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Friday, the first suicide bombing of the conflict took place in Gao, while government troops in the capital city Bamako started fighting amongst themselves.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Lydia Polgreen of The New York Times in Bamako.

Crowds gathered in the town of Bredasdorp in the Western Cape, where the rape occurred.

And several South African radio stations have been broadcasting an intrusive beeping noise every four minutes to symbolize the frequency of rape in the country.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with South Africa’s Talk Radio 702 host Redi Tlhabi.

And it features two of the best teams from Africa – yet two very different teams.

Nigeria’s Super Eagles — a perennial regional powerhouse will face Burkina Faso’s Stallions.

The Burkina Faso’s Stallions surprised many by playing at higher level than expected. The team hadn’t won a game at the African tournament since 1998 and had yet to make the finals.

But the team nearly missed its opportunity. It was during the semi-final match between Burkina Faso and Ghana when a controversial call by a referee nearly cost the Stallions its star player, Jonathan Pitroipa. He received a red card which meant he would have missed Sunday’s final against Nigeria.

But a replay of the call showed that the referee made a bad call. The referee, Slim Jdidi of Tunisia, recognized his mistake and Pitroipa was reinstated and allowed to play in the final.

Nigeria’s Super Eagles hasn’t been without its troubles either. The team had been an African powerhouse in the 1990s.

But over the past decade hadn’t done well, causing the media to nickname the Super Eagles, the “Super Chickens.” The team has turned around with young and energetic players, making them the favorite to win.

The BBC’s Mukesh Sharma says the holiest place where pilgrims gather is right near the confluence of India’s sacred rivers.

“Three rivers, the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati rivers converge at this place,” he says. “People generally go to the riverbank, perform rituals with flowers and incense sticks, then they go into the water take a few dips and offer water to the sun, that’s how they pray.

Consider this: During the 55-day festival, the entire Kumbh Mela area is designated as a district. The makeshift tent city is constructed and deconstructed within weeks.

The Kumbh mela has its own police and fire station, post office, and railway depot. This year’s Kumbh mela is expected to attract as many as 100 million people.

Kumbh Mela tent city (Photo: Kumbh Mela 2013)

So you can imagine its easy to get lost … actually, it happens a lot.

On the biggest day of the festival, it’s estimated that as many as 20,000 people will get lost or separated from their families and friends and will seek out assistance at the lost and found desk.

Stranded at the lost and found desk (Photo: Mukesh Sharma)

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In theory, the water down there, isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, could be home to ancient microbes that could offer clues about everything from the origins of life on earth to the possibility of life in space.

It’s been rough going so far, but American scientists say they finally have their “eureka” moment.

Last month, they brought up samples of water and sediment from sub-glacial Lake Whillans, not far from the South Pole.

Now they’ve tested those samples and they’ve announced that they do indeed contain living bacteria.

The scientists haven’t published their results yet, or established whether the microbes are unique. But they say they’re convinced that their results are clean, meaning the bacteria they found weren’t introduced by the drilling process itself.

Lead researcher John Priscu of Montana State University told the New York Times that they still need to find out what the microbes are and how they make a living. But for now, he told the Times they’ve gotten their first glimpse of what has been a completely unknown ecosystem.

It is already the world leader in 4G technology, and #3 in smartphone sales. But while much of the world is embracing Huawei, the US market is wary. Last fall, a Congressional report said US networks and entities shouldn’t buy equipment from Huawei and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, because of security concerns.

Huawei says they’re just plain wrong. But this is about perceptions – and the recent spate of unrelated Chinese hacker attacks haven’t helped.

Huawei has a story it would like to tell – of a scrappy little telecommunications company started 25 years ago by a laid-off army engineer that’s grown into a leader in its field.

“Our vision is that in the future, information will explode, so we want to build as big a pipe as we can,” said Zhang Linbo, a guide at Huawei’s Exhibition Center at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. “We have already established our leading position in this area, like in IP network, fixed network, and wireless network, we are ranking in the top three. No other company can do this.”

That’s not even going into the consumer devices Huawei started making more recently –laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and USB dongles.

Just this week, Huawei announced it’s teaming up with Microsoft in Africa to offer a $150 smartphone, using Windows software.

And for Americans despairing of getting a consistent mobile phone signal, Huawei says it provides what it calls “no edge” networks – with overlapping circles of coverage, so there aren’t dropouts.

Huawei guide Zhang Linbo (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Those political issues played out in the House Intelligence Committee last autumn. Congressman Mike Rogers co-chaired a House Intelligence Committee investigation into whether Huawei, and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, pose a potential security threat to the United States.

