make sum of counts of item descendants in jQuery
<p>Hi I have the following code</p>

<pre><code>&lt;ul id="sample-menu-1" class="sf-menu"&gt;
    &lt;li class="current"&gt;&lt;a href="#a"&gt;main item &lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;0&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
        &lt;ul&gt;
            &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#ab"&gt;sub item 1 &lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;0&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
                &lt;ul&gt;
                    &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#"&gt;menu item &lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;4&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
                    &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#aba"&gt;menu item &lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;8&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
                    &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#"&gt; sub item 2&lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;0&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
                        &lt;ul&gt;
                            &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#"&gt;menu item &lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;6&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
                            &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#"&gt;menu item &lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;8&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
                        &lt;/ul&gt;
                    &lt;/li&gt;
                &lt;/ul&gt;
            &lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>What I would like to do in my jQuery script is have the <code>&lt;span class="cntnews"&gt;0&lt;/a&gt;</code> have the sum of these items of there descendants</p>

<p>so for  mainitem this will be 26, for sub item 1 this will be 26, and for subitem 2 this will be 14</p>

<p>I would like this to work for any unordered list. So far im not getting the result I want so any help would be appreciated</p>
