(Reuters) - Protesters hope to shut down Wall Street on Thursday -- home to the New York Stock Exchange -- by holding a street carnival to mark the two-month anniversary of their campaign against economic inequality.

Protest organizers acknowledged that the "day of action" they have planned could be the group's most provocative most yet, and could lead to mass arrests and further strain relations with city authorities.

"It feels pretty sad because we built a community here, and now they can just come and destroy it," said Lara Bitar, 28, as she helped collapse the camp's "intifada tents" early Monday morning. "At the same time, this movement is about more than just the space here." ...

After resigning last night, Quan's adviser Dan Siegel wrote on Facebook: "No longer Mayor Quan's legal adviser. Resigned at 2 am. Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators."

Hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as eight different rare earths. ... And that's where the real environmental problems begin. Mines in China have a particularly terrible record of contamination. Communities around a former rare earths mining operation in Inner Mongolia, for example, blame hundreds of cases of cancer on leaked radioactive waste from the mine, and local people complain that their hair has gone white and their teeth have fallen out.

[Ross Douthat] WHEN I think about the sins of Joe Paterno, and the ignominious ending of his long and famous career, I think about Darío Castrillón Hoyos.

Emily Oakley, who had worked on an organic farm in California, moved with her husband, Mike Appel, to Oaks, Okla., in pursuit of cheap farmland. But even though they had $25,000 saved, the couple could not get a bank loan. When they applied for a government loan, the loan officer threw back his head and laughed.

“He’d never met anybody coming in for a loan for an organic vegetable production,” Ms. Oakley said. “He thought, ‘These are young, naïve, romantic, idealistic kids who didn’t know what they’re getting themselves into.’ ”

What do we want? Funding! How will we get it? Comics!

The idea that people, working through consensus, can solve basic problems such as how to regulate public space, security and infrastructure is one of the most powerful spurs to current architectural thinking. Younger architects and planners are studying how people actually use space rather than adopting top-down design ideas fashioned by governments or urban theorists. A new sense of post-Utopian architecture is replacing older, modernist efforts to impose ideal order on the in­trac­table city.

Voters in eight cities in three states cast ballots Tuesday to decide whether red light cameras and speed cameras should be used in their communities. Seven of the races went against the use of photo ticketing.

The night's first results came from Ashtabula, Ohio where 60 percent of residents approved an amendment to the city charter stating that the city "shall not use any traffic law photo-monitoring device" unless a police officer personally issues the citation.

It’s a major bureaucratic process to remove a child from her home and family. The state insures the child, pays for daycare, investigates the claims of abuse, and retains legal custody, but it cannot actually put a baby to bed at night. And so, on the other side of this most intimate public-private partnership are usually people like us, left alone with a stranger’s child and a garbage bag full of clothes and wondering what’s going to happen next. And what happens next depends, to a stomach-churning degree, on the state’s willingness and ability to keep up its half of the bargain.

Over the past 12 years, longtime banking analyst Mike Mayo has issued numerous calls to sell bank stocks, a rarity in a system where nearly all stocks are rated buy or hold. His negative ratings have frequently gotten him in trouble with banks, clients and his own bosses, who didn't want to alienate those companies. In this excerpt from his new book, "Exile on Wall Street," Mr. Mayo gives an inside view of the fights, the scolding and the threatening phone calls he received as a result of yelling "sell"—and offers a proposal to fix the banking sector.

As politicians left and right lament that stingy banks won't lend "to get the economy going again," another source of capital sits untapped precisely because the government stands in the way: You, me, and anyone else who wants to invest directly in fledgling companies.