To help the Certified Wedding Planner keep up with current events from the last seven days, we offer an overview of wedding news you may have missed.

Many businesses are using innovative offers to attract brides and grooms. Engaged couples are being promised a complimentary room each year for life when they book their wedding at New York’s Renaissance Westchester Hotel. In St. Louis, a wedding boutique is drawing business from all over the country by offering wedding gowns for pregnant brides and the Brides Across America campaign continued to thrill military brides with free wedding gowns.

A Wisconsin couple’s western-themed wedding included Garth Brooks and Slim Whitman as well as the entire wedding party on horseback. More couples are going green by choosing farms as their wedding venue. In venue tip news, backyard weddings are reported to reduce cost and enhance memories while creative draperies and lighting can be used to evoke a celebrity-style wedding.

Preferred wedding vendor lists are a crucial component of the wedding planner’s tool kit, but be wary of paid advertising masquerading as vetted referrals. Controversy over beach wedding permits in Hawaii reached the negotiation stage between religious groups and the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

A Minnesota police officer, in collusion with a local jewelry store, proposed to his fiancé using a highway billboard. Many husbands-to-be are becoming more involved in wedding planning, but wedding planners are cautioned to beware of Groomzilla.

Hollywood made its usual wedding news splash as Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green denied rumors of the end of their four year relationship and are planning an intimate wedding ceremony. Jessica Alba and Cash Warren intend to continue the Hollywood tradition of following an intimate ceremony with a second, tabloid-worthy wedding bash. Kelly Osbourne announced her engagement to British model Luke Worrell.

Today’s episode of the Rachel Ray Show featured the mass wedding of 33 brides displaced by Hurricane Ike, Lifetime Network’s show Get Married named wedding design guru Colin Cowie as its new host, and Ellen DeGeneres fought back tears on her talk show as a seven-year-old piano prodigy performed a song she had written for the newlywed host and her wife, Portia De Rossi, called “Once Upon a Wish”.

The continued fallout from the November 4^th ballot measures banning same-sex marriage in three states included a California Supreme Court challenge, boycotts and vandalism of supporters of the bans, and the Mormon Church receiving suspicious packages and threats for their perceived roll in the controversy. Meanwhile, gay marriages began in Connecticut, Vermont and Illinois geared up as the next battlegrounds, and Subway Restaurants and the eHarmony dating company responded to gay activists’ complaints by tailoring their businesses away from discrimination to be more inclusive of alternative lifestyles.

Internationally, schoolgirls in Scotland are learning how to become wedding planners in a class project designed to spark their imaginations and teach organizational skills and wedding planners in Bollywood are inspiring a generation of betrothed with elaborate wedding backdrops on television and movie sets. Brides and grooms agonized over rising wedding costs in New Zealand while a distraught father in India was awarded compensation for a wedding transportation no-show for his son’s nuptials.

Meanwhile, brides are being targeted by con artists in Australia and the British government moved to strengthen marriage by making pre-nuptial agreements binding and reducing the rights of cohabitating couples.

In wedding financial news, while the economy is apparently good for the wedding industry in North Carolina, a stock market watch site is questioning whether the wedding industry is good for the economy. The combination of fewer brides and more wedding vendors is driving the need to diversify and innovate to survive. Some wedding chapels are experiencing a drop in business and brides are responding to economic pressures by cutting wedding costs and taking on wedding debt.

In Arizona, delayed unemployment checks ruined one couple’s wedding plans. In the United Kingdom, the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company offered peace of mind to engaged couples strapped for cash and concerned about a wedding cancellation with a new wedding insurance policy.

The saga of rogue wedding photographers continued as a couple in New Jersey finally received their wedding photos after a two year battle. Not as fortunate, nearly 300 newlywed brides and grooms gathered in a Staten Island, NY hotel with hopes that their runaway bankrupt photographer or, more importantly, their missing pictures and videos had been located.

In offbeat wedding news, the internationally popular Second Life virtual world further imitated real life when the couple who married after meeting in the game planned to divorce after the husband was caught committing cyber adultery. In the U.S., Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested Jie Hua Zhou on charges that she arranged over 100 fake marriages for $20,000 to $50,000 each to help non-citizens bypass immigration laws.

On a happier note, a wedding ring thought lost forever off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii was found and returned to the gleeful newlywed husband and a wedding planning class at the University of South Carolina put their academic studies to practical use by planning a free wedding for a pair of their classmates.

Tags: Certified Wedding Planner, Wedding Industry News, Wedding Industry Trends, Wedding Planning News, Wedding Planning Trends

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