Faced with stinging budget cuts, a county school board in the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado is selling advertising space on report cards to help make ends meet.

Jefferson County Public Schools expects to make $90,000 over three years from Collegeinvest, a college savings plan, for the two-inch (five-centimeter) ads on report cards issued by its 91 elementary schools.

That seems like a drop in the bucket for the school board, which last year slashed its spending by $40 million in the face of reduced state and federal government support and a slump in revenue from school property taxes.

But school board spokeswoman Melissa Reeves told AFP by telephone on Monday: "We're obviously looking for revenue generators and taking them where we can find them."

Seattle Joins Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo In Supporting Occupy Protests

The Seattle Times reports today:

The Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution in support of Occupy Seattle that calls on the city to examine its banking and investment practices, home-foreclosure patterns and the financing of local elections.

The resolution was a grab bag of proposals meant to provide a local response to the concentration of wealth and abuses in the financial sector that the Occupy Wall Street protest and its regional offspring have called attention to in encampments and rallies around the country this fall.

"Working together, we can fix our broken economy and fix our broken social contract," said Councilmember Nick Licata, who sponsored the legislation. He said that, at the very least, the city can make sure public funds are reinvested in the community.

Other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo, have passed resolutions in support of the Occupy protests.

The Seattle resolution ....called on Congress to support job creation by investing in the country's infrastructure, tightening banking regulations and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.

It's not clear how much practical effect the resolution will have. The city's finance director said very little of the city's money is in commercial banks. The city does do business with Wells Fargo, but the bank is essentially a pass-through as the city moves money into long-term assets or pays bills, said Glen Lee, finance director.

The city does give tax breaks to a range of businesses, from church-sponsored day-care centers and nonprofit adult family homes to banks with international facilities that pay about one-third less than other businesses, Lee said.

"I look forward to examining these issues with the council," he said.

Prosecutors charged a 20-year-old suburban St. Louis woman on Wednesday with murdering her 13-month old son, saying she admitted she beat the boy because he was crying and "wouldn't lay down, wouldn't go back to sleep."

Shelby Dasher is charged with second-degree murder in the death of her son, Tyler, whose body was found discarded near a cemetery about a mile from home on Tuesday, hours after she reported him missing.

Dasher was arrested early Wednesday and was being held on $500,000 cash bond.

St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch said Wednesday that Dasher told police she repeatedly struck her son because he was crying and "wouldn't lay down, wouldn't go back to sleep." He said she also admitted she disposed of his body.

"Raising children can be frustrating. There are a myriad of ways to handle that," McCulloch said. "This isn't one of them."

McCulloch revealed little else about the boy's death, except to say it appeared the mother used no objects or weapons to strike her son.

Lobbyists for a day, a band of millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday to urge Congress to tax them more.

They had a little trouble getting in. It turns out there are procedures, even for the really rich.

But once inside, their message was embraced by liberals and tolerated by some conservatives - including the ideological leader of anti-tax lawmakers, who had some advice for them, too.

"If you think the federal government can spend your money better than you can, then by all means" pay more in taxes than you owe, said Grover Norquist, the head of a group that has gotten almost all congressional Republicans to pledge to vote against tax hikes. The IRS should have a little line on the form where people can donate money to the government, he suggested, "just like the tip line on a restaurant receipt."

One of the millionaires suggested that if Norquist wanted low taxes and less government, "Renounce your American citizenship and move to Somalia where they don't collect any tax."

In the silence left by the private efforts of the "supercommittee" to find $1.2 trillion or more in deficit cuts by Thanksgiving, free advice flowed in public.

A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters - including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist - with blasts of pepper spray.

Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for "a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital."

Dorli Rainey is an activist who has supported liberal causes in the Seattle area for decades. A photo showing Rainey being cared for by fellow activists in the immediate aftermath of the police incident appeared on news websites around the world.

Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said he didn't have specifics on the Rainey incident, but he said pepper spray is "is not age specific. No more dangerous to someone who is 10 or someone who is 80."

Occupy Wall Street protesters hope to rebound on Thursday with a rally at the New York Stock Exchange to show their battle against economic inequality has life after they were evicted from a downtown park.

Rallies by the two-month-old movement have numbered in the hundreds of people in New York but the protesters and city officials said they expect thousands of people to pour into the Wall Street area from 7 a.m.

It will be a test of whether Occupy Wall Street and the loosely knit global alliance it inspired will flag or get a boost after the police cleared a camp of several hundred protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan on Tuesday.

"This movement is really not about tents as much as it is about an idea and we're keeping the idea through a number of direct action things planned" for Thursday, said spokesman Ed Needham. "There's also going to be events in 100 countries around the world tomorrow."

Occupy Wall Street plans to shut down the home of the New York Stock Exchange and the heart of American capitalism with a street carnival that kicks off a day of protests.

A B.C. man has seized two surveillance cameras he says RCMP had hidden in trees near his trailer home, and they are full of images from crime scenes and investigations.

Dion Nordick of Grand Forks told CBC News on Tuesday he found the motion-activated cameras in June, in trees overlooking the trailer he rents. They are now in his lawyer's possession.

Nordick said he took the cameras down, removed the memory cards inside, and found pictures of himself and his friends coming and going from his trailer among the 200 images on the cameras.

There were also pictures of drug busts, suicides and assaults, "and it looked like they just hadn't been erased off the card," said Nordick.

He said he saw a photo of a dead body and images of a woman who was the apparent victim of an assault.

Never write an email that you wouldn't be OK with the whole world reading. A professor from Suffolk University Law School in Boston is experiencing why it is important to remember that rule of thumb.

Michael Avery composed a five-paragraph message to his colleagues in response to a campus-wide drive for care packages for American troops stationed overseas. In his email, Avery wrote that it is "shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings." Avery specializes in constitutional law.

Avery's email also included at least one other controversial remark: Sympathy for American troops, he wrote, is "not particularly rational in today's world."

A three-hour lockdown at East Carolina University was triggered when a man carrying an umbrella was mistaken for a gunman.

University spokeswoman Mary Schulken said the lockdown began about 10 a.m. when personnel from the Greenville Police Department monitoring a surveillance camera saw a man near campus who appeared to be carrying an assault rifle. An alert was issued ordering students, faculty and staff to stay inside and lock their doors.

Heavily armed officers from at least four law enforcement agencies responded in force, sweeping campus buildings, searching buses and briefly surrounding a nearby house. A state Highway Patrol helicopter hovered overhead.

Schulken said the response was justified even though it turned out to be based on a false report.

Calls to Greenville police seeking comment were not returned.

A recent cross burning at the home of a Panama City mixed-race couple does not signal the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; it was the symptom of something understandable to anyone who's ever been afraid of losing someone.

LB Williams, a 50-year-old black man, his wife of nearly seven years Donna Williams, who is white, and their bi-racial daughter found a cross burning in their driveway Nov. 4. Their grandchild was home too.

"When I saw that cross burning, I was scared to death," Donna Williams said. "I was terrified...we all were."

They called police and reported it. Her grandbaby still reports seeing fires outside the house, even when there are none. There's a scar burned into the driveway in the shape of a cross, she said.