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BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Cramped space at the St. Clair County jail means inmate visits soon may be going to cyberspace.

The Belleville News-Democrat says St. Clair County Sheriff Rick Watson is exploring the costs of perhaps giving relatives the option of visiting with their jailed loved ones through online video streaming.

Watson says such an offering would be safer in that it would let inmates have such visits from their cells rather than requiring guards to move them to and from the visitation area. And it would be convenient for the relatives.

Supporters of the idea include the John Howard Association, a nonprofit prison watchdog. Its executive director, John Maki, says enabling more visitations creates a calmer lockup, improving safety of the jail and staff.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — YouTube says more than 1 billion people are now visiting its online video site each month to watch everything from zany clips of cute kittens to sobering scenes of social unrest around the world.

The milestone announced Wednesday marks another step in YouTube's evolution from a quirky startup launched in 2005 to one of the most influential forces in today's media landscape.

YouTube crossed the 1 billion threshold five months after Facebook Inc. said its online social network had reached that figure for the first time.

The vast audience has given YouTube's owner, Google Inc., another lucrative channel for selling online ads beyond its dominant Internet search engine.

Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion in 2006 when the video site had an estimated 50 million users worldwide.