Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wedding: Actress's father Jon Voight was 'not invited' to the private nuptials in France

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s wedding was probably one of the most eagerly anticipated high profile nuptials since those that cared about the royal wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011.
Yet somehow, they managed to keep the whole event, held at the $60million (£36million) Chateau Miraval in the south of France the couple purchased in 2008, so under wraps, no-one realised it had even taken place until some days afterwards.
Jolie’s father, Jon Voight, found out about it around about the same time that everyone else did. And by everyone else, we mean the rest of the world, because the veteran actor wasn’t actually invited.
Questioned about the nuptials on Thursday morning (28 August), Voight apparently told TMZ that he first read about them via an online news site.
Asked whether he was upset not to be invited, he responded by saying he was busy with the Emmy Awards anyway, having been nominated for a prize for his portrayal of the character Mickey Donovan in TV series Ray Donovan.
Jolie and Voight have endured a turbulent relationship in the past. Back in 2001, Voight told Access Hollywood that Jolie had been suffering from "serious mental problems" and said that he had urged her to seek professional help.
Following his comments, the then 26-year-old fired back by telling reporters she did not consider it "healthy" for her to be in his company.
They eventually reconciled in 2011, sometime after the incident and after Jolie had amassed a total of six children.
"I suddenly saw things differently and everything shifted," Voight said of the change in attitude that led to the pair repairing their relationship. "That one moment changed my whole life. It gave me back my daughter and my family. Being reunited with my Angie is very precious to me. I adore my grandchildren, they are my great love. It makes me so emotional and grateful."
Pitt’s immediate family were all reportedly in attendance.
However, comments made by Voight to Good Morning Britain earlier hinted that his absence from the ceremony had been amicable.
"I'm very happy that I can legitimately call him my son-in-law, this wonderful fellow who I love," he told the ITV show.
"You know what they are very happy. The kids must have had a wonderful time at the wedding, they all had their things to do and it must have been very beautiful so I'm very happy for them.
"She's working now with Brad, and I've got a couple of things to do, but as soon as we can we'll get together and it's going to be exciting."
Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died in January 2007 after suffering from ovarian cancer.
Earlier this month, Voight stirred controversy when he accused Penelopé Cruz and her husband Javier Bardem of 'inciting anti-Semitism' after they signed an open letter condemning the Israeli government’s Palestinian 'genocide'.
In response, Voight, who is famously pro-Israel, penned a strongly-worded letter published on Variety.com.
"My name is Jon Voight and I am more than angry," it begins. "I am heartsick that people like Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem could incite anti-Semitism all over the world and are oblivious to the damage they have caused.
"They are obviously ignorant of the whole story of Israel’s birth, when in 1948 the Jewish people were offered by the UN a portion of the land originally set aside for them in 1921, and the Arab Palestinians were offered the other half.
"The Arabs rejected the offer, and the Jews accepted, only to be attacked by five surrounding Arab countries committed to driving them into the sea."
He goes on to claim that Israel, after years of being at war with the Palestinian people, gave them the Gaza strip as a gesture of peace. He ends the piece by pleading for famous names in the entertainment industry to re-address their anti-IDF stances.
"I am asking all my peers who signed that poison letter against Israel to examine their motives. Can you take back the fire of anti-Semitism that is raging all over the world now?
"You have been able to become famous and have all your monetary gains because you are in a democratic country: America. Do you think you would have been able to accomplish this in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, et cetera?
"You had a great responsibility to use your celebrity for good. Instead, you have defamed the only democratic country of goodwill in the Middle East: Israel.
"You should hang your heads in shame," he concludes. "You should all come forth with deep regrets for what you did, and ask forgiveness from the suffering people in Israel."

Neither Angelina Jolie, nor Brad Pitt, have publicly shared their views on the conflict.

