A mother is facing felony charges and two state police officers are under investigation after a traffic stop escalated into a wild scene involving broken glass, gunfire and a high speed chase.

Charles Dickens is a man for our season, an artist who got people to think about economic injustice.

Can art do anything for the 99%? The case of Charles Dickens argues that yes - when genius, perseverance, activism, and admittedly, luck, combine, artistic creations can spark fires that burn through encrusted layers of human wrongs. It doesn't happen overnight, and not as often as we wish. But it happens.

Maybe that's why we're turning to Dickens for guidance as America careens toward the nightmare he warned us about in the brutal early days of industrial capitalism. In this late finance-driven stage, as our top-heavy society teeters on the brink of self-inflicted disaster, we need him more than ever.

Dickens is a man for our season.

Poet of the People

Dickens was the most famous writer in Europe and America during his lifetime, just 25 when his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, rocketed him to the heights of literary success. Ebeneezer Scrooge gave us the icon of miserly capitalism, while Oliver Twist indicted economic injustice in the simple request of a hungry child, "Please, sir, I want some more."

A friend of the laborer, the poor, the prisoner, and the sufferer, Dickens was likewise the enemy of the miser, the hustler, the social climber, and the hypocrite, all of whom he could slice and dice in a fury of satire.

In the subjects Dickens took on we find a menu of concerns that reflect our current ills: laissez-faire capitalism (Hard Times), class divides (Great Expectations) child poverty (Oliver Twist), debt (Little Dorrit), legal injustice (Bleak House) and tyranny (A Tale of Two Cities).

No wonder Dickensia is everywhere right now. Since the financial crisis, there have been BBC adaptations, a hit biography, and retrospectives celebrating the 200-year anniversary of his birth in 2012. Oprah doubled down on Dickens with a Great Expectations /A Tale of Two Cities combo for her book club. Most recently, Bill de Blasio rode A Tale of Two Cities all the way to the New York mayorship, making the title of Dickens' novel a campaign slogan for a divided metropolis. A new film version of Great Expectations featuring Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and an upcoming biopic starring Ralph Fiennes seal the author's resurgence.

Charles Dickens didn't just imagine hard times; he lived them. The world was very nearly deprived of one of its great artists and humanitarians when poverty struck his decidedly ordinary family. When Dickens was 12 years old, his father, a clerk, hit a rough financial patch and was thrown into debtor's prison. Young Charles left school and labored in a rat-infested shoe polish warehouse, toiling 10 hours a day, six days a week, for two years. If not for the death of his grandmother, who left the family a small inheritance, Dickens would likely have remained there and never continued his education. Fortunately he was able to make his way to school and eventually landed a job as a newspaper reporter.

Dickens' childhood story, which haunted him for life, is a vivid example of what happens when people fall on hard times in the absence of a social safety net: they get trampled. No doubt Dickens and his family would have been sneered at today by Tea Partiers and self-serving 1 percenters who pretend that poverty is a deserved condition. But Charles Dickens learned firsthand that poverty is no more a sign of depravity than wealth is an indicator of superiority. He saw that very often the reverse is true. This theme would feature in Great Expectations, where the working-class Pip longs to be a gentleman, but soon finds out that many gentlefolk were either dissipated or conniving or sadistic - or all three.

A cyclist in Spain was fined €100 ($135) recently for eating a croissant while riding his bicycle.

Ivan González was slapped with the fine after a policeman spotted him eating the breakfast pastry while riding through central Sabadell, in Spain's Catalonia region.

He was on his way to work when a local policeman waved him down and wrote up a ticket for reckless driving, Spain's La Vanguardia newspaper reported on Thursday.

An indignant González said he planned to appeal the decision.

Even police at the local station appeared confused by the hefty penalty, he said.

The fine for dangerous cycling is all part of Spain's shift towards a points-based driving licence.

Spanish drivers receive a total of 12 points but can lose points for various infractions, including talking on a mobile phone while driving, speeding or drink driving.

They can also see points stripped for more unusual activities like reversing on a motorway or throwing any object from a car window that could cause an accident.

But even cyclists can lose points for similar infractions, as Ivan González discovered recently.

There are plenty of countries offering to hand you a new citizenship, provided you invest a sufficient amount of money. For those who do not have millions to spare, which nations are more affordable?

Malta made headlines earlier this week when its parliament approved a program to sell the nationality for just $900,000. It comes with full EU benefits and is one of the least restrictive passports for global jetsetters.