“We’ve heard reports about backdoors and unexplained beaconing from the equipment sold by both companies,” said Rogers at the hearing. “Our sources overseas have told us there is reason to question whether the companies are tied to the Chinese government or whether their equipment is what it appears. Certainly, there are vulnerabilities built into the equipment that appear to be there by design.”

The Committee’s report didn’t cite any hard evidence that Huawei or ZTE had been spying, but speculated that they might in the future, if the Chinese government leans on them. So the report recommended that US government agencies and American businesses not use Huawei or ZTE equipment, lest it one day be used to spy, steal sensitive information, or shut down entire systems.

Duncan Clark, chairman of the Beijing-based hi-tech consultancy group BDA, found the argument far from convincing.

“I think it was a very unwise report, in that it’s cutting off to the US to access to one of the world’s largest providers of telecommunications and IT equipment,” Clark said.

He added that Huawei’s technology is some of the best, fastest and most competitively priced on the market. And the US could use all that because it’s been steadily falling behind the international standard.

According to Clark, part of the problem is that the telecom industry in the US is an old boys’ network. But he points out that if it’s a connection with China that raises concerns about security, Cisco and others telecommunications companies get many of their components from China, too.

Still, at least some security experts say Huawei’s code is much easier to break into than Cisco’s – and there’s the suspicion that if the Chinese government asked, Huawei couldn’t say no.

Such arguments clearly frustrate Scott Sykes, Huawei’s vice president for corporate media affairs.

“We have an impeccable track record in terms of security,” he said. “Nobody disputes this fact. We’ve been business for 25 years. We are in 140 countries. We are a $32 billion company.”

Huawei VP Corporate Media Affairs Scott Sykes. (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

And with two-thirds of Huawei’s revenue coming from outside of China last year, Sykes says it would be corporate suicide to act in a way that would lose international customers’ trust.

Huawei wants people to see it as an international company, and it’s trying to be more transparent, even though it’s still a private company, and the reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, still doesn’t give interviews. But, increasingly others in the company do, to dispel what they say are false impressions, for instance, in terms of company ownership.

“Zero percent is owned by the Chinese government,” said Scott Sykes, adding that the company is not working with Chinese military intelligence. And while, yes, it has a Communist Party Committee, so do many foreign companies of any size in China, including Walmart. It’s part of the cost of doing business, and the committee doesn’t interfere in business decisions.

But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t – goes the counterargument – a compelling enough one that Australia and Canada, have blocked Huawei from some contracts, and India’s been wary. Britain, on the other hand, has gone ahead, building a network with Huawei, after doing its own security tests.

“In some ways, I think Huawei is much more sophisticated than China (the government),” said BDA Chairman Duncan Clark. “Huawei’s problem is that it’s bumping up against the glass ceiling that China itself imposes through its foreign policy, or through the perception it creates around the world. The resistance to Chinese products or Chinese companies is something Huawei is powerless to change.”

The recent spate of Chinese hacker attacks on US media certainly hasn’t helped. On top of all this, the US International Trade Commission now has two cases pending against Huawei for patent infringement.

If Huawei is found guilty, the products with patent issues would be banned for sale in the US, and that could affect any or all of Huawei’s consumer product line.

Still, Huawei doesn’t give up easily. It’s big in the world, and wants to be big in America. But for all the allure of faster, cheaper, more reliable telecom networks, and cool phones and pads and dongles, there’s at least as much ambivalence about whether this is all a hi-tech Trojan horse.

Huawei is left with the unenviable task of proving a negative.

But what exactly does that mean?

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Jim Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

There are also a record number of women – 27.

And a record number of lawmakers who live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. One of them is the first to be elected from the controversial settlement in the city of Hebron.

Her name is Orit Struk. She’s a 52-year-old with 11 children and a dozen grandchildren. Three of her young daughters accompanied Struk earlier this week, when she arrived for the swearing-in ceremony at the Knesset building in Jerusalem.

When asked how it felt to be at the ceremony, Struk said, “It’s very exciting. It’s a blessing to God that we’ll be able to do only good things, God willing.”

Struk’s religious language matches her appearance. Her covered head, long sleeves and ankle-length skirt are a striking contrast in this flashy crowd of Israeli political elites. But that’s the standard uniform, so to speak, worn by many religious Israeli women from West Bank settlements.

Some 350,000 Israelis live in Jewish settlements across the West Bank. But Hebron – or Hevron in Hebrew – isn’t just any settlement.

