With the country embroiled in a tainted-milk scandal, a Chinese woman is suing her husband for the right to breastfeed her son, and therefore prevent her husband from divorcing her.

What is as pure as mother’s milk, or as safe? That’s a question that even Confucius would have trouble debating. But a Chinese court will now have to.

The couple met online and married quickly, in September, 2007. Clearly they didn’t use eHarmony and didn’t know the perils and pitfalls of online dating.

Almost before they got to know each other, a baby was conceived. But while she was pregnant, she says, her husband took too many pregnant pauses. He was away for long stretches of time.

Once the son was born, her husband snatched the baby, telling her, “If you want to see your son, we have to divorce.”

She looked for her son, and finally found him after a frantic search — and with her breasts and temper engorged — at her husband’s sister’s house, and took him away. The victory was short-lived.

The husband went ahead and filed for divorce, but the court rejected his request because it ruled that when a child is still breastfeeding, a husband cannot file for divorce. Dripping with venom, the husband ignored the court’s ruling, rounded up a group of friends, and took the child away again, by force.

How dare he?

Now the wife is suing her husband to get the child back, and to breastfeed without interruption.

The court has yet to rule on this case. But your FWW scribes will keep you abreast of the situation as it unfolds.

Last week, we highlighted the story of a husband who threatened to divorce his ex-smoker wife if she lit up again; this week, cigars are the point of contention.

An otherwise happy Egyptian wife is divorcing her husband — and his stogie habit — reports Russian news source Novosti. The woman alleges that her partner refuses to smoke outside their home, and, consequently, she has developed a heavy allergy.

In her own words:

"My husband deliberately puts my life to danger. And I am not ready to sacrifice my life for the sake of love for him," she said.

She calls him "inflexible"; he calls her "inhumane":

"I am a draftsman engineer, and I often take additional work home to earn more money for my loved but ungrateful wife," he lamented.

Feels like everything's going up in smoke these days...

Gov. Sarah Palin may be not be getting a wink of sleep now that an Alaska state judge allowed a probe to go forward into whether she abused her power. The Republican vice presidential nominee is under fire for pressuring Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her ex brother-in-law, a state trooper.

The charges are that pressure to fire the trooper came from the Governor herself, her husband, Todd, and her staff. After Monegan did not agree, she fired him, citing disagreement over budget cuts.

And to her, that's a heck of a good reason and why should it be questioned otherwise?

On Thursday Judge Peter Michalski threw out the lawsuit filed by five Republican state legislators who claimed that Palin was the victim of an unfair partisan probe. The Republicans appear to be worried that a damaging report may surface before Election Day and affect voters. Or at least the kind of voters who vote based on performance.

The attorney for the five state legislators, Kevin Clarkson, claimed that the body that ordered the investigation had exceeded its authority.

But Michalski agreed with defense attorney Peter Maassen, who argued that the Legislature has broad authority to investigate the governor. The mere appearance of impropriety does not mean any individual's right to fairness was violated, Michalski wrote in his decision.

“It is legitimately within the scope of the legislature's investigatory power to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the termination (of) a public officer the legislature had previously confirmed,” the judge wrote.

On Sunday, October 5, there’s a marathon rebroadcast of the miniseries The Starter Wife, and for any woman going through divorce, this is a delicious way to spend a Sunday morning. The two-hour premier is at 9 am on the USA channel.

The premise: a stay-at-home Hollywood wife gets dumped by her weasely movie-producer husband. Then there are four more episodes, taking you right up to 2 pm and through shock, denial, tears, anger, resignation, and oh yes, having two men fighting over you while you live in a gorgeous Malibu beach house. The actual series begins at 9 pm and midnight (East Coast) on October 10, and you can get up to speed earlier that day asso you need to get up to speed. (And there go Friday nights.)

Debra Messing plays the wife, so you can kind of understand two men fighting over her. But what is it with fictional romances that feature a woman caught between two men? I mean, how often does a divorced woman have two men to choose between? Ok, Nancy Lee seems to have all the men she wants.

But the rest of us?

We can see it on screen, from Philadelphia Story, to Pillow Talk, to Jules and Jim, to Sleepless in Seattle, to Moulin Rouge, and The Notebook. Just this year, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it was a woman choosing between two guys; in Mamma Mia! it was a woman choosing between three men.

This must be the ultimate female fantasy, a wealth in choice of mates, like superheroes are for men.

Debra Messing as Molly has to choose between a wealthy powerful studio head, and a penniless (but hunky and soulful) beach bum. And this is before she and her husband have even negotiated the terms of the divorce!

Of course it’s a gimmick, but it got our attention. If you’re divorced, and headed for marriage No. 2, you probably don’t want to go through the whole formal wedding deal a second time, nor do you want to pay for it.

Now comes “Elope for Obama.”

For all weddings in October, the Brooks Hill Historic Church in Portland, Oregon, will donate the entire rental fee to the Obama presidential campaign. In fact, you’re told to make a check out to Obama for Change.

You can have up to 50 guests. The nondenominational church is on a hillside 20 minutes from downtown Portland. You can choose from any wedding on their website, with rentals from $395 for an intimate two-hour wedding to $695 for a four-hour wedding. Use of the baby grand is included. Local ministers, usually $200 to $300, will pronounce the vows (religious or secular), also at no charge, in support of Barack Obama. Or you can bring your own minister. Everything, of course is subject to availability. And you need to be in Oregon four business days in advance to get your license. Other than that, party on!