Resort explosion ruins Canadian couple's destination wedding

A Canadian couple’s dream destination wedding in the Dominican Republic turned into a nightmare situation following an explosion at their resort.
And even months after the blast tore through the Dreams Punta Cana, the wedding guests say they're not satisfied with the resort's response to the incident or its explanation as to what was behind the explosion.
"When you see the big shards of glass at our table, you realize how serious an incident this was and how fortunate we are that we weren't more seriously injured," wedding guest John Yannitsos told CTV Calgary.
An explosion rocked the five-star resort on May 10 -- a day after a Calgary couple celebrated their wedding with about 70 guests.
The bride's father Brad Laforge said while the wedding day was perfect, things took a frightening turn the following night.
"I heard the explosion, felt a shockwave and saw an orange glow and heat coming at us," Laforge recalled.
Photos from the scene of the explosion show the ceiling completely collapsed inside a restaurant, debris, including shattered glass, covering the tables and a raging fire just outside the establishment.
The group said they were left to try to locate their loved ones on their own.
"There was no presence of management or security to support us," Yannitsos said.
The group escaped the blast with cuts and bruises and they were treated by a doctor in their party.
The local fire department said in a statement that the accident was the result of high winds which caused the ceiling inside one of the resort's restaurants to collapse. It said the explosion was caused by "a derivative of petroleum or other chemical."
The fire department said one person suffered burns that were caused by steam.
Officials inspected the resort and on May 13 concluded that: "the hotel complies with fire safety standards of the Dominican Republic, and excluding the affected are, they can continue their normal operations.”
But the group's lawyer said the guests are not satisfied with the resort's response to the explosion and are reviewing their legal options.
Air Canada Vacations and West Jet Vacations declined to comment on the matter and Dreams Punta Cana has yet to respond to CTV Calgary.
Meanwhile, months after the explosion, some wedding guests continue to attend physiotherapy for their injuries and others are receiving counselling.

"It was just handled so poorly," Laforge said. "It was horrible and continues to be."

Bride-to-be postpones wedding plans to search for missing dad

A New York bride-to-be has postponed planning her wedding to search for her missing father, reports CBS New York.
Raymond Locascio reportedly vanished July 8, hours after being fitted for a tuxedo for his daughter Suzanne's October wedding. Family told the station the 62-year-old was excited for the event, and was talking about which song to choose for the father-daughter dance.
"He had gone that morning and actually called and talked to me about his tux," Suzanne Locascio told the station. "He was excited for it."
Raymond Locascio is a bank courier who lives with his wife of 41 years in Cornwall, about 60 miles north of New York City, family tells the station. He reportedly dropped his wife Barbara off the afternoon of July 8 in Monroe, about 12 miles southwest of his home, on his way east to his work in Peekskill.
He never made it.
Two days later, his 2006 mint green Ford Taurus was found off the road in Woodbury adjacent to the entrance of numerous hiking trails in Bear Mountain State Park. His family told the station the location of the car was unusual, because it was on a route that led back to Monroe, not to his work in Peekskill.
His family is concerned he could have gotten lost in an area with spotty cell service.
"He's a diabetic. He hadn't had lunch. He works crazy hours. He had been up since two in the morning," his wife Barbara told the station.
Police haven't ruled out foul play, suicide or an accident, reports the station. While the father of the bride reportedly had money problems and his home was in foreclosure, family believes that didn't play a role in his disappearance, especially with the pending wedding.
Family says he wasn't paying for the event, reports the station.
"We have to keep hoping he's out there somewhere," his daughter told the station.

Locascio reportedly doesn't normally travel with his diabetes medication. New York State Police describe him as a white male, five feet, ten inches tall, between 215 and 220 pounds. He was last seen wearing blue jean shorts and a blue polo or t-shirt with the "Beav Ex" logo in it. He wears glasses, and may have been wearing a blue or black baseball cap.

