Half of all Yemeni girls are married by the age of 18. Nujood Ali (right), didn't really have a fighting chance at making it through her teens without a husband. By the age of 10, Nujood had, in fact, been married off — and divorced.

Nujood in one of a handful of landmark cases of child divorce in the Middle East. Fortunately, Saudi Arabian officials and child advocates are looking to end child marriages before there's ever a need for a dissolution.

The Associated Press has reported that the Saudi government is putting pressure on families to hold off on adolescent unions and arranged marriages, such as one 11-year-old boy who was passing out wedding invitations in class (he's to marry his 10-year-old cousin), the article describes, as a young boy would do with birthday party planning.

The Human Rights Commission has stepped in to aide the minors, and, along with clerics who also oppose the marriages, is urging Saudi government to pass legislation setting the minimum age for marriage.

No one can deny that this is a much larger issue than a "way of life." There are politics, religion, and money at stake, as well as a perspective that Western cultures will never have the capacity to understand. Fortunately, there is someone who is chipping away at the rules, the traditions, and most importantly, the inequality.

China. Always been a stickler for rules, regulations, keeping its citizens in line. Now it's barring divorces? Well, sort of.

Due to the tsunami of marriage applications hitting the civil affairs bureau of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, for 8/8/08, divorce applications have been suspended for the day, reports web site china.org.cn. Other cities around the country have suspended divorce proceedings, as well.

In addition to the throngs of couples hoping to pick up a little extra luck by tying the knot on the triple-eight date ("Eight is the most auspicious number among Chinese people, who believe it brings fortune and happiness," says the article), August 8th is also the opening day of the Olympic ceremonies.

The obsession with the nuptial date is an international one; from Asia to the U.S. to Eastern Europe. Moscow has also reported a spike in 8/8/08 nuptial planning, according to international news web site dawn.com.

But there's also a rise in divorces from last year's 7/7/07 marriage boom: A Moscow city official said up to a quarter of those who married on July 7th last year had already divorced. Maybe not so lucky, after all?

The man who abducted his seven-year-old daughter in Boston last month was arrested in Baltimore over the weekend, and the girl was returned to her mother. On Tuesday the father was charged in a Boston court with felony parental kidnapping, assault and battery. He was held without bail.

And then the mysteries deepened.

Who is "Clark Rockefeller"? Could he be wanted in California under another name? Is he, as he presented himself, a secret agent? Or is he, as investigators believe, a former German exchange student? 

Another question: How could his ex-wife, Sandra Boss, a high-powered executive at the London office of McKinsey & Co., be deceived by such a shady character? Actually, any woman who has ever been wooed by a psychopath will know the answer to that one.

The London papers reported that Boss, who made more than $1 million a year, paid "Rockefeller" $1.5 million last year in exchange for exclusive custody of their daughter, Reigh.

The sticking point for shared custody, Boss said, was that she wanted to see "Clark Rockefeller's" valid birth certificate, and to know, finally, who her husband of 12 years really was.

He refused to reveal his identity, took the money, and began plotting their daughter's abduction, including buying an apartment in Baltimore under another assumed name.

She, finally sure that he wasn't a Rockefeller, changed their daughter's last name to Boss.

Evangelist Juanita Bynum made headlines again this week, as her ex's attorney claims she has yet to hand over $10K due to his client, reports The Atlanta Constitution-Journal. The lump sum is only the first of four installments that are due to ex Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III to pay his legal fees accrued during the divorce.

To refresh your memory, Weeks did not pursue spousal support from his ex-wife, with whom he built the Global Destiny Church, in their tangled divorce proceedings; he did, however, ask that she cover his $40K legal bill.

Bynum isn't heading to prison just quite yet; Bishop's attorney has threatened possible jail time or a fine for missing a July 8th deadline to turn over the money.