What can we say... Portland is that liberal a place. Cindy Lou Banks, the owner of the church, feels that Obama, if elected, would bring a new beginning to the country, and said, “What better way is there for couples to support his election than eloping in October and forging their own new beginnings?"

How does Banks make money from this? Volume!

Oh, and if you reserve the chapel ($150 deposit) and don’t show up for the wedding, they keep your deposit.

We will now give equal time to any lawyer offering a free divorce in honor of John McCain.

"Honey, I've got a headache" could take on a whole new meaning, say Italian researchers. According to expressindia.com, the burden of cheating brings about stress, which leads to a migraine, which can possibly lead to a life-threatening aneurysm.

The researchers studied hundreds of patients. Some of those who reported the worst headaches were also cheating on their spouses.

The funny thing: Instead of backing up the research with additional research material and stats or cautioning women of the signs that husbands may be straying, the President of the Italian Migraine Society, Lorenzo Pinessi, offers helpful tips for the migraine-prone, cheating husbands!

His advice for frazzled adulterers was to "take a time-out from the affair and have a brain scan."

And, according to him, headache-prone cheats should "avoid the Karma Sutra and stick to simple sexual intercourse" to limit pressure on the heart.

"The sexual position chosen can also have affect as the more physical the more pressure on the heart -- it is probably best to avoid positions where the male is on his feet," Pinessi said.

Right. Of course! Please, guys, stick to "simple sexual intercourse"...with your mistress.

Here's what happens when a divisive couple deals with a housing slump. A Cambodian couple resorted to a drastic solution to combat the country's notoriously corrupt and expensive court system by literally — and we mean literally — cutting their house in half.

According to the Khmer-language "Koh Santepheap" newspaper, Meuon Rima sought a divorce from his wife, Nhang, both 40, because she refused to nurse him during a recent illness. They decided to split their house, which was built on stilts, rather than deal with what they considered a diseased court system.

Rima sawed the house down the middle with "surgical precision," the newspaper reported. He was last seen driving away from the village in southeastern Prey Veng province hauling half of the home with him.

It was not known where he had gone with his very detached piece of marital assets, it said. And apparently Rima had not felt the same need to divvy up the couple's two teenage children, both of whom were left with Nhang.

One would argue that the heart of the home is the family, so in that sense he left the home mostly intact. 

FWW has reported on many solutions to deal with divorce and housing, including how to divide the family home and if you should keep the house, but we don’t recommend actually splitting the house. Granted that just last year a man in Germany, facing divorce, chain-sawed a house he shared with his wife in two, and then hauled “his half” away to his brother’s property on a forklift truck.

Usually when couples resort to what is called “The War of the Roses” solution, referring to the 1989 movie about a fractious divorce, they simply keep living there, each taking separate quarters and turning the kitchen into a demilitarized zone.

It’s one of those good news-bad news kind of things, especially for women going through divorce who have chosen to hit the chocolate aisle in the supermarket rather than the liquor store. It has now been conclusively proven that dark chocolate prevents heart attacks. The bad news: it doesn’t take that much.

The study, reported in the September “Journal of Nutrition” and in “Science Daily,” traced the amount of C-reactive protein, which indicates a chronic inflammatory state, in 20,000 Italians. The protein, which can be found with a simple blood test, is a marker for the risk of cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and stroke.

“People having moderate amounts of dark chocolate regularly have significantly lower levels of C-reactive protein in their blood,” said Romina di Giuseppi, the lead author of the study. “In other words, their inflammatory state is considerably reduced.”

The beneficial effect is due, she said, to the antioxidants in dark (but not in milk) chocolate, in particular the flavonoids and other polyphenols. Decreasing the C-reactive protein level, she added, would reduce cardiovascular disease for women by one-third and for men by one-quarter.

The Catholic University in Campobasso, Italy, which sponsored the study, said that while chocolate has long been assumed to be heart healthy, this is the first time it was proven conclusively in a population study.

So how much is good for you? Let’s put it this way: maybe it’s better to eat dark chocolate as a reward for filing a set of papers, rather than as a way to get through filling out those papers. To achieve maximum effectiveness, women should consume about 3 ½ ounces a week. There is no further benefit (other than pleasure) after that.

Here's another reason that life is full of possibility, and that if your first marriage didn’t work, perhaps the next one will. A recent survey in Parade magazine found that 88 percent of couples interviewed said they were — drum roll, please — happy or reasonably content in their marriages. Yippee.

Another hopeful nugget on the state of matrimony was that half of the couples used words like "joyful" or "loving" to portray their marraiges. Furthermore, 71 percent of these couples said they've stayed married because of deep love while 73 percent also cited the magic word — the desire for companionship.

Why does this not surprise me? For starters, I am a happily re-married woman who adores her husband after 15 years of being together. Although the study didn't break down whether many of these participants were in second marriages, I would bet that many were.

Here's a little secret rarely reported: We learn from our mistakes. Sometimes you can have two good people who just aren't good for each other. That was certainly the case in my first marriage. I learned who I was and who I wasn't. (Also learned who he was and wasn't...and then said good-bye).

Because I was younger, I didn't know myself as well. Qualities like being cute and adoring went high up on the husband-to-be resumé. Didn't really focus on such important factors as whether we shared common values, heritage, or ways to spend Sunday afternoons. Also, you grow more tolerant over time, realizing that sometimes it really is ok to agree to disagree.

So the Parade survey wasn’t too surprising. Plus we like happy endings and new beginnings at FWW.