Good morning, and welcome to the Guardian's rolling coverage of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration and the related protests spreading across North America.

Yesterday saw a "zombie protest" at Zuccotti Park, as protesters donned the garb of the undead to highlight the plight of "corporate zombies" working in Wall Street.

Meanwhile, AP reported that:

In Chicago, demonstrators pounded drums in the city's financial district. Others pitched tents or waved protest signs at passing cars in Boston, St. Louis, Kansas City, Missouri, and Los Angeles.

Tomorrow a national student walkout is planned – in protest against "unforgivable student debt and soaring tuition rates", according to Occupy Wall Street, while in the evening in New York there will be a union backed march to the site of the protest.

The march is scheduled for 4.30pm and will be attended by members from Supported by United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU, 1199 SEIU, Workers United and Transport Workers, PSC-CUNY United NY, the Strong Economy for All Coalition, the Working Families Party, Vocal-NY, New York Communities for Change, Community Voices Heard and Alliance for Quality.

We'll have the latest developments from the Wall Street protest and elsewhere, but also today I will be trying to map out where the protests have spread in the US and Canada, where occupy demonstrations are said to be scheduled for Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.

Are you involved in a protest in North America? You can share details by contacting me on Twitter @AdamGabbatt or email adam.gabbatt@guardian.co.uk



The object of the poster's affections appears to be the woman in black with turqouise trainers and red neckerchief – as featured on the top of yesterday's OWS blog.

Are you the woman with the turqouise trainers? Are you the poster of this Craigslist ad? Is "fist spotting" a new dating craze or a typo? Do get in touch.

The NYPD didn't just halt a protest march when they arrested 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge.

They also apparently brought a fledgling romance to a shuddering halt... Gawker's Adrian Chen has spotted this rather sweet "missed connections" Craigslist post by one of the people on Saturday's demonstration:

My colleague Dominic Rushe writes:

Ben Bernanke, Fed chairman, is being quizzed in Washington about the state of the economy and has just been asked Occupy Wall St. "I would just say that very generally people are quite unhappy about the state of the economy," he says and with "some justification." "At some level I can't blame them, 9% unemployment and slow growth is not a good situation." He says. But don't expect to see Ben down in Zucotti Park any time soon.

Here's a fantastic resource for tracking the occupy demonstrations across the US – occupytogether.org. Thanks to @AlbertoNardelli on Twitter and Javier on the emails.

The website is tracking all of the protests across the US, providing links to Facebook pages and the like and generally enabling people to see what is happening in their area.

From OccupyTogether's FAQ:

We look at Occupy Together as being a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. As we have followed the news on facebook, twitter, and the various live feeds across the internet, we felt compelled to build a site that would help spread the word as more protests organize across the country. We hope to provide people with information about events that are organizing, ongoing, and building across the U.S. as we, the 99%, take action against the greed and corruption of the 1%.

My colleague Paul Harris writes that "as some of America's biggest corporations push for a tax holiday on more than $1tn of overseas profits, a new survey has revealed that the last time such a measure was tried it ended in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs".

The study could be a setback to the aggressive push by a coalition of American businesses, called Win America, which includes big-name firms like Apple, Google and Pfizer. The group has employed more than 160 lobbyists to push its agenda, claiming that the companies will use the tax break to bring back money overseas and invest it in building new facilities and creating jobs. But a report carried out by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies has examined the last time such a move was carried out. That was in 2004, when a similar scheme allowed 843 firms to cut their tax rate on repatriating overseas profits from 35% to 5%. The firms then brought home $312bn and avoided paying $92bn in government taxes in return for a promise to create jobs. The measure was called the American Job Creation Act.

Read Paul's piece in full here.

News from Oregon:

@jrledoux @AdamGabbatt Portland, OR starts our occupation on #Oct6; ystday we were trained by a lawyer on how to respond to police #occupytogether

The Communication Workers of America, the largest communications and media union in the US, has come out in support of Occupy Wall Street.

CWA has 700,000 members in total, and members will be at the march to New York tomorrow and demonstrations at Freedom Plaza in Washington, which begin on 6 October.

"CWA members will join the demonstrations to focus public attention on the impact of Wall Street's greed on ordinary Americans," the union said in a statement.

It continued:

The 700,000 members of the Communications Workers of America strongly support the Occupy Wall Street Movement. It is an appropriate expression of anger for all Americans, but especially for those who have been left behind by Wall Street. We support the activists' non-violent efforts to seek a more equitable and democratic society based on citizenship, not corporate greed. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are spreading throughout the country. We will support them and encourage all CWA Locals to participate in the growth of this protest movement.

More on Occupy Portland, which begins on 6 October. From their website:

THE PLAN On Oct. 6th, 12:00 pm, thousands will gather at the Waterfront near SW Ankeny and Naito Parkway (http://tinyurl.com/44rl474) to march to Pioneer Courthouse Square. This is solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, where thousands have been staying near the Wall Street stock exchange to protest the corruption of Washington politicians, misdeeds of big banks, and the cancerous reign of corporate lobbyists. Bring friends, family, passion, and supplies for the night because we will be in this for the long haul. Once we are done for the day we will then march back to the Waterfront and set up for the night. WHAT TO EXPECT As with most protests, this will be non-violent. Certain members of the group will cover what and what not to do. Where to be, how to behave, as well as where to go. We have a set route that we will march, which departs at 2:30. From the meeting place we will head to W Burnside, and walk until SW Broadway. From there we will continue south until reaching Pioneer Courthouse Square. Due to the property within the Square being privately owned, we may be asked to protest on the sidewalks surrounding the block. When we depart from the Square, we will move down to SW Taylor and follow it back to the Waterfront. It is then that we will start the full Occupation. WHAT TO BRING?