Number of same-sex weddings revealed for the first time

Just over 1,400 same-sex marriages took place in the first three months of the new law, official figures have revealed.
Of these, 56% were female couples and 44% were male.
The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 was introduced in England and Wales on 29 March this year.
The law triggered a rush of couples vying to be the first to tie the knot at midnight, and there were 95 same-sex marriages in the first three days.
'Powerful signal'
The figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are the first official assessment of the popularity of the law change.
Around 120,000 people in civil partnerships - which were introduced in 2005 - will have the option of converting their union to a marriage from 10 December.
The average age of women marrying was 37 and for men it was 38.6, the ONS said. There were 351 marriages in April, 465 in May and 498 in June.
Richard Lane, of the charity Stonewall, said the significance of the law change went beyond the statistics.
"Equal marriage also sends a powerful signal - regardless of the number of couples who get married - that same-sex relationships are every bit as loving, committed and valued as those between opposite sex couples," he said.
"That's an incredibly important message for people growing up gay in Britain."
Mr Lane said he expected take-up to increase once couples are able to convert their civil partnerships into marriages.
'We wanted to do it properly'
Journalist Joseph McCormick married his partner, James Hanson, at Kingston Register Office in south-west London, earlier in August.
"I had always assumed I would not be able to get married, as the law would not allow it," the 26-year-old editor of Pink News said.
"If we were going to do it, we wanted to do it properly - I agree with people who say civil partnerships feel like an unequal alternative to marriage."
On the day, he said, it was "very traditional", with both families attending.
"People definitely wanted to be there because they had never been to a same-sex wedding before. Obviously there was an element of intrigue, but in many ways it was just the same as any other wedding."
As for planning the day, he said some products sold on the high street like guest books were still produced with only bride and groom options available, but this was "not the end of the world".
"I think more and more businesses are cottoning on to the fact that it's wedding season and those that offer a bespoke service for same-sex couples are doing well," he added.
The early uptake of same-sex marriage is lower than that of civil partnerships, the ONS said.
It is also below the 1,827 civil partnerships recorded in the first three months of 2012, the most recent year available.
The government had predicted a combined figure of 6,000 same-sex marriages and civil partnerships every year.
The first same-sex ceremonies in Scotland are expected in October. Northern Ireland has no plans to change its current law which does not allow same sex marriages.
Mark Rimmer, chairman of the Local Registration Services Association, which represents local authority registrars, said he felt the number of ceremonies had not been as high as some predicted.
Mr Rimmer, who runs the registration service for two councils, Brent and Barnet in London, described the take-up as "small beer".
He added: "It was not gong to be a big thing - it was a good sound bite but safe to say it won't be a whirlwind for local authorities."
Replacing civil partnerships?
The ONS statistics are not broken down across England and Wales.
But separate figures compiled by the BBC show Westminster, previously the most popular place in the country for civil partnerships, hosted 33 same-sex weddings in the first three months, compared to just six civil partnerships.
There were 12 same-sex marriages in Liverpool, 12 in Leicester and 14 in Cardiff but no civil partnerships in Liverpool or Leicester and nine in Cardiff.
The Quakers, who campaigned in favour of same-sex marriage, said they had hosted three same-sex weddings in their meeting houses since the law changed.
Bernadette Chapman, of the UK Alliance of Wedding Planners, said she had not seen a "huge explosion" since the law change in England and Wales.
"I was not expecting it," she said.

"When the civil partnership law was first passed, everyone got incredibly excited thinking all this money would be thrown at the industry - and of course it was not like that at all."

Want a Successful Marriage? More People at Your Wedding a Good Sign, Study Suggests

Successful marriages are linked to wedding size and premarital sexual relations, a new study from University of Virginia's National Marriage Project finds.
Those with happy marriages were more likely to have had a large number of guests at their wedding and have had fewer romantic relationships prior to getting married, according to the study, "Before 'I Do:' What Do Premarital Experiences Have to Do with Marital Quality Among Today's Young Adults?" by Galena K. Rhoades, research associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver, and Scott M. Stanley, research professor and co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver.
The researchers speculate that those with prior relationships have difficulties in marriage because they are able to compare their current spouse to previous partners, and devoting oneself to a single spouse may be more difficult after having a lot of experience.
"In most areas, more experience is better. You're a better job candidate with more experience, not less. When it comes to relationship experience, though, we found that having more experience before getting married was associated with lower marital quality," Rhoades explained.
Prior romantic experiences could include sexual encounters or cohabiting partners. Women who had a child from a prior relationship reported lower marital quality, but the same was not true for men.
Among those who lived together before getting married, couples who made a deliberate decision to start living together reported happier marriages than those who "slid" into cohabiting before getting married.
"We believe that one important obstacle to marital happiness is that many people now slide through major relationship transitions — like having sex, moving in together, getting engaged or having a child — that have potentially life-altering consequences," Stanley said.
Those with bigger weddings had happier marriages even after controlling for income and education (since larger weddings are generally more expensive).
Among those with 50 or fewer wedding guests, 31 percent reported a high quality marriage. For those with 51 to 149 guests, that number rose to 37 percent. And for those with 150 or more guests, almost half, 47 percent, reported having a high quality marriage.
The researchers suspect that a large wedding indicates that the newlyweds have a strong network of friends and family that can help them navigate the challenges of marriage.
"In what might be called the 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' factor, this study finds that couples who have larger wedding parties are more likely to report high-quality marriages," said W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. "One possibility here is that couples with larger networks of friends and family may have more help, and encouragement, in navigating the challenges of married life. Note, however, this finding is not about spending lots of money on a wedding party, it's about having a good number of friends and family in your corner."
The data is from the Relationship Development Study, which is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This longitudinal study interviewed 1,000 Americans 11 different times beginning in 2007 and 2008. All of them were unmarried and between the ages of 18 and 34. The NMP study looked at the 418 of them that got married over the course of the study.

Based upon the study, Stanley had a word of advice to any single person who would like to marry some day: "Remember that what you do before you say 'I do' may shape your odds of forging a successful marital future."

Israeli court allows protesters to picket Palestinian-Jewish wedding

A Palestinian man and his Jewish bride-to-be are facing hostile protests in the Israeli town of Rishon Letzion after Israel's high court refused their application to ban demonstrations outside their wedding reception.
Mahmoud Mansour, 26, a Palestinian from Jaffa, has had to hire dozens of security guards after an anti-Arab group, Lehava, published details of his wedding reception online and called for Israelis to come and picket the wedding hall.
The group, which campaigns against assimilation between Jews and Arabs in Israel, is angry that Mansour's bride-to-be, Moral Malka, 23, is Jewish, although local media reported that she has already converted toIslam and the couple have had an Islamic wedding.
"We've been together for five years, but we've never encountered such racism. I always knew there were racists, but as long as you're not affected by it, until you feel it in your own body, you don't know what it is," Mansour told Haaretz on Sunday.
"If it were someone from her family, I would understand, but these people aren't related. Why do they care? Why are they getting involved? If they think they'll get us to give up on each other, it won't happen."
He said that hiring the security guards had cost over $4,000 (£2,400), half of which was being paid for by the wedding hall, but the remainder the couple had to find themselves. The court decided that protesters would be allowed to picket the wedding, but only at a distance of 200m.
The wedding has become a national issue – drawing comment from even the president on Sunday – underscoring the strength of feeling following Israel's two-month confrontation with Hamas. On Sunday, peace talks in Cairo inched forward but there was no sign of imminent agreement.
Lehava, which campaigns under the slogan of 'saving the daughters of Israel', was revealed to have links with the Israeli government in a 2011 investigation by Haaretz, receiving up to $175,000 per year from the state, over half of its operational budget.
In 2012 the group distributed flyers in east Jerusalem warning Arabs not to visit the mostly Jewish western side of the city, and has campaigned against Jews and Arabs mixing on beaches and Jewish landlords renting to Arabs.
On Sunday's wedding, the group said: "Please come with positive energy and bring loudspeakers and horns. We will ask our sister to return home with us to the Jewish people who are waiting for her," reported Israeli news site Arutz Sheva.
Other Orthodox Jewish groups have also entered the fray. Yad L'Achim, another group that campaigns against Jewish and Arab assimilation in Israel posted a blurred picture of the bride on its Facebook site, calling on Jews to write to her and plead with her not to go ahead with the wedding.
The page, published on 13 August, has got over 2,000 likes and over 4,000 people have written responses asking the bride to cancel the reception and leave her husband.
Speaking to Haaretz, however, Mansour said he had also received many letters of support. "We feel great, and that really gives us strength. They think they'll break us, but we can't be broken. The opposite is true – we're getting stronger," Mansour said.

"The wedding will go on as planned – it will be great. I'm not worried, but it's troubling that on this day, which everyone waits for their whole life, the happiest day of their life, I have to go to court. It's sad that such things happen in this country."

Wedding crasher steals bridesmaids' wallets during ceremony

A Madison Catholic Church was hit by a thief for the second time in the last year, when a robber struck during a wedding.
Amanda and Ryan Kartos were married at St. Bernard's Catholic Church on Atwood Avenue on July 26, and say that during the ceremony someone stole wallets and a phone out of the room in the basement where the women of the wedding party had stored their personal items.
"I know a couple people talked about setting purses aside, but you just forget about it," said Amanda Kartos. "You just forget about it. And we felt comfortable, it was all our friends and family, and it was a church."
A number of bridesmaids had their wallet stolen, and Kartos' phone was also taken from the church hall.
Madison police keyed in on a photo from after the wedding that shows a man dressed in coat and tie leaving the Nekoosa Trail Walmart after a bridesmaid's credit card was used. Cameras also caught an image of his maroon SUV.
"We're hopeful that we're going to be able to identify at least this person that we have some surveillance video on," said Madison Police Public Information Officer Joel DeSpain. "Whether this is the person who took the wallets we really don't know at this time."
Police also can't say whether this case is related to one from December where a card box was stolen from St. Bernard's during a funeral. The perpetrator has not been found.
The Kartos' said that wedding guests say the man in the Walmart photo saw the man in the church at the wedding and thought he was a family member. They say while they expected hiccups on their wedding day, they did not expect this.
"You expect the cake to come a different color or your tux not fitting just right," said Ryan Kartos. "But to have this happen it's just kind of surreal, especially being in what's supposed to be a safe environment like a church."
"I just want him to be embarrassed and be punished," Amanda said of the perpetrator. "I don't want it to happen to anyone else."

Officials at St. Bernards said they are very concerned about the incidents and are making some changes. They have a new card box for funerals that would be difficult to lift, donated by the funeral theft victim's family. They've also installed a keypad lock on the church hall downstairs, and will be installing surveillance cameras this fall.

Nice day for a wet wedding: Bertha soaks happy couple

Newlyweds Katy Lomas, 28, and Richard Owen, 34, made the most of it when torrential downpours nearly ruined their wedding day
There is usually one guest at every wedding whose bad behaviour threatens to ruin the whole day.
But when the uninvited visitor is the tail end of a Caribbean hurricane, asking them to leave can prove difficult.
Newlyweds Katy Lomas, 28, and Richard Owen, 34, had to contend with the last gasp of Hurricane Bertha as they walked down the aisle on Saturday.
The downpour drowned out the couple’s voices as they exchanged vows, and burst through the roof, flooding the carefully-prepared venue as guests scrambled to stay dry.
When the wedding party moved to a £6,000 tepee outside, the couple found it standing in a foot of muddy floodwater.
But rather than wilt in the rain, the couple and their friends and family pitched in to save the day from soggy disaster.
With the help of staff at Wentworth Castle in Barnsley, the whole wedding and reception was moved back inside the venue.
Even the wedding cake and the entire bar was moved from one room, through the pouring rain, back into the castle.
After more than an hour of rearranging, Katy's father went up for the first pint of beer at the newly-created bar, which was met with a loud cheer from the guests.
The drenched couple, from Sheffield, ended the night dancing bare-foot in the rain, surrounded by their loved ones.
Speaking from bone-dry Oman, where the couple are on honeymoon, Richard, a primary school teacher, said: “It didn’t really go to plan but we made the best of it.
“Looking back on it, I suppose it was the best possible day. Everyone just pulled together and it was that kind of spirit.
“We thought we’d better get on with it. It was amazing how everybody just got on with it.

“It was the poor wedding planners I felt sorry for. They were soaked to the bone.”

Nothing Says “Sorry Our Drones Hit Your Wedding Party”

Muhammad al-Tuhayf was relaxing at his house late in the afternoon on Dec. 12, 2013, when his iPhone rang. A boxy, tired-looking Yemeni shaykh with large hands and a slow voice, Tuhayf heard the news: A few miles from where he was sitting, along a rutted-out dirt track that snaked through the mountains and wadis of central Yemen, U.S. drones had fired four missiles at a convoy of vehicles. Drone strikes were nothing new in Yemen — there had been one four days earlier, another one a couple weeks before that, and a burst of eight strikes in 12 days in late July and August that had set the country on edge. But this one was different: This time the Americans had hit a wedding party. And now the government needed Tuhayf’s help.
The corpses had already started to arrive in the provincial capital of Radaa, and by the next morning angry tribesmen were lining the dead up in the street. Laid out side by side on bright blue tarps and wrapped in cheap blankets, what was left of the men looked distorted by death. Heads were thrown back at awkward angles, splattered with blood that had caked and dried in the hours since the strike. Faces that had been whole were now in pieces, missing chunks of skin and bone, and off to one side, as if he didn’t quite belong, lay a bearded man with no visible wounds.
Clustered around them in a sweaty, jostling circle, dozens of men bumped up against one another as they struggled for position and a peek at the remains. Above the crowd, swaying out over the row of bodies as he hung onto what appeared to be the back of a truck with one hand, a leathery old Yemeni screamed into the crowd. “This is a massacre,” he shouted, his arm slicing through the air. “They were a wedding party.” Dressed in a gray jacket and a dusty beige robe with prayer beads draped over his dagger, the man was shaking with fury as his voice faltered under the strain. “An American drone killed them,” he croaked with another wild gesture from his one free hand. “Look at them.”
A few miles outside of town, Tuhayf already knew what he had to do. This had happened in his backyard; he was one of the shaykhs on the ground. Only three hours south of the capital, the central government held little sway in Radaa. Like a rural sheriff in a disaster zone, he was a local authority, someone who was known and respected. And on Dec. 12, that meant acting as a first responder. Tuhayf needed to assess the situation and deal with the fallout. Every few minutes his phone went off again, the marimba ringtone sounding with yet another update. Already he was hearing reports that angry tribesmen had cut the road north. Frightened municipal employees, worried that they might be targeted, kept calling, begging for his help. So did the governor, who was three hours away at his compound in Sanaa.
It didn’t take Tuhayf long to reach a conclusion. The Americans had made a mess, and to clean it up he was going to need money and guns.
This is the other side of America’s drone program: the part that comes after the missiles fly and the cars explode, when the smoke clears and the bodies are sorted. Because it is here, at desert strike sites across the Middle East, where unsettling questions emerge about culpability and responsibility — about the value of a human life and assessing the true costs of a surgical war.
For much of the past century, the United States has gone to war with lawyers, men and women who follow the fighting, adjudicating claims of civilian casualties and dispensing cash for errors. They write reports and interview survivors. But what happens when there are no boots on the ground? When the lawyers are thousands of miles away and dependent on aerial footage that is as ambiguous as it is inconclusive? How do you determine innocence or guilt from a pre-strike video? When everyone has beards and guns, like they do in rural Yemen, can you tell the good guys from the bad? Is it even possible? And when the U.S. gets it wrong, when it kills the wrong man: What happens then? Who is accountable when a drone does the killing?
On Dec. 12, 2013, a U.S. drone carried out a strike in Yemen. Little of what happened that day is known with any degree of certainty. Most of the facts are adrift somewhere in the shadowy sea of a classified world. Identities shift and change depending on the vantage point, and what appears true thousands of feet up in the air often looks different on the ground. Following two reviews, the U.S. claims it was a clean strike and that all the dead were militants. Yemen disagrees, calling the attack a tragic mistake that killed civilians. Two countries, two conclusions. But one of them paid the families of the dead men a lot of money.

Yemen is a U.S. ally that says it approves every drone strike, but it is also so strapped for cash that the government has implemented numerous austerity measures. Either it handed out the money and guns to cover for its partner, or the U.S. privately paid money to the families of men it publicly describes as al-Qaeda while simultaneously promoting the man responsible for the strike. In truth, only three things are known for certain: Twelve men are dead, $800,000 in cash was delivered, and the dead can’t be both guilty and innocent.

Muhammad al-Tuhayf was relaxing at his house late in the afternoon on Dec. 12, 2013, when his iPhone rang. A boxy, tired-looking Yemeni shaykh with large hands and a slow voice, Tuhayf heard the news: A few miles from where he was sitting, along a rutted-out dirt track that snaked through the mountains and wadis of central Yemen, U.S. drones had fired four missiles at a convoy of vehicles. Drone strikes were nothing new in Yemen — there had been one four days earlier, another one a couple weeks before that, and a burst of eight strikes in 12 days in late July and August that had set the country on edge. But this one was different: This time the Americans had hit a wedding party. And now the government needed Tuhayf’s help.
The corpses had already started to arrive in the provincial capital of Radaa, and by the next morning angry tribesmen were lining the dead up in the street. Laid out side by side on bright blue tarps and wrapped in cheap blankets, what was left of the men looked distorted by death. Heads were thrown back at awkward angles, splattered with blood that had caked and dried in the hours since the strike. Faces that had been whole were now in pieces, missing chunks of skin and bone, and off to one side, as if he didn’t quite belong, lay a bearded man with no visible wounds.
Clustered around them in a sweaty, jostling circle, dozens of men bumped up against one another as they struggled for position and a peek at the remains. Above the crowd, swaying out over the row of bodies as he hung onto what appeared to be the back of a truck with one hand, a leathery old Yemeni screamed into the crowd. “This is a massacre,” he shouted, his arm slicing through the air. “They were a wedding party.” Dressed in a gray jacket and a dusty beige robe with prayer beads draped over his dagger, the man was shaking with fury as his voice faltered under the strain. “An American drone killed them,” he croaked with another wild gesture from his one free hand. “Look at them.”
A few miles outside of town, Tuhayf already knew what he had to do. This had happened in his backyard; he was one of the shaykhs on the ground. Only three hours south of the capital, the central government held little sway in Radaa. Like a rural sheriff in a disaster zone, he was a local authority, someone who was known and respected. And on Dec. 12, that meant acting as a first responder. Tuhayf needed to assess the situation and deal with the fallout. Every few minutes his phone went off again, the marimba ringtone sounding with yet another update. Already he was hearing reports that angry tribesmen had cut the road north. Frightened municipal employees, worried that they might be targeted, kept calling, begging for his help. So did the governor, who was three hours away at his compound in Sanaa.
It didn’t take Tuhayf long to reach a conclusion. The Americans had made a mess, and to clean it up he was going to need money and guns.
This is the other side of America’s drone program: the part that comes after the missiles fly and the cars explode, when the smoke clears and the bodies are sorted. Because it is here, at desert strike sites across the Middle East, where unsettling questions emerge about culpability and responsibility — about the value of a human life and assessing the true costs of a surgical war.
For much of the past century, the United States has gone to war with lawyers, men and women who follow the fighting, adjudicating claims of civilian casualties and dispensing cash for errors. They write reports and interview survivors. But what happens when there are no boots on the ground? When the lawyers are thousands of miles away and dependent on aerial footage that is as ambiguous as it is inconclusive? How do you determine innocence or guilt from a pre-strike video? When everyone has beards and guns, like they do in rural Yemen, can you tell the good guys from the bad? Is it even possible? And when the U.S. gets it wrong, when it kills the wrong man: What happens then? Who is accountable when a drone does the killing?
On Dec. 12, 2013, a U.S. drone carried out a strike in Yemen. Little of what happened that day is known with any degree of certainty. Most of the facts are adrift somewhere in the shadowy sea of a classified world. Identities shift and change depending on the vantage point, and what appears true thousands of feet up in the air often looks different on the ground. Following two reviews, the U.S. claims it was a clean strike and that all the dead were militants. Yemen disagrees, calling the attack a tragic mistake that killed civilians. Two countries, two conclusions. But one of them paid the families of the dead men a lot of money.

