More than one in seven people.

That's how many people are on food stamps in America these days. More than one in seven people.

In fact, the number of recipients of federal food assistance rose a whopping 171% between 2000 and 2011 alone, to an all-time record of more than 47 million Americans across the country now on the food stamp dole.

That means more U.S. citizens are receiving food stamp benefits now than in the entire history of the food stamp program ever.

One-sixth of the country is now receiving food stamps and the number just continues to climb.

Veiled by the yellow willows and brush along a forgotten creek bed in San Jose, hundreds of people jerry-built a treehouse and constructed underground bunkers and ramshackle lean-tos to form one of the nation's largest homeless encampments.

The 68-acre shantytown is just minutes away from downtown and the high-tech giants that made Silicon Valley one of the world's most opulent locations. For years, the city turned a blind eye to "the Jungle." But the camp along the muddy bank of Coyote Creek has become more crowded in recent years and is awash in rotting trash, rats and human waste - so bad that the endangered steelhead trout have essentially disappeared.

After years of halfhearted cleanups, city officials on Thursday plan to begin shutting down the Jungle for good.
The sprawling camp has become a major embarrassment, and a potent emblem of Silicon Valley's homeless crisis. In 2013, San Jose and the surrounding Santa Clara County estimated almost 7,600 homeless people, more than in San Francisco. And 75% of them were sleeping outside, on sidewalks, in parks and under freeway embankments - a percentage greater than in any other major U.S. metropolitan area.

Officials have blamed soaring housing costs for the displacement. As Silicon Valley rocketed out of the recession, workers streamed in, driving the average apartment rent within 10 miles of San Jose up to $2,633 in September, from $1,761 two years earlier, according to the rental website RentJungle.com.

The median home price is nearly $700,000.

"It's a perfect storm of extreme wealth, a booming tech community and people priced out of the market," said Jennifer Loving, executive director of Destination Home, a public-private partnership to end homelessness in the county.

Here in Virginia, U.S.A., I'm aware that the native people were murdered, driven out, and moved westward. But my personal connection to that crime is weak, and frankly I'm too busy trying to rein in my government's current abuses to focus on the distant past. Pocahontas is a cartoon, the Redskins a football team, and remaining Native Americans almost invisible. Protests of the European occupation of Virginia are virtually unheard of.

But what if it had just happened a moment ago, historically speaking? What if my parents had been children or teenagers? What if my grandparents and their generation had conceived and executed the genocide? What if a large population of survivors and refugees were still here and just outside? What if they were protesting, nonviolently and violently - including with suicide bombings and homemade rockets launched out of West Virginia? What if they marked the Fourth of July as the Great Catastrophe and made it a day of mourning? What if they were organizing nations and institutions all over the world to boycott, divest, and sanction the United States and seek its prosecution in court? What if, before being driven out, the Native Americans had built hundreds of towns with buildings of masonry, hard to make simply disappear?

Editor's Note: When's the last time you worked overtime? How about the last time you worked overtime and got paid for it? If you're in the middle class, probably not recently.

Only Americans who make less than $23,660 a year are automatically eligible for time-and-a-half pay after working 40 hours a week. Today, that's only 11 percent of salaried workers. It didn't used to be this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way, argues venture capitalist Nick Hanauer.

Just like President Obama has taken executive action on immigration, Hanauer believes the president can and should take executive action to raise the salary threshold for overtime eligibility.

Hanauer's a billionaire who made his fortune as one of the original investors in Amazon. The current rules are written to benefit wealthy capitalists like him, he admits. So, you might ask, why does Hