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.”