Algeria Announces Major Oil Discovery

Algeria’s energy minister says a new oil field containing an estimated 1.3 billion barrels has been discovered.

Youcef Yousfi told the state news agency Saturday that the discovery near the large oil fields in the southern region of Hassi Messaoud is one of the most important in the last 20 years.

He added the state oil company, Sonatrach, will rely on unconventional techniques to extract 50 percent of the reserves, including hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking.

The field will be exploited in the next three to four years following the necessary studies, the report added.

Algeria, an energy giant in Africa that already is one of the largest natural gas suppliers to Europe, had been concerned about declining oil reserves.

How To Stop International Parental Child Abduction

International Parental Child Abduction is a complex legal matter that requires a deep understanding of domestic and international law combined with keen awareness of warning signs that may indicate an illicit scheme is being planned or has been implemented against a targeted parent and child. The following suggestions may be extremely helpful to you:

1.    To begin, the gravest mistake any person who may suspect they are targeted for abduction can do is to do nothing.  Time is the most critical element. As history has demonstrated over-and-over, when a parent who suspects that abduction may be in play does nothing, they usually become left behind parents chasing into the cyclones of abduction. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of children are ever returned home. Thus, if you think you and your child are possible suspects of international abduction, you must act now.

2.     We urge you to review the I CARE Foundation's Warning Signs of International Parental Child Abduction. Carefully take notes as to what may and may not apply to your unique situation.

3.     If any of the Warning Signs of International Parental Child Abduction are present, we urge you to consult with a qualified attorney who is deeply familiar with international parental child abduction prevention, reunification, and theHague Convention of the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  One of the greatest mistakes that any targeted parent can make is to hire a family law attorney who does not have significant familiarity with international child abduction prevention and reunification matters.  Sadly, we have seen numerous cases where failures by legal counsel not familiar with the complexities of international abduction cases has eventually led to targeted parents and their children being unprotected due to poor legal strategies.  Do not make this mistake.  If you are in need of a qualified attorney familiar with international child abduction matters, the I CARE Foundation may be able to provide a referral to you. Please contactlegal@stopchildabduction.org for more information. 

4.    In the event you believe there is an Abduction in Progress, you must act immediately. This includes contacting your local and national police as well as the Central Authority of the country you live in.  For example, the United States Department of State's Office of Children's Issues acts as the Central Authority for the United States.  For a list of Central Authorities, please click here.

5.     In the United States, there are abduction prevention tools available for at-risk parents including the Passport Issuance Alert Program and the Prevent Departure Program that may be extremely beneficial toward protecting children. 

6.     In North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean, parents need to be aware of loopholes found in the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative that may enable an abductor to wrongfully remove a child from their country of habitual residency.

7.     In all cases where there appears to be an abduction risk we suggest targeted parents immediately consult with a highly qualified attorney and discuss seeking an emergency order to obtain sole full custody of the at-risk children along with placing specific travel restrictions for the children including specifically that the child is not to be removed from the city or county, state or province, and country they live in.  We advise that travel restrictions include the child is not permitted to travel on any cruise ship as per the risks associated with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

8.     Dual Citizenship with individuals possessing dual passports presents a serious challenge for at-risk parents and their targeted children.  Knowing how to defend against Dual Citizens intending to abduct a child is critical, particularly since there is a large increase in multi-national marriages/partnerships. There are several important issues worth addressing including that in many countries only one parent's signature is required to obtain a passport. In addition, many nations will not acknowledge to a non-national parent if a passport has been issued in the name of their dual-citizen child. Thus, it is rather easy for a parent who possesses dual citizenship or is a sole citizen of another country to state to the court possessing jurisdiction of a child that they either have never applied for a foreign passport for the child, or if they have, they are no longer in possession of it (they have lost it), as the court typically has no way to verify the validity of their statement. For assistance in the United States dealing with foreign passport issuance issues, please contact the I CARE Foundation at legal@stopchildabduction.org.

