Bring your favorite canine companion to the annual Howl-O-Ween Dog Pawty from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 29, at the Scout Burnell-Garbrecht Dog Park in Pierce Park (618 Dayton-Xenia Road, Xenia).

Presented by Greene County Parks & Trails with WYSO and Better Images Portrait Studio, the day will include dog costume contests, best radio voice, hot dog bobbin' contest, exhibitors and so much more. Admission is free with $1 donation per dog. All proceeds benefit the Scout dog Park and WYSO.

Saying that it "reorders the way they do business in Washington by reinventing the tax code and restoring our nation to fiscal health through balanced budgets and entitlement reform," Texas Gov. Rick Perry is this hour unveiling his "cut, balance and grow plan" on taxes.

Every year, 73 million sharks are killed for their fins. Most go to make shark fin soup, a luxury dish and status symbol in some Asian cultures that can sell for $100 a bowl. Currently, 30 percent of shark and ray species are threatened with extinction.

Steve Jobs did his last product launch last March, for the iPad 2. At the close, he stood in front of a huge picture of a sign showing the intersection of streets called Technology and Liberal Arts.

It was a lifelong ideal for Jobs, the same one that had drawn him to make his famous 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC for short. That was where a group of artistically minded researchers had developed the graphical user interface, or GUI, which Apple's developers were to incorporate into the Lisa and the Macintosh a few years later.

"Oakland police arrested dozens of people at a plaza outside City Hall and at a second, smaller camp nearby early this morning, two weeks after the protesters launched efforts as part of the nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement against corporate greed and economic inequality," The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

When Steve Jobs was six years old, his young next door neighbor found out he was adopted. "That means your parents abandoned you and didn't want you," she told him.

Jobs ran into his home, where his adoptive parents reassured him that he was theirs and that they wanted him.

A sharp drop in a widely watched gauge of consumer confidence has brought that key economic barometer to a low "last seen during the 2008-2009 recession," Conference Board director of consumer research Lynn Franco says in a report released by the private research group this morning.

The board says its consumer confidence index fell this month to 39.8, from 46.4 in September. Other measures of consumer sentiment, about current conditions and expectations, also declined.

The United Mine Workers union (UMWA) is out with its own report this morning about last year's Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster in West Virginia in which 29 workers died.

If you need a break from the "real news:"

The Washington Post's Justin Jouvenal is "live-tweeting" from the so-called #no2trial today in Fairfax, Va.

Health plan deductibles keep inching up.

When employees sign up for coverage this fall during their company's annual enrollment period, nearly a quarter will face annual deductibles of at least $1,000, according to a recent employer survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KHN is an editorially-independent program of the foundation.)