Yemen is a U.S. ally that says it approves every drone strike, but it is also so strapped for cash that the government has implemented numerous austerity measures. Either it handed out the money and guns to cover for its partner, or the U.S. privately paid money to the families of men it publicly describes as al-Qaeda while simultaneously promoting the man responsible for the strike. In truth, only three things are known for certain: Twelve men are dead, $800,000 in cash was delivered, and the dead can’t be both guilty and innocent.

That wedding ring found under a ski lift in Vail?

Thanks to a 7NEWS reader, a man who lost his wedding ring in Vail five years ago is getting it back!
Last week, we posted a story that a wedding ring had been found under a ski lift at Vail.
Vail officials tweeted that the ring had an inscription that said, "All my love, Sue."
David Brenner was in a meeting with Grey and Sue Dorsey at Pinnacle Mortgage Group Wednesday when Glen got a text with a news story about lost ring in Vail. He said he didn't lose his ring. But he asked David, who is also married to a woman named Sue, if he had ever lost his wedding ring.
David's answer? "Yes, I did."
"I'm a loan officer, I'm a very busy guy, I work 11 to 12 hours a day," David explained. "Even when I’m up skiing, I’m working, so on the ski lift I’m constantly taking off my gloves to return emails and calls."
David said he had no idea the ring had fallen off until the end of the day.
"I pulled off my gloves and said, 'Where’s my ring?'" David told 7NEWS.
David remembered he lost it at a ski resort, but after all these years he forgot where.
When he called his wife Wednesday to ask where it happened, she remembered it was Vail.
"It can't be a coincidence," David told 7NEWS.
David said he pulled up TheDenverChannel.com's story on his tablet and then called the writer.
"Unbelievable. That's my ring. It has the same ridges," David said. "What are the chances? Your story did a good thing!"
Vail's original tweet about the ring only mentioned the inscription with Sue's name. It turns out the ring had another inscription that David knew about.
"The date of my wedding is inscribed inside -- June 20, 1982," David said.
Vail confirmed it was David's ring. They admitted they had held back some of the information so they could identify the correct owner.
A few hours later, Vail tweeted the news that the owner of the ring had been found!
David is still amazed.
He wondered, "How can you see a ring five years later? How is not further down in the underbrush?"
Vail officials said the ring was found under the Sourdough Lift by an employee during regular maintenance work.
David and Sue have since replaced the ring, but Vail has offered them a free night's stay to come back and visit and pick up their original wedding ring.

David and Sue said they really consider themselves lucky in love and lucky because they're best friends.

Neighbors Say Barn Weddings Raise a Rumpus

For legions of young couples, there is no wedding venue more desirable than a barn in the country, with its unfussy vibe, picturesque setting and rural authenticity.For neighbors of the wedding barns, it is a summer-long agony.“They blare music all night long, they have college students out there screaming, and everyone’s drinking,” said Laurie Tulchin, who lives in a rural part of Iowa City next door to a wedding barn. “Rural residents have quiet lifestyles. Sometimes I just think, ‘What the heck happened out here?’ ”In rural areas across the country, residents have protested that some barn owners flout zoning rules requiring that they operate only as agricultural enterprises. Unlike other businesses, the barns are often not inspected to ensure that they are up to code, and many lack proper sanitation, fire doors and sprinklers, accommodations for people with disabilities and licenses to serve liquor.In the Midwest, century-old wooden dairy barns in shades of red and chocolate brown are ubiquitous, but they typically have little purpose on a modern farm: They are expensive to maintain, and their doors are too small for 21st-century equipment. Transforming them into cavernous event spaces with banquet tables, dance floors and lofts for mingling has become a new way for their owners to make money.
Grooms and brides say the barns are part of a cultural shift away from traditional weddings. At a typical barn wedding, formal china and glassware are out, in favor of carefully mismatched plates and Mason jars for sipping cocktails. Guests nibble casual fare like grilled corn on the cob and barbecued pork. If the weather cooperates, the evening often ends with people gathering around a bonfire and toasting s’mores under the stars.Resources helping engaged couples dream up decorating ideas have proliferated in recent years. Pinterest boards and rusticweddingchic.comsuggest adding touches like sofas made of hay bales and wine bottles repurposed as candle holders. Websites recommend out-of-the-way venues, as the shopping blog Racked did last year in “The Most Beautiful Spots Around Chicago for a Barn Wedding.”The barn owners say they are responding to a demand in the market. Scott Jordan, who owns 50 acres here in Grant, a quiet hamlet outside St. Paul, spent more than $300,000 to restore a barn on his property so that he could rent it out for weddings, charging $4,800 per event.His neighbors, he said with a grimace, did everything they could to stop him.“They ganged up on me,” said Mr. Jordan, a ruddy-faced, muscular 53-year-old in work boots and a red Harley-Davidson T-shirt, as he surveyed his barn, which was being busily prepared for its first wedding of the season. “They’re putting up the biggest stink.”Mr. Jordan said that he had installed fire doors, handicapped-accessible parking spaces and a modern septic system to appease his neighbors, but that they were still threatening to sue the township over the wedding barn.
“We’ve spent an awful lot of money,” he said. “I’m a good neighbor. And they’re still mad.”Indeed, city council meetings have become stages for disputes in areas where friendly relations are the norm. Some small townships with ambiguous zoning laws have been forced to examine their regulations to figure out whether the wedding barns are legal.Tom Windisch, one of Mr. Jordan’s neighbors, said he and other residents had been shocked that running a wedding venue in the country was legal.“We moved out here for the rural nature, the quiet aspects of it, the open space,” Mr. Windisch, 47, said as he stood on his front porch on a bluff near Mr. Jordan’s property. “So do I want a band cranking music out of that building several times a week? No, I do not. Anybody would have reacted the way we did.”Some neighbors insist that their concerns are for the safety of the guests. “All these people want to have this rustic outdoor wedding in the country so they can get closer to nature, but that barn was built for storing hay,” said Jeff Hettmann, whose next-door neighbor operates a wedding barn in Glenmore, Wis., outside Green Bay. “It’s not designed to have 200 people jumping up and down and dancing in it.”The operator of the barn, Steve Corrigan, said that it is more than 1,000 feet from Mr. Hettmann’s house, and that there was no way Mr. Hettmann could hear noise from the weddings.

“The people who have these barns have a passion to protect the history of the land,” Mr. Corrigan said. “When you drive through the countryside, you’ll see deteriorated barns that have fallen into disrepair. When they’re gone, it destroys the skyline.”In some towns, judges have intervened, leaving trails of anguished soon-to-be-married couples. Last summer, a judge in St. Louis County, Mo., ruled that a historic barn on a property with a view of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers was a potential fire hazard, leaving a bride and groom who had scheduled a wedding reception there only days to make other plans.“It was a debacle,” said the bride, Hannah Oberle, who recently completed graduate school at the University of Missouri. “In our minds, we were like, ‘Man, this did not turn out how we expected.’ ”The operators of the barns say their businesses should be considered a form of agritourism, a use of farmland not unlike petting zoos, hayrides and other ventures that have become popular in an era when family farming is difficult to sustain.The boom shows no sign of slowing down. Last year, there were 44 wedding barns in Wisconsin, and about eight more are expected to open this year, said Steve Peterson, the president of the Wisconsin Agricultural Tourism Association.“There’s some real growing pains with the wedding barns,” Mr. Peterson said. “They exploded onto the scene before a lot of issues could be worked out. Most of these barns are in townships, and it’s tough to rely on these small township boards to solve complicated zoning issues.”Some towns are scrambling to change zoning laws to allow more landowners to cash in. The planning commission in Hinesburg, Vt., voted to change its zoning — which allowed mainly farming and forestry — to a more generous definition including weddings, day camps and cafes.Bill Bruentrup, the chairman of Friends of Minnesota Barns, said that while he was generally positive about the trend of barn weddings, he had some mixed feelings.“As a preservationist, I feel it’s been a godsend for some of these barns to be saved like this,” Mr. Bruentrup said. “Some of them were beautiful old barns, and if it wasn’t for this to generate some income, they wouldn’t exist. But I’m not the neighbor who moved out to the country for peace and quiet and has to hear a band playing till 12 o’clock at night.”