9.    The majority of international parental child abductions occurs when a child is wrongfully detained in a foreign country. Often the abducting parent misleads their targeted parent into thinking that travel abroad is for a family trip or due to a family illness. Often, the scheming parent will even invite the other parent to travel abroad with them. However, once in a foreign country with the child, the scheming parent will often make false claims of domestic violence or child abuse, seek to have their targeted parent arrested, often successfully obtain a restraining order against that person so that the target cannot have contact with the child, and, while this is all going on, the scheming parent will seek an emergency court order in the country they are in seeking for that court to take jurisdiction of the case, grant the scheming parent sole custody while denying any access to the other parent.

For any parent who is considering allowing a child to travel abroad, regardless if you think your relationship with the other parent is in good standing or not, or, if there is a court order directing the child to travel with the other parent, we urge you to utilize the I CARE Foundation's Hague-centric International Travel Child Consent Form as this tool was created to protect against legal arguments associated with the wrongful retention of a child abroad. For more information please contact the I CARE Foundation at legal@stopchildabudction.org.

10.    In the United States, know that the Office of Children's Issues is dedicated to assisting in the prevention of child abduction. 

Should Parents Post Pictures of Their Kids on Facebook?

This week marked another dust-up in the debate about oversharenting—that is, parents sharing too much information about their kids online.

At Slate, Amy Webb argued parents are “creating a generation of kids born into digital sin.” She and her husband post nothing—no photos, no videos—about their daughter online to protect her anonymity. Andrew Leonard at Salon fired back, “We are strengthening the ties that bind a larger community of family and friends together” by sharing our kids’ lives with a select few on social media.

Wherever you stand, most parents are doing it. According to a recent study done by print site Posterista, 94 percent of parents in the United Kingdom post pictures of their kids online. And 64 percent of parents upload images of their children to social media outlets at least three times a week.

Plus, even if you strike for total anonymity for your child like Webb does, it’s still difficult to succeed. In the comments section of Webb’s post, someone boasted to have tracked down the name, photo and saved website domain of her child. So much for anonymity.

Given that our kids are necessarily exposed, what happens in 10 or 15 years when a child inherits a Facebook page already full of embarrassing baby photos?

“It may be that we have to negotiate with our kids a little bit more about what’s acceptable or not or give them the ability to take down photographs they don’t want there,” says Stephen Balkman, who leads the Family Online Safety Institute.

He sees the new phenomenon as an opportunity to teach kids about online reputation. “When your kids get to be 11 or 12, sit down and Google their name with them. Go through their Timeline. See if they want what’s up there, and if they don’t, delete it,” he says. “But by looking at all this they’ll better grasp the benefits and consequences of sharing information.”

But that conversation is not always easy. “As parents are starting at a very young age posting anything and everything on Facebook, then it will be hard as parents to say to your child as a teenager, ‘That’s not appropriate to post,’ when parents have been posting information about them for their entire lives,” says Dr. Mary Beth DeWitt, director of psychology at Dayton Children’s Hospital.

And what may be even more problematic are the psychological implications of growing up without anonymity. There was plenty of admonishing following Miley Cyrus’s shenanigans at the Video Music Awards about the ill effects of constant exposure and living in the spotlight from a young age. Well in a way, that’s what is happening to this generation of kids, albeit on a smaller scale. From before birth—when moms are posting pictures of their sonograms on Instagram—parents expose their children’s information to family, friends, acquaintances and total strangers online. And it has yet to be seen how today’s toddlers will deal with their inherited online identities as teenagers.

“We’re still exploring this since it’s so new. Hopefully a parent posting on Facebook about their child won’t make a child feel like that defined who they are, but it’s a concern,” says Dewitt.

“I would tell parents to look back and think how they would feel if their parents posted about them online for everyone to see and use that as the guideline for what’s appropriate and what isn’t.”

Finally, The First Home Pregnancy Test That Tells You How Pregnant You Are

For more than 30 years, DIY pregnancy tests have been the first hint for women about whether or not they are expecting. And now they may also have the power to reveal how far along the pregnancy is.

Here’s how it works. The Clearblue Advanced Pregnancy Test with Weeks Estimator contains two strips instead of the standard single strip. Both strips measure a hormone women produce when they are pregnant, called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), that appears after fertilization. hCG levels increase significantly in a woman’s urine during the early weeks of pregnancy, and start to decline 11 weeks into the pregnancy. Like standard pregnancy tests, the new one measures hCG levels. But the second hCG detection strip uses the hormone to estimate the length of the pregnancy based on time since ovulation. If a woman is indeed pregnant, the test will read: “Pregnant,” as well as list either: 1-2, 2-3 or 3+ to indicate by how many weeks.

The test is already available for women in Europe, where Clearblue launched it in 2008. The Food and Drug Administration approved the kit for market in December 2012, and starting September 1, the test will have widespread availablity to American women in all major retailers. Clearblue’s clinical trials included 2,000 women and 5,000 tested urine samples and determined that hCG measurement was effective and accurate for estimating the time since a woman’s last ovulation. The company says the test is 99% accurate at detecting pregnancy from the day of a woman’s expected period, and about 93% accurate in estimating the number of weeks.

“Through our consumer research, we found consumers were really wanting more information at the beginning of pregnancy. In fact, 78% of women in our research study feel that knowing how far along you are at the beginning of pregnancy is very important,” says Ryan Daly, the Marketing Director at Procter & Gamble, which makes the test. “We’re excited to bring this to the U.S. because there is nothing else like it. Consumers have been looking for more information and answers in the pregnancy test category and there hasn’t been any innovation since the digital pregnancy test was launched.”

To estimate how far along a woman is, doctors typically work off the date of her last menstrual period, as well as an ultrasound reading to document physical changes in the womb that can date a pregnancy. But not all women keep accurate track of their periods, and many have irregular cycles, so these dates aren’t always reliable for dating pregnancies. Ultrasounds can improve on the accuracy, based on doctors’ assessments of the baby’s development, but these images typically aren’t useful until the woman is at least eight weeks along.

The new test is not meant to be used as a substitute for these doctor’s methods, since ultrasound imaging is the gold standard for dating pregnancy. But the home-based test could be helpful and reassuring for women until they are able to get a confirmation from their physician. “We are living in an era where everyone wants an instant and immediate answer and have as much information as they can get, says Dr. Rebecca Brightman, an OBGYN at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “There are certain women with underlying medical problems or behaviors that I would like to see sooner rather than later for pre-pregnancy counseling. The more information I can get the more it helps me as a clinician.”

The test may be more helpful for certain groups of women and their doctors; for those who have irregular period, for example, it could pinpoint the timing of a pregnancy more accurately in the period before ultrasound can be used. “I think some patients [for] who have really irregular periods [it] might be helpful, but I think that for most women who have regular monthly periods, I don’t think it is going to give them a lot more information,” says Dr. Christine Proudfit, assistant professor, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

There’s also some debate over how predictive hCG levels are in dating pregnancy. Its levels can fluctuate in the first weeks of gestation, and even remain low in some women. That’s one reason why doctors–and Clearblue–say it can’t replace an ultrasound and clinical diagnosis. “Earlier on in pregnancy, there’s a much narrower range of hCG levels, but as pregnancy progresses, there becomes a much wider range. Using it to actually date a pregnancy is much more challenging once you’re a few weeks along, which is usually about when we actually see patients,” says Proudfit.

For some, the value of the new test may simply be historical. Women treasure their tests as reminders of their first steps toward parenthood, and pregnancy tests themselves have experienced an interesting evolution. “As infertility became more of a part of the national conversation in the 1990s, I think the pregnancy test [took] on a different kind of symbolism. It’s not seen as just for teenagers or college students or unmarried women,” says Sarah Leavitt, who authored an extensive history of the pregnancy test when she was a historian at the National Institute of Health (NIH).

However women end up using the latest version of the test, most doctors say the additional information it can provide is a welcome addition, and hope it will prompt women to seek prenatal care sooner rather than later, which can improve their chances of having a healthy pregnancy as well as healthy children.

Mission All-But-Impossible: Destroying Syria’s Chemical Weapons from the Air

Taking out Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile isn’t easy – and is fraught with perils, including creating plumes of deadly vapors that could kill civilians downwind of such attacks.

That’s why Pentagon officials suggest that any U.S. and allied military strike against Syria will tilt toward military, and command and control, targets —including artillery and missile units that could be used to launch chemical weapons — instead of the bunkers believed to contain them.

Secretary of State John Kerry made clear Monday that military action is all but inevitable in the coming days. “We know that the Syrian regime maintains custody of these chemical weapons. We know that the Syrian regime has the capacity to do this with rockets,” he said. “President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people.”

But targeting the weapons themselves may not make the most military sense.

For starters, neither the U.S. nor its allies know where Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is keeping his cache of hundreds of tons of sarin, mustard gas and other chemical agents. That means that any military strike to take them out will surely leave some untouched.

After more than two years of civil war, the Syrian military has distributed many of its chemical arms beyond the original 15 or so major storage sites where Western intelligence agencies believe they were housed when the conflict began. “Dispersing the stuff would make [attacking it] more difficult,” says Eliot Cohen, a former Pentagon official now at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Blowing up storage sites, he warns, also could “leave the facilities so shattered that people can come in and pick the stuff up that you don’t want them to pick up.”

Secondly, the Obama Administration and its allies aren’t considering deploying troops to seize and secure such weapons. The Pentagon has estimated that mission could take 75,000 troops.

Last month, Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, detailed for Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the armed services committee, the difficulties associated with using military force to seize control of Syria’s chemical stockpile.

“We do this by destroying portions of Syria’s massive stockpile, interdicting its movement and delivery, or by seizing and securing program components,” he said in his July 19 letter assessing U.S. military options in Syria. “At a minimum, this option would call for a no-fly zone as well as air and missile strikes involving hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines, and other enablers. Thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces would be needed to assault and secure critical sites.”

Neither the nation—nor President Obama—has any desire for U.S. combat boots on Syrian soil. So U.S. defense officials are weighing air strikes to punish Assad’s government for their suspected use of chemical weapons. But because the Pentagon doesn’t want to put primarily U.S. pilots at risk of being shot down and held hostage by Damascus, it’s leaning toward the use of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles—TLAMs—against Syrian targets.

Unfortunately for U.S. war planners, Tomahawk cruise missiles pack a relatively puny 1,000-pound warhead. That’s unlikely to punch through buried chemical-weapons bunkers and generate the intense, sustained heat needed to incinerate sarin or other chemical weapons inside.

“Doing this with Tomahawks is going to be a challenge,” says Amy Smithson, a chemical-weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. “You may get half of them with Tomahawks, but I have plume concerns—anybody in the neighborhood is going to be in big, bad trouble” if the poisonous agents drift their way.

Bulk chemicals not already loaded into individual shells are especially vulnerable to being spread by bombing. That’s why Smithson believes that Western governments should provide those near targeted chemical-storage sites with protective gear before launching any attacks. “Syrian civilians and rebel forces,” she says, “could benefit greatly from gas masks.”

Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, sketched out a likely U.S. military response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons in that July letter to Levin. He termed it Conduct Limited Stand-off Strikes:

This option uses lethal force to strike targets that enable the regime to conduct military operations, proliferate advanced weapons, and defend itself. Potential targets include high-value regime air defense, air, ground, missile, and naval forces as well as the supporting military facilities and command nodes. Stand-off air and missile systems could be used to strike hundreds of targets at a tempo of our choosing.

Cohen is leery of a tit-for-tat strike that he fears the Obama Administration is considering. The apparent indiscriminate use of deadly agents against civilians, he argues, requires a disproportionate response by the U.S. to convince other states from doing the same.

“You want people to understand that, if you do this, you lose your war,” Cohen says. The Obama Administration should consider destroying Syria’s air force, its air defenses, and many of its airfields to retaliate if Syria’s use of chemical weapons is confirmed. “The objective,” he argues, “should be crippling the regime.”