Aside from a spirit for change, everyone attending is asked to refer to the Needs of the Occupiers list.

My colleague Karen McVeigh has written a piece on how Occupy Wall Street has spread across North America and to Europe since the idea was originally spawned in July this year.

The core group, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), claims people will take part in demonstrations in as many as 147 US cities this month, while the website occupytogether.org lists 47 US states as being involved. Around the world, protests in Canada, the UK, Germany and Sweden are also planned, they say. The speed of the leaderless movement's growth has taken many by surprise. Occupytogether.org, one of several sites associated with the protest, has had to be rebuilt to accommodate the traffic. OWS media spokesman Patrick Bruner said: "We have on our board right now 147 US cities. I don't know whether they are occupied or they are planning on being occupied. My guess would be over 30 cities are occupied." The original call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters to occupy Wall Street drew hundreds of protesters on 17 September and 2,000 attended a march the following Saturday. But the movement, which organisers say has its roots in the Arab spring and in Madrid's Puerta del Sol protests, has been galvanised by recent media attention.

My colleague Paul MacInnes is in New York on holiday, but hasn't let that stop him from getting a word in with Michael Moore down at Occupy Wall Street:

A crush of cameramen, the peak of an orange baseball cap jutting out from the throng, it could only mean that Michael Moore had made his way to Liberty Square. The divisive filmmaker, as much of a whipping boy for the right as a figurehead for the left, has just released his memoir Here Comes Trouble. A visit to the protests may not have been part of his promotional tour but it seems likely his face will be all over the news channels given the interest of the cameras. Moore was jovial and happy to josh with the media, including a bloke who'd made his own Fox News camera out of cardboard. He was also plainly determined to portray the protests as an inspirational moment. Given that, and the fact that there are almost as many slogans as there are protesters, I stuck my head into the throng to ask whether Moore didn't think the protests might benefit from having a clearer focus, something Nicholas Kristof argued in this Sunday's NYT. Not at all, Moore replied. "They don't need more focus, they need more numbers", he said. "People across the country already have the focus. People in Omaha, in Iowa, they know what's going on. They see the crippling student debts, the absence of jobs, the repossessions and they know who caused it." "It's the people up there", said Moore his finger pointing across the park at a black skyscraper that's home to both various banks and the Federal securities regulator Finra. "It's the people in those offices, the focus needs to be on them."

I've been speaking to Michael Kink, from the strong economy for all coalition, which is convening the unions' march to Occupy Wall Street tomorrow.

Asked why these unions have decided to back the demonstration, Kink said:

Some organizers and activists from our coalitions were part of suport for the initial march and occupation on September 17 – they recognized that the #OccupyWallStreet call was aimed at the same targets and the same problems we had been focusing on in recent work, including the 20,000 person march on Wall Street we all organized together last May 12. Once the occupation settled in, many of us started working to keep union and community leaders informed of what was happening and to discuss how best to support and expand the effort. I know that many of them were talking among themselves about the courage of the occupiers and the fact that they were fighting the right fight at the right time. Strong For All, United NY and the Working Families Party are all labor-community coalitions that have been working on issues of economic justice, income inequality and government policies to create jobs and help low-income and working families. We decided together, with the support of key allied groups and unions, to call for a Community-Labor March tomorrow and continuing actions with the #OWS activists to highlight key issues and problems in New York City and New York State.

But might the union leaders end up pushing for a firmer agenda than Occupy Wall Street protesters have so far committed to?

Not so, Kink said:

We're very explicitly not grabbing the steering wheel -- we're marching under the banner of "We Are The 99%," lending support and people power and trying to show specific examples of how private and public policies are working for the 1% instead of the 99%. Examples include the $5 billion tax cut our state government is going to provide the richest New Yorkers on December 31, the savage cuts to antipoverty programs, schools, human services and higher education that are happening at the same time, and the lack of action on job creation when destructive rates of unemployment, poverty and homelessness are hitting many New York City neighborhoods. We are working to stop the tax cut for millionaires and billionaires and to reinvest the money into job creation and restoration of the worst of the budget cuts. Students are walking out of City University of New York, New York University, Columbia University and other campuses around the state to protest cuts to higher ed, increases in tuition, elimination of programs and exploitative student loan practices by banks. Groups are also working to support New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's investigation and prosecution of Wall Street fraud, for an end to home foreclosures and mortgage write-downs by bailed-out banks, and elimination of unearned economic development subsidies to Wall Street banks that have not kept the job-creation promises they made to get the subsidies. All of these issues are ones that groups and individuals have been working on directly, on the front lines. They're not abstract or vague, they are very concrete facts in the lives of millions of New Yorkers. And they're all examples of how we need to get public and private institutions to stop looking out for only the 1% and start looking out for the 99%. We'll continue the collaborative effort with #OWS after Wednesday with a week of actions and our groups are working with #Occupy efforts around the New York State and across the country. We are adding our work and these examples to the mix at #OWS, not to the exclusion of other concerns, but to demonstrate common cause and common goals.

More than 2,200 people have so far committed to marching tomorrow.

A class action lawsuit has been filed in Manhattan federal court today against Mayor Bloomberg and the New York police department, over the mass arrests on the Occupy Wall Street Brooklyn march on Saturday, according to NY Daily News.

Reporter Oren Yaniv tweeted that the action was filed this afternoon.

More than 700 protesters were arrested on Saturday. There were claims that demonstrators were misled into thinking it was ok for them to walk on the road section of Brooklyn Bridge, as opposed to remaining on the footpath, although others claimed police did warn protesters, at least initially, that they should remain in the pedestrianised zone.

That's it for today, thanks for reading. We'll be back with more updates tomorrow.