Week in and week out, dozens of wedding planning stories, some serious and some silly, challenge the Certified Wedding Planner to stay informed of wedding industry news and trends. To help you sift through the barrage of information, each week we will continue to offer a recap of wedding industry headlines from the past seven days.

While wedding planning is being accurately acclaimed as a profitable business option and some industry veterans are reporting business to be improving, many planners are utilizing innovative ways to raise awareness of their services. In an economic atmosphere of downsized budgets, deferred dreams, and wedding debt, some wedding professionals are writing wedding advice columns and sponsoring photography raffles.

In other efforts to counteract the effects of recession, planners in Texas shared their Bridezilla stories in a newspaper contest, County Hall registrars in Britain offered free weddings, and New York City spent over $12 million on new civil-wedding chambers in a bid to overthrow Las Vegas as the world’s top wedding destination.

Internationally, engaged couples in Taiwan have been rushing to the alter to avoid a superstitiously bad 2009, legislation in England is working to protect victims of forced marriage, and in a child wedding story that is more touching than troubling, two very young children in Germany were stopped by police as they attempted a New Year’s Day elopement to Africa.

Meanwhile, the ongoing battle over same-sex marriage rights continued in states, courts, churches, and legislative bodies. Proponents of the California Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage filed a lawsuit to hide the identities of donors to their cause amidst reports of threats and other backlash.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown advanced his challenge to the recent ballot initiative and repudiated a marriage definition bill he signed as governor three decades before. Former congressman and author of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act Bob Barr wrote an op-ed recommending that his legislation defining marriage as between one man and one woman be repealed in favor of states’ rights on the issue.

And in trying to make sense of it all, conservative writer Andrew Sullivan presented a patient perspective on human rights, family dynamics, and the healing power of love and marriage.

As usual, Hollywood had plenty to report from the matrimonial front. Secret weddings were revealed for “Dark Knight” and “Harry Potter” actor Gary Oldman and his fourth wife, jazz singer Alexandra Edenborough, as well as CBS “Late Late Show” host Craig Ferguson and his third wife, art dealer Megan Wallace Cunningham. Similar news was adamantly denied for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, although the former husband of Jennifer Aniston was clear that no adultery precipitated their divorce.

Celebrity couple engagement news included Alyssa Milano promising her hand to Hollywood agent David Bugliari, “High School Musical” star KayCee Stroh singing the praises of her finance Ben Higginson, and Jennifer Love Hewitt cancelling wedding plans with former fiancé Ross McCall. Black Eyed Peas singer Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson made news for her pre-nuptial workout and parties leading up to her scheduled wedding on Saturday to actor Josh Duhmael.

On the reported downside of marriage were Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, and the upcoming movie, “Not Easily Broken”. And continuing the Hollywood trend of mining tragic comedy from the wedding genre, and in the process insulting at least half its audience, the predictable flick “Bride Wars” offered little more than a shallow perspective on good and bad cinematic bridal gowns.

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.

To help the Certified Wedding Planner keep up with the headlines from the past seven days, we offer an overview of the important and the trivial from the week in wedding planning.

With the apparent passage of California’s Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriages, upwards of $370 million in business will be lost to the wedding industry over the next three years, according to a study by UCLA. In continued opposition, the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a petition with the California Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the amendment. Protests are being staged in Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and elsewhere, and a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter is interpreting her new, second-class citizen status to mean there is no need to pay California state taxes. Ironically, an upcoming Hollywood movie, Milk, rings echoes from successful past gay-rights struggles.

Relief came to the 3,000 couples left in limbo by a bankrupt wedding photographer when a judge ordered Celebration Studios to release the photos and videos of their weddings. A more direct wedding perpetrator was caught stealing hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards, cell phones, sunglasses, and various electronic devices from guests’ stored belongings during an event at a Fort Meyers, Florida country club.

In celebrity wedding news, Ashley Olson is denying reports that she is planning a secret, million-dollar wedding in the South of France next summer. The Egyptian renewal of vows between former Scary Spice Girl, Mel B, and film producer Stephan Belafonte is taking place this week without the presence of one-time band mate Victoria Beckham, a.k.a. Posh Spice, and her soccer icon husband, David Beckham.

While actor Kevin Connolly of HBO’s Entourage was busy trying to break up a wedding reception brawl in Naples, Florida, television cooking queen Rachael Ray was turning the nightmare of Hurricane Ike into a mass dream wedding for dozens of displaced couples at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas. In the United Kingdom, a television company has enlisted the help the owner of Flaunt Events, a wedding fair company, to identify engaged couples for a new show called Four Weddings.

The supposed wedding site of the legendary couple, King Arthur and Guinevere, Castle Hill at Knucklas (Welsh for Green Hill), is up for sale in what is billed as a “rare opportunity to purchase a site of historical importance”. In other UK wedding news, a south London couple agreed to exhibit their wedding in a public ceremony as part of artist Emma Smith’s reenactment of celebrations from the 18^th century at historic Orleans House in the London borough of Richmond.

Internationally, cross-cultural weddings are on the rise, a Kenyan couple’s wedding plans are threatened by aspirations for the American dream, an arranged marriage of children to settle a family feud was disrupted by Pakistani police, and the Thailand wedding industry is touting its Buddhist temples, white, sandy beaches, and lush green forests for unique, imaginative destination weddings.

A Malaysian wedding planner has designed a beautiful traditional Indian rangoli display that carpets over 1,200 square meters at the Persada International Convention Centre in Johor, Malaysia. Comprised of five metric tons of broken colored rice and assembled by 35 volunteers over three days, the 30-year-old creator, N. Jeyasimman, hopes to set a world record with his art.

In wedding business, SCORE, reinvented as “Counselors to America’s Small Business” and affiliated with the Small Business Administration, is helping small-business people understand how to differentiate themselves and then market that difference. A wedding planning veteran in Minnesota has started the Green Wedding Planner Blog site to introduce her new business model for brides who want to wear green, environmentally speaking. In Israel, celebrants are taking advantage of farming and industrial land to build celebration halls to provide natural, green settings for weddings and other events.

The Knot was named a finalist for the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Awards for their innovative implementation of social applications, such as the Baynote, Inc. Collective Intelligence Platform, as part of their continued commitment to providing a one-stop wedding resource for their community of brides-to-be. Despite the nomination, shares of The Knot were downgraded by analysts, reflecting slower growth in national advertising and a decline in publishing. Once the actual third quarter earnings defied the conventional thinking and exceeded expectations, stocks of The Knot rose thirty percent.

A St. Petersburg, a Florida couple increased their enjoyment and decreased their wedding budget by holding their celebration in their own back yard. An Owego, New York couple infused their love of Halloween and things that go bump in the night with their love for each other by celebrating their wedding at a local haunted house.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the wedding party caught in the middle of a deadly battle in southern Afghanistan.