Also coming Bishop's way? A Land Rover, which Bynum has yet to relinquish. But just as Weeks taketh, he giveth: He has also ordered that Bynum remove some items from their home, as well, including assorted antiques, a sculpture, and a harp. Guess the harp doesn't really scream "bachelor pad"...

If there's anything these settlements reveal, it's the odds and ends that celebrities value (heavy emphasis on the "odd"). Lest we forget David Hasselhoff's victorious claim over the antique barber chair, while his ex claimed the Michael Jackson photograph.

You’ve seen them at dinner, the couples whose fighting escalates to shouting matches or those who close their eyes into slits, purse their lips and fire off sarcastic put downs at their mates over their Chardonnay or Coors Light.

They seem like they’re heading for divorce.

Not necessarily. Some people fight and like it.

John Gottman, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, says there are three types of fighters:

• The ones who validate the other person’s experience and work it out together. (“I understand why you spent the rent money on a motorcycle for your mid-life crisis.”)

• The ones who fight vocally. (“You middle-aged, mindless jerk! How could you?”)

• The ones who agree to disagree. (“Ok, I guess I’ll have to figure out another way to pay the rent.”)

As long as the verbal fighters understand each other and aren’t bothered by it, they can stay together. Husband and wife know it’s a way to let off steam and so they manage their expectations.

In a study, Gottman discovered that couples argue about the same issues 69 percent of the time. As reported in “Psychology Today,” his long-term study of 670 couples showed that couples don’t actually resolve their problems, but learn to live with them.

Should they change partners, they’ll just get a different set of unresolved issues.

So what’s the key to happiness? “Establish a dialogue with the problems, learning to live with them much the same way someone learns to live with a bad back," he says.

The trick is to acknowledge your partner’s limitations.

Uh-huh. That’s not hard.

Gottman, however, also pointed out that the positive interactions in your relationship have to outweigh the negative arguments five-to-one.

Otherwise the couple won’t last until their silver anniversary, or even their fifth.

It is every divorced mother’s nightmare: that her ex-husband might kidnap their child. That’s exactly what happened on Sunday to Sandra L. Boss, a sophisticated and youthful looking 41-year-old. Her 7-year-old daughter, Reigh (pronounced Ray), was snatched while on a supervised visit with her father in Boston.

Boss had married Clark Rockefeller in the early 90s. It turns out that the Rockefeller name, as with many things about the man, was a ruse.

He was a faker, a well educated con man, and definitely a liar.

Even their wedding date – 1994, 1995 -- and place (Nantucket?) seems hard to verify.

Police say they have his date of birth, February 29, 1960, but the fact that it is Leap Year’s Day makes even that suspicious.

The New York Post, in fact, said the FBI put his age at 58, not 48.

His social security number, obtained only three years ago in Connecticut, where as far as anyone knows he has never lived, is apparently false.

The father has not, as far as anyone knows, ever worked.

The mother, meanwhile, was by all accounts a superbly educated and hard working career woman at the international management consultant McKinsey & Co.

But even a Harvard education, which she had, and a deep analytical mind don't prepare someone for a con man like “Rockefeller.”

In fact, the more well-educated and intelligent, the easier a person is to deceive.

Here's a divorce lab experiment that doesn't work. Mix two celebs with big egos for a toxic brew of parenting no-nos. There was just another court appearance in Los Angeles in the battle between "Two and a Half Men" actor Charlie Sheen and his ex-wife, Denise Richards, who has a new reality show called "Denise Richards: It's Complicated."

Note to Richards: Your behavior is making your life more complicated..

Sheen and Richards married in 2002 and have two daughters, Sam, 4, and Lola, 3. She filed for divorce when she was pregnant with Lola, in 2005.

Their divorce was made final in 2006, but the custody battle has raged on with accusations (dragged through the press) of bizarre emails from her to Sheen, a restraining order against him (he was ordered to stay at least 300 feet from Richards, her home, her car and their daughters, except during supervised visits) and her accusations that he was a gambler, took drugs, and had violent mood swings.

