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For years, reports have suggested that Afghanistan is sitting on massive deposits of copper, gold, iron and rare earth minerals valued up to $3 trillion. This provides hope for a future economy that would not have to rely so heavily on foreign donations.

But with an uncertain political, regulatory and security environment, international investors are hesitant. And it could be many years before Afghanistan begins extracting its mineral wealth.

The Afghan Geological Survey office in Kabul is one of the few agencies in the country that measure up to international standards. Here, a U.S. government task force is helping train and advise Afghan geologists in processing samples from potential mining sites.

On a recent day, technicians are busy cataloging core samples from North Aynak in Logar province, about 30 miles south of Kabul. Afghan and U.S. geologists are evaluating the site's potential as a copper mine.

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The British Foreign Office is happy to assist its citizens, but officials want to make clear that there are some requests they won't fulfill.

Such as supplying Olympic tickets or doing a background check on that Swedish woman you met online.

Those are just a few of the "often good natured" but distracting requests that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) says it received over the past year, according to a press release issued Thursday.

Some others that no doubt provided stodgy British bureaucrats with some much-needed levity:

— A man who required hospital treatment in Cambodia when a monkey dislodged a stone that hit him demanded help getting compensation and wanted assurance that it would not happen again.

— A man asked FCO staff in Rome to translate a phrase for a tattoo that he wanted.

— A woman requested that consular staff in Tel Aviv order her husband to get fit and eat healthily so that they could have children.

— A man asked the consulate in Montreal for information to settle a 1,000-pound wager on the color of the British passport.

— A number of British Consulates have been asked to book hotels or to advise on where to watch football.

"FCO staff help many thousands of British nationals facing serious difficulties around the world every year," says Mark Simmonds, minister of consular affairs. "We also receive over a million inquiries each year, so it is important that people understand what we can and cannot do to support them when they are abroad.

"We are not in a position to help people make travel arrangements or social plans, but we do help those who face real problems abroad. These can include victims of crime, bereaved families who have lost a loved one abroad or Britons who have been arrested or detained," Simmonds says.

"We aim to continue to focus on supporting those who really need our help in the coming year," he says.

After a long bumpy ride that started five years ago, the domestic airline industry seems to be pulling up and smoothing out.

The number of passengers planning to fly this summer will tick up 1 percent from 2012, climbing back to the highest level since 2008, an industry group said Thursday.

Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

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