One reason why: The Cave of the Patriarchs. It’s where Abraham and his family are believed to be buried. And the site is located in the heart of the old city.

“First of all, Hevron is the first Jewish city in the land of Israel. Jews have lived here almost continuously for, for almost 4,000 years,” said David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron.

“And the significance of Hevron is not just for the Jewish people. I think anybody that believes in one God, this is where it started. This is the roots of monotheism. Abraham was able to reveal the existence of one God and all of the major western religions are based upon that. That’s the starting point,” Wilder said.

And it’s what motivates Orit Struk. Spending time at the Knesset is nothing new for her. She’s long worked as a lobbyist for the West Bank settlements. But now that she’s an elected member of the Knesset, Struk is in a different position to help realize a certain dream for the future of Hebron.

“God willing,” Struk said, “Hebron will be a city in Israel where tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands of Jews, live. And it will be open to people of all religions to visit.”

Struk wants to retroactively legalize dozens of settlement outposts built without government permission. She and her colleagues with the Jewish Home party are also opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state. For them, Judea and Samaria – the names that religious Jews use to refer to the West Bank – is, and always will be, part of Israel.

Palestinian Muslims also revere the final resting place of Abraham in the city of Hebron, which they call al-Khalil. They know this same holy site as the Ibrahimi Mosque. But Palestinian movement is severely restricted near the mosque and the old city, which is a few minutes walk from the Jewish settlement where Orit Struk and her family live.

The treatment of Palestinians in Hebron is one of the reasons why her ascension to the Knesset isn’t welcomed by all.

Yehuda Shaul served as an Israeli soldier in Hebron. Now he’s with “Breaking the Silence,” an advocacy group that’s opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. He said of Hebron, it’s “the place where our great past meets our disgusting present and future.”

“I think this is a very sad moment in the story of our society, that communities like this sit around the table and will be part of the people who make our laws, the laws under which I live,” he said.

For Shaul, the Jewish settlers of Hebron represent an extremist ideology that is damaging to Israel itself. And that’s why he sees the election of Orit Struk to parliament as a dangerous development.

“Look, today in Hebron you have 850 settlers in a city center of 175,000 Palestinians. Guarding them, you have 650 combat soldiers. Forty-two percent of Palestinian families have fled the area, because they couldn’t continue to have any kind of ordinary life,” Shaul said.

But Orit Struk and her supporters respond to that by saying the results of the recent Israeli election speak for themselves.

Hebron spokesman David Wilder said, “People think that we’re monsters. People think that, you know, we’re not people, that we’re some other species. And it’s not true.”

Not that Wilder cares all that much what people think. He said the real test for Orit Struk and her colleagues will be what they can accomplish in parliament. Then, there will be another election.

Trouble is, most Latvians don’t share their government’s enthusiasm and they don’t want to give up their own money — the lat.

According to recent polls, only 30 percent of Latvians back the plan to introduce the single currency next year. That leaves some Latvian government officials to worry that the lack of support might prompt the eurozone to withdraw the invitation.

“Most Latvians know we have beautiful money,” said Latvian playwright Lelde Stumbre, 60. “Our national currency has always been important to us.”

Latvia’s currency – lats and santims – was introduced in the early 1920s.

“The money is a symbol of independent Latvia, just like the national anthem, the flag and the language,” said Stumbre. She said while growing up under Russian occupation, she felt the rouble was forced on Latvians. When Latvia regained its independence, said Stumbre, it was an important step when the lat was reintroduced into its currency.

1 lat circulation coin with a nesting stork. Stork is one of the most frequent birds in Latvia. (Photo: The Bank of Latvia)

“A lot of us have a completely European dynamic,” said Paegle. He lives in Riga but works in London and travels across Europe.

The Latvian government knows it has a lot of work to do to persuade reluctant Latvians to give up their currency.

Many Latvians “don’t have a strong sense of belonging to the European Union and they also don’t really seem to grasp the concept of it,” said Ilze Birzniece, anthropology lecturer at the University of Latvia.

There’s also the other issue: The eurozone’s financial crisis which many Latvians would just as soon pass on.

Yuto Kanazawa wanted to play pop and jazz standards when he first set out to become a professional musician.

He enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and soon he was writing his own compositions.

Yuto Kanazawa performs “The Ocean.”

And the direction of his compositions changed.

Kanazawa came to The World studios recently and played one of those tunes, called “The Ocean.”

Watch the video above of his performance and interview with The World’s Marco Werman.