On his side, Sheen had requested that their daughters not appear on her reality show, which premiered on E on Memorial Day. Too late, they are already on it.

And, of course, they battled endlessly over Sheen's visitation rights.

Sheen, 46, got married last month to Brooke Mueller, a real estate investor. Richards said she was happy for him, and had sent a wedding present in their daughters' names.

That rapprochement didn't last long.

Sheen and Richards were in court on July 17, and again yesterday in Los Angeles. Richards asked a judge to restrict Sheen's access to the girls, because "they were having problems." She was said to have a videotape with her that would demonstrate their bad behavior after being with their father, but the videotape was not shown in court.

Here’s a new way for the ex-basketball player Jason Caffey to keep score: ten children by seven “baby mamas” and one wife. He filed for bankruptcy last August. That didn’t stop a judge in Atlanta, Georgia, from handing down a ruling on Wednesday that Caffey, because he didn’t show up in court, owed one of them, Lorunda Brown, $17,088.87 in legal fees.

The judge dismissed Caffey’s motion “with prejudice.” That ain’t good.

It was a response to Caffey’s failure to turn up in court on his own motion to modify child support to Brown.

Caffey was a professional basketball player in the NBA until 2002. When he filed for bankruptcy last fall, his papers stated he owed $1.9 million, mostly in long overdue child support.

He said he made $11,500 a month from – get this – a string of daycare centers and a sportsbar in Alabama.

He also listed assets of two NBA championship rings (worth $10,000) and a 2006 Dodge Charger (worth $34,000).

His problem, his lawyers said, was that his expenses are $15,000 a month. Thus, he is bankrupt.

His wife, mother of two of his children, filed for divorce last year.

Coincidence?

Bankruptcy does not cancel child support obligations, but it does put a hold on collections until the person filing for bankruptcy sets up a payment plan.

That tripped up another Caffey baby mama, Karen Russell, in April. Russell is baby mama No. 1, having given birth to a son 15 years ago. (She and Caffey met at the University of Alabama.)

Caffey began missing child support payments in, ahem, 1995, she says.

He did, however, make regular payments, when the child support was deducted from his NBA salary, which ran as high as $5 million a season.

(And wouldn’t we like to see those pay stubbs? That must have been a way for him to remember all of the baby mamas’ names.)

Will the humiliation never end? We had to give up the big house, drink tap water instead of Perrier. The divorce decree demanded that we give back our married names. We can’t afford to take a decent vacation, even though we saw that first husband all the way through business school and helped start his business. The divorce is far behind us, and the kids are grown. Life went on. He remarried, things seemed civil.

And then he died.

Sad, yes, but worse... the editors of the newspaper decided that first wives don’t exist, or more specifically, that first wives should not be named in the obituary. Poof! We’re gone. Apparently those children — who were named — were miraculously born without a mother. And there’s nothing we can do about it, except pay for a death notice and put our own names in it. A story in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle says that listing exes is a potential trigger for hard feelings — on the part of the new wife. "It offends some second wives to have the first one included with the survivors,” an editor said.

And that is just the beginning. Think about it. She’ll undoubtedly be buried next to him some day (not soon enough) and the kids... well, they may choose to be buried with their dad, with whom they share a name, instead of with their mother. After all this, it’s possible we are going to be alone in the grave. At least we won’t know about it.

Meet Louise Rush and Alan Bamberger, of San Francisco. They were divorced six years ago, but they still live in the same 2,700-square-foot Victorian house. She takes a downstairs bedroom, he takes an upstairs one, where he is close to their two sons. Lisa Belkin wrote an 8,000 word article “When Mom and Dad Share It All” in The New York Times Sunday magazine on June 14. But she didn’t have room for the Bambergers or another divorced couple that has split responsibilities amicably, even after divorce. You can read about them here on her blog about equally shared divorce.