Make Your Tight Wedding Budget Your Greatest Asset!

Make Your Tight Wedding Budget Your Greatest Asset!

     
     

By Tim and Lisa Spooner

    Tight wedding budget got you down? We know what you mean! As planners of our own beautiful wedding on a budget of just $2,000, we understand the challenges facing you.


    Planning a wedding on a tight budget need not tie your stomach up in knots. In fact, your tight budget can make your wedding truly remarkable!


    Do you want to know how to make your tight budget a major ally instead of your adversary? How would you like to stop hating your budget restrictions and start appreciating the advantages you have over other wedding planners?


    To know this freedom, you need to know the positives to planning your wedding on a tight budget. Then, simply make the choice to major on those positives to achieve the wonderful wedding of your dreams. Focusing on the helpful aspects of your budget will lead you to the amazing side benefits that you never knew accompanied your wedding budget.


    In this article, we look at several of the great assets your tight budget can give your wedding planning.


    Right at the top of the list we find the value of increased creativity that comes with your tight budget. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. The needy wedding planner discovers her inventive, creative wedding planning skills. Your wedding will not turn out like another “cookie cutter” wedding. Instead, your budget will force you to think outside of the airtight box that suffocates most weddings.


    So go ahead and let those creative juices flow! Instead of planning an ordinary wedding, plan an extraordinary wedding!


    As a wedding planner who must abide by a tight budget, you will not find yourself ordering straight out of the wedding catalog. Instead of simply ordering a pre-made, one-size-fits-all wedding, you will choose to piece together a wedding that truly reflects your personality. Your wedding will truly be YOUR wedding!


   
    Relax, let your hair down! Allow your personality to permeate your wedding planning. Welcome to your wedding! Traditions and magazines know about weddings in general but they don’t know about your wedding!


    As a wedding planner on a strict budget, you will have good reason to rely on your family and friends for support. Instead of simply plopping down a chunk of change and letting the professionals handle everything for you, you will benefit from working with your family and friends to bring your wedding dreams into reality.


    Every wedding event requires a community for its success. Your budget will help you keep your community involved all the way through the planning process to your wedding day! With your friends and family involved in your wedding planning, you will find your wedding to be extra special to you and your community.


    Since you cannot afford the fees charged by the professionals, you carefully plan your event to reflect your personality and keep your family involved. You also put lots of your own creativity into the wedding. Your creativity, personality, and community all infuse themselves into your wedding planning and two more advantages emerge from your tight budget…


    A sense of ownership pervades your planning experience. Your wedding really feels like your wedding to you since you created it and poured yourself into it. Your sense of ownership will in turn produce a great sense of satisfaction in you as you realize that you created a great master piece - your wedding day.


    In the end, your budget can help produce for your wedding these five assets: creativity, personality, community, ownership, and satisfaction. By focusing on these five positives, your budget will take its place among your most powerful wedding planning aids. You must live with your budget limitations anyway - Why fight it? Let your budget work for you!


    Look on the web and you will find many helpful resources out there, such as our blog and book, just waiting to help you make your wedding budget work for you. Do not settle for anything less than the beautiful wedding of your dreams!


   
   

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     Get Our Money Saving Secrets for Your Dream Wedding!

       Download "Wedding Planning on a Budget" to discover how Tim, Lisa, and other
       couples have been saving thousands upon thousands of dollars on their dream weddings!
      


    


                 

European police on alert for Wikileaks founder

WASHINGTON – WikiLeaks was on the defensive on several fronts Wednesday, scrambling to remain on the Internet and post more U.S. diplomatic documents while its fugitive founder Julian Assange was targeted by a European arrest warrant on Swedish rape charges.
Amazon.com Inc. prevented WikiLeaks from using the U.S. company's computers to distribute embarrassing State Department communications and other documents, WikiLeaks said Wednesday. The WikiLeaks site was unavailable for several hours before it moved back to servers owned by its previous Swedish host, Bahnhof, which are housed in a protective Cold-War era bunker.
At the same time, Swedish officials intensified legal pressure on Assange by asking European police to arrest him on rape allegations that have shadowed him for weeks. Swedish Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny said that the European arrest warrant had been issued for Assange in connection with the allegations filed against him in that country.
Amazon's move to kick WikiLeaks off its servers came after congressional staff called the company Tuesday to inquire about its relationship with WikiLeaks, Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, said Wednesday.
"The company's decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material," Lieberman said in a statement. He added that he would have further questions for Amazon about its dealings with WikiLeaks.
The White House said Wednesday it was taking new steps to protect government secrets after WikiLeaks release of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. Officials said national security adviser Tom Donilon has appointed a senior aide to identify and develop reforms needed in light of the document dump.
The White House also spurned a call from Assange for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to step down if she had any role in directing U.S. diplomats' spying on other foreign leaders. "Mr. Assange's suggestion is ridiculous and absurd, and why anyone would find his opinion here relevant is baffling," said spokesman Tommy Vietor, adding Clinton was doing an "extraordinary" job. The White House says U.S. diplomats do not engage in spying.
Clinton was in Astana, Kazakhstan, enduring repeated comments about the WikiLeaks disclosures as she met with foreign officials at a conference of international leaders.
Among those she met with was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had been described in newly released U.S. diplomatic cables as "feckless" and a party animal.
"We have no better friend, we have no one who supports the American policies as consistently as Prime Minister Berlusconi has, starting in the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration," she said during a summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
A senior State Department official said that in her meeting with Berlusconi, the Italian leader raised the WikiLeaks matter, saying the publicity it had generated in Italy was a political problem for him. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to describe a private conversation, said Clinton expressed regret for the leak, calling it an illegal act.
The WikiLeaks matter was discussed in virtually all of Clinton's private one-on-one meetings with European leaders and foreign ministers during the summit meeting Wednesday.
"I have certainly raised the issue of the leaks in order to assure our colleagues that it will not in any way interfere with American diplomacy or our commitment to continuing important work that is ongoing," Clinton said.
Assange's call for Clinton's resignation came in an online interview Tuesday with Time magazine from an undisclosed location. Assange said Clinton should step down "if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations" in violation of international agreements.
State Department officials have acknowledged that secret instructions to American diplomats to gather sensitive personal information about foreign leaders originated from the U.S. intelligence community. But diplomats were not required to spy, the officials said.
Assange remained a fugitive Wednesday, shadowed by the Europe-wide arrest warrant. A German security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because no authorization was given to discuss the legal steps, confirmed that a warrant for Assange had been issued in that country.
Assange's London-based lawyer, Mark Stephens, complained his client had yet to receive formal notice of the allegations he faces — something Stephens described as a legal requirement under European law. The lawyer added that Assange had repeatedly offered to answer questions about the investigation, to no avail.
The 39-year-old Australian computer hacker has been out of public sight since a Nov. 5 news conference in Geneva. He has spoken publicly only through online interviews, while a statement from his lawyer said the Australian was being persecuted by Swedish officials seeking his arrest on allegations of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.
The exact nature of the allegations facing Assange aren't completely clear. Stephens has in the past described them as a part of "a post-facto dispute over consensual, but unprotected sex." Even Swedish prosecutors have disagreed about whether to label the most serious charge as rape.
Formal charges have not been filed, but a detention order issued at Ny's request on Nov. 18 remains in force pending an appeal by Assange. The case is now before Sweden's Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Assange's secret-spilling group is still in the process of disclosing hundreds of classified State Department cables, which have revealed requests for U.S. diplomats to gather personal information on their foreign counterparts, highlighted Western concerns that Islamist militants might get access to Pakistan's nuclear material and American skepticism that Islamabad will sever ties to Taliban factions fighting in Afghanistan.
According to a diplomatic cable released just Wednesday, U.S. envoys met in November 2009 with two former aides to Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. One of the aides, Sergio Massa, described her husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, as a "monster," a "psychopath" and a "coward." Kirchner died in October.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101202/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/wikileaks

Nigeria: Soldiers raid militant camps in oil delta

LAGOS, Nigeria – Soldiers raided three militant camps Wednesday hidden in the winding creeks of Nigeria's oil-rich and restive southern delta, seizing heavy weaponry in an attack rebels claimed killed more than 100 people.
The attack started Wednesday afternoon in Delta state, an oil-producing state in the middle of Niger Delta, military spokesman Lt. Col. Timothy Antigha said.
Militants in the Niger Delta have attacked pipelines, kidnapped petroleum company employees and fought government troops since 2006. The attacks cut drastically into crude production in Nigeria, an OPEC-member nation that is crucial to U.S. oil supplies. Production has risen back to 2.2 million barrels of oil a day, in part due to many militant leaders and fighters accepting the amnesty deal.
However, not all have been pacified. The main militant group in the region, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, has promised to carry out new attacks after claiming responsibility for kidnapping seven expatriate workers in November from offshore oil rigs operated by London-based Afren PLC and Exxon Mobil Corp. The group, known by the acronym MEND, also claimed a dual car bombing that killed at least 12 people and wounded dozens more during an Oct. 1 independence celebration in Nigeria's capital, Abuja.
The government has taken a hard line on militancy in the southern delta since the car bombing. Securing the delta remains vitally important to President Goodluck Jonathan, who hails from the region, as he faces election next year.
Soldiers attacked three camps operated by fighters loyal to militant leader John Togo, who reportedly had accepted a government-sponsored amnesty deal last year but later abandoned it, Antigha said.
He said the fighting continued into Wednesday night, as soldiers recovered anti-aircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, automatic rifles and dynamite from the camps.
A statement sent to journalists Wednesday night from a little-known militant group calling itself the Niger Delta Liberation Force claimed more than 100 people died during an attack — the majority of them civilians. The group's account of the attack could not be immediately verified.
Antigha acknowledged there may have been casualties in the attack, but declined to comment further.
Analysts say the push to pacify the delta will test the limits of the president's power.
"The Niger Delta campaign is now testing his ability to protect Nigeria," said Thompson Ayodele, executive director of the Initiative for Public Policy Analysis in Lagos. "If he fails his political opponents will capitalize on it, saying that he is a man who is not prepared for the job."
During an operation last month, the military managed to free 19 hostages, including seven foreigners. The man accused of masterminding the kidnappings, Otonyemie Kuna, 25, known in the delta as "Obese," has been arrested and faces charges in the attacks, Rivers state police spokeswoman Rita Inoma-Abbey said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the federal government has announced more than 6,000 militants who missed the deadline last year to join the amnesty now will be included in the process after Jonathan gave his personal approval. That drew a retort from MEND, which promised to carry out new attacks just as the nation's oil industry has recovered and a presidential election draws near.
"This desperate action shows a confused individual, bent on looting the nation's treasury," the militant group said in a statement sent to journalists.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101201/ap_on_bi_ge/af_nigeria_oil_unrest

World AIDS Day 2010

On World AIDS Day, we take time to remember those who have been lost to this devastating disease, and recommit ourselves to saving as many lives as we can, now and in the future. This December 1, World AIDS Day is also an opportunity to reflect on what we have achieved. We have saved millions of lives from AIDS over the past decade. By investing in what we know works, we can save millions more in the future.
The Obama administration has made the fight against AIDS central to the Global Health Initiative, our commitment to strengthening global health systems and implementing sustainable solutions to improve the health of entire communities. One major focus of the Global Health Initiative is strengthening our partnerships around the world so they reflect and reinforce the global effort needed to defeat AIDS. This year, the United States also made its first multi-year pledge to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria to further support this cooperative approach. Our metric for success is simple: lives saved.
Through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), we are making smart investments that will ultimately help bring us closer to a world free of HIV/AIDS. We work with dedicated organizations and individuals every day to make this goal a reality. The struggle is far from over, but the United States is committed to remaining a global leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS -- today, tomorrow, and every day until the disease is eradicated. That is our obligation and our promise to the millions of souls around the planet living with HIV/AIDS.
Source:
Secretary Clinton: December 2010 » World AIDS Day 2010