Why U.S. Embassy Closures Will Keep Coming

The U.S. shuttered 22 of its embassies this week across the Middle East and North Africa due to “credible threats” from al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations, a phenomenon that is likely to become the norm rather than the exception.

In the age of terrorism, U.S. embassies have become appealing and symbolic targets. Following twin attacks in 1998 on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds of people, funding for embassy security rose 1,000-fold to a high of $2.6 billion in 2012. And yet, that was still not enough to save the lives of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last September. Since then, Congress has made yet another push to beef up embassy security, doubling Marine guards and allotting more money to building walls, barriers and in some cases even moats.

State is in the process of implementing all 29 recommendations of the Accountability Review Board, which was set up to review the failures that allowed the Benghazi attack to succeed. And money for the most part has been flowing in ways not seen since post-9/11 years. Some 150 new diplomatic security personnel have been added or are in training. President Obama requested money in his 2014 budget to retrain Marines to protect personnel in addition to top-secret documentation, which was until recently the Marines’ primary objective in deploying to the 270 diplomatic posts the U.S. maintains around the world. New alarms and cameras are being installed, with new abilities. Some cameras even give off alerts when they detect a car going the wrong way down an adjacent one-way street.

But in the meantime, no amount of security is going to be able to protect all embassies and U.S. personnel 100% of the time. And despite the risk to American lives, it is diplomacy in the most dangerous of places that yields the greatest reward. “If we are going to bring light to the world, we have to go where it is dark,” Secretary of State John Kerry told the Foreign Service Institute’s Overseas Security Seminar in May. As the Arab Spring roils on, the State Department has decided shuttering embassies when there are serious threats is a preferable compromise to closing them permanently, or walling them off in ivory towers. “Retreating behind the wire,” Kerry said, “cannot be the way that we do business.”

So the current U.S. policy is to strike a balance, with temporary closures in high risk areas, and a permanent presence in parts of the world where U.S. officials know they will not be able to always conduct regular business every day.

Pope Francis Says He Does Not Judge Gay Priests

Today the Pope stated that he does not judge gays—a statement that will send shockwaves through the church. His comments were short, subtle, but unmistakably direct. “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized,” he told reporters on his return flight from Rio de Janeiro to Rome. “The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem … they’re our brothers.”

The Pope also criticized journalists for reporting on allegations of homosexuality within the Vatican, saying those matters concerned questions of sin, not crimes, like the sexual abuse of children. He said when someone sins and confesses, God both forgives and forgets. “We don’t have the right to not forget,” he said.

The Pope is the voice of God for hundreds of millions of people around the world. His attitude is a marked departure from his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, who signed a document in 2005 stating that gay men could not become priests. Now bishops all over the world are going to wonder what the Pope’s statement means for them in their own churches.

The most crucial response to the Pope’s comments may come from countries whose governments and cultures are far less open to gays and lesbians than the United States and Europe. Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, gay activity can be a crime, and violence against gays and lesbians is common. But the country is also nearly 50% Catholic, and if the Catholic Church adopted an attitude like Pope Francis is modeling, the climate toward the gay community could dramatically change.

The response in the United States will also be significant. When the Pope speaks and takes a position on an issue, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops is not going to directly contradict him. Now visible Cardinals across the country will have to consider what steps they will take to not judge or marginalize their gay brothers and sisters. For example, a gay Catholic couple in Oceanside, NY, has been petitioning Cardinal Dolan to break bread with them since Easter. Dolan has not responded to the request, arguing that the couple lives outside his community, and that they want to foster debate. Now the Pope is setting a moral example that indicates he himself would probably dine with them, and that puts Dolan in a tight position.

As the Pope opened up about gays, he reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s position that women cannot become priests. “On the ordination of women, the church has spoken and said no,” he said. “John Paul II, in a definitive formulation, said that door is closed.” But he also argued that the Catholic church has an underdeveloped theology of women, and he seemed to suggest that the church needs to deepen its understanding of women and their roles in society. He reminded listeners that he holds women in the highest regard: “The Madonna is more important than the apostles, and the church herself is feminine, the spouse of Christ and a mother.”