to me would say, ‘You know what, Mrs. O, my grandmother came in when I was playing and I was singing and she says, where did you learn that song?’ And they say, at school. She (grandmother) says, ‘I used to sing that when I was small, when I was little, when I was young young.’ And she says, ‘Can I sing it with you?’”