It's likely to be an unwelcome development for an immigration-wary Brussels. Programs are already available for swift residency in Portugal - a "Gold Residence Permit Programme" there can be secured with property investments of at least $675,000. It does not give you full citizenship, however.

Union County, North Carolina - Authorities arrested a Union County Department of Social Services worker and a Monroe man Friday night after an 11-year-old boy was found handcuffed to the front porch of a home with a dead chicken tied around his neck, investigators said.

WBTV of Charlotte reported a deputy was answering an animal services complaint next door to the home on Austin Road, south of Monroe, when he saw a child secured to the front porch at the ankle, by what appeared to be a pair of handcuffs.

The child also had a dead chicken hanging around his neck, and appeared to be shivering, the deputy said.

Editor's Note: This post contains graphic pictures of dead wildlife that may disturb some readers.

Trophy hunter and U.S. television host Melissa Bachman ignited controversy this week after posting a picture showing her posing over a dead lion she had slain in South Africa earlier this month.

According to Reuters, a recent FBI memo admits that hacking collective Anonymous has been accessing multiple US government computer systems and stolen information over the past year. The alleged memo is said to have been distributed yesterday, and calls the intrusions a "widespread problem that should be addressed." The Department of Energy, the US Army, and the Department of Health and Human Services are all mentioned as targets.

The attacks are said to have started last December, using an exploit present in Adobe's ColdFusion software. After gaining access, the perpetrators reportedly installed back doors in the systems so they could regain access at a later date; Reuters states that many of the compromised computers were still being accessed as of last month. The FBI memo tell IT personnel how to evaluate whether their systems have been compromised.

Does the United States have a culture of bullying? That was the thesis of an article by the New Republic's Chris Wallace that came out Tuesday. Following in the footsteps of Dave Zirin, who argued last week in the Nation that the NFL's pernicious "man code" reflected a broader American weakness for "sexism, violence against women...and physical domination of others," Wallace examines how the "power politics of the locker room" unfold across the country. "There exists a rush to dominance, a pattern of bullying," he writes, "in every walk of life...The hardest part about watching a football game for me now (aside from knowing now the real toll of the carnage-as-entertainment) is seeing its reflection in the world that brackets it."

Wallace was reacting to the high-profile NFL fiasco in which a white player for the Miami Dolphins, Richie Incognito, bullied a black teammate, Jonathan Martin, to the point of hospitalization. When Martin first reported the abuse, he was widely dismissed and insulted for tattling like a kid. What he'd done by going to the authorities - instead of taking his tormentor "to fist city" - was break the masculinity code. He failed to "step up and be a man," according to Tennessee running back Chris Johnson. "I think Jonathan Martin is a weak person," added an NFL personnel worker (who bravely insisted on anonymity). "There's no other way to put it, other than him being soft."

Dealey Plaza is a public park and a designated National Historical Site that has been open to the public over the five decades since President Kennedy was assassinated there. It was meant to encourage visitors to seek and discuss their own history and this critical event. In 1964, Penn Jones, a newspaper editor and early critic of the Warren Commission's official version of the assassination, began to hold an annual Moment of Silence on the Grassy Knoll (North Pergola) lest we forget the injustice or let the case remain unsolved. At his request, the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) has continued the tradition since his illness and death in the 1990s.

COPA has sought a permit since 2010 for our annual Moment of Silence this 50th anniversary year. We also speak truth to power about the assassination of President Kennedy, who was behind his murder and why he was killed to put others in power in the United States in an un-Constitutional coup.

Two U.S. Border Patrol agents who forced four suspected drug smugglers to chew marijuana and flee shoeless into the Arizona desert on a chilly November night are due to be sentenced on Tuesday for violating the men's civil rights.

A jury convicted Dario Castillo, 25, and Ramon Zuniga, 31, in April of depriving the Mexican men, all of whom were in the U.S. illegally, of civil rights in the incident in the borderland deserts of southern Arizona.

The 2008 incident began when a Border Patrol agent mounted on horseback discovered a group of men sleeping in a dry stream bed in the desert, which straddles a key corridor for Mexican traffickers smuggling drugs and illegally ferrying immigrants into the United States.

Castillo and Zuniga were about to end their shift after midnight, according to testimony, when they got a call for assistance from the horse patrol. They responded, but the group of about 20 suspected smugglers scattered into the night when the agents arrived.