The House of Representatives approved Thursday a bill necessary for Japan to ratify an international treaty to help settle cross-border child custody disputes, making it certain that it will be enacted during the current Diet session through June after upper house deliberations.

For more than a year Yassamane and Eric have been waiting to adopt a child in Morocco. But a decision to tighten the adoption law has thrown the whole process into doubt, leaving dozens of hopeful foreign couples in limbo. Kafala as it is known in Morocco, or "custody" in Arabic, allows Muslims -- including converts to Islam -- to assume the guardianship of orphans in the North African nation. The same conditions apply in most Muslim countries, where religion is a determining factor in the adoption process.

French researchers on Tuesday dealt a blow to folklore that says mothers are better than fathers in recognising their baby's cry. The "maternal instinct" notion gained scientific backing more than three decades ago through two experiments, one of which found that women were nearly twice as accurate as men in identifying the cry of their offspring. But the new study says men and women are equally skilled at this -- and accuracy depends simply on the amount of time that a parent spends with the child.

There is a Russian proverb, “If you go to war pray once; if you go on a sea journey pray twice; but pray three times if you are going to be married.” One lawyer, who specializes in divorce cases, couldn’t agree more.“Everyone gets married to be happy - nobody expects a divorce to end their marriage. But, if you see how many couples end up divorcing, the number is just startling,” Lee In-chul, 39, said in a recent interview with The Korea Times.According to Statistics Korea, 320,000 couples tied the knot in 2010 and 120,000 pairs divorced.