TV station: Australian mom, TV crew are freed

This is a serious issue which faces anyone who marries a foreign national in particular those from the middle east. This mother was trying to retrieve her children from Lebanon, sadly she was not successful. She had mounted what was a months long effort to retrieve her children from her ex husband who took them to Lebanon and had not returned them.

She along with members of the Australian current affairs show "60 Minutes" were detained as a result of the attempt. They were facing charges of "kidnapping, physical assault, hiding information and criminal conspiracy."

The charges were dropped after the children were found and returned to her ex-husband.

I hope she doesn't give up because of this setback.

In the U.S. there is a program called the Children's Passport Issuance Alert Program. "Parents may enroll their U.S. citizen children under the age of 18 in the Children’s Passport Issuance Alert Program (CPIAP), one of the Department of State’s most important tools for preventing international parental child abduction. If a passport application is submitted for a child who is enrolled in the CPIAP, the program allows the Department of State, Office of Children’s Issues to contact the requesting parent(s) to verify whether the parental consent requirement for minors has been met."