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?

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.

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 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.)

A jury in Tampa, FL has convicted Dr. Richard Carino on three counts of receiving child pornography and three counts of possessing child pornography. The Jury listened closely to the testimony of government’s star witness: the doctor’s ex-wife.

Carino, 48, who practiced family medicine in Port Richey, FL, with a specialty in pain management, married a widow with two young children in March 2004. Autumn Carino, 47, worked in her husband’s medical office.

She therefore must have been aware of a DEA investigation of excessive prescriptions for controlled drugs coming out of his office. In fact, the DEA said that one day in March of 2004, her husband wrote 82 prescriptions for phentermine and other easily abused drugs.
Some days he wrote hundreds of prescriptions, the DEA charged.

Eventually, his registration to dispense controlled substances was indefinitely suspended by the state and revoked by the federal government.

But his problems were about to get worse, and therefore so were his wife's. 

Two shocking divorces in Yemen have drawn attention to the plight of child brides. The first case involved a 10-year old wife, Nujood Ali, shown, who walked into a courthouse in April and demanded a divorce. In May another girl, 9, ran to a hospital in Jibla, and told the staff her husband had been beating and abusing her.

The 10-year-old girl, Nujood, The New York Times reported over the weekend, is barely 4 feet tall. Her father, a beggar, married her off to a 30 year old man, he said, for her own good. He wanted to protect her, one of his 16 children, from abduction and forced marriage to someone else, as had happened with her two older sisters.

Her father’s argument was that it’s better if I force her to get married than if someone else forces her to get married.

During Nujood’s time with her husband, she said, he beat her and forced himself on her. She took a taxi to the courthouse in Sana, the capital, her first trip ever alone, and once there found both a lawyer and a kindly judge. When she appeared before him in court, he asked her if she wanted a separation from her husband or a permanent divorce. To see what she answered, in front of her father and her husband, go here.

International Planned Parenthood reports that pregnancies are the leading cause of death for girls between 15 and 19 worldwide. Those below the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women over 20. The problem exists in Yemen, where the typical age of marriage for girls is 12 to 14. According to a 2005 Unicef report, 60 percent of girls 15 to 19 in Niger are married. In Mali, 39 percent of girls are married by age 15. In Ethiopia 50 percent of girls are married by age 15.

Being denied access to your own phone and television might constitute grounds for a lawsuit for some. But when Florida resident Donna Campbell discovered that her husband had done so in order to keep an even bigger offense under wraps — he and 16 other coworkers won the lottery, and he had no intention of sharing — she knew it was time for divorce court.

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The European Economic Union has instituted a temporary measure to limit "divorce shopping," where spouses "battle for the most favorable settlement in different EU courts," explains The Earth Times — most of which involves the speed of processing. Sweden finalizes in six months, while Ireland requires a four-year separation period. Up until 2006, neither party was required to even set foot in Guam to legally split. (Now one party must spend a whopping seven days in the tropical country.)

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As a handful of states legalize same-sex marriage, gay couples will inevitably marry in one state and reside in another. Divorce is another inevitable. The Wall Street Journal June 10, 2008 asks: When the state of residence doesn't recognize a couple's union in the first place, how can the couple dissolve it? Bring the issue of child custody into the mix, and you've got a mess: contradictory state rulings, questionable parental rights, two people who both want to be "Dad" — or "Mom." Such is the case for Lisa Miller (right) and Janet Jenkins, as The New York Times recently reported on their battle for six-year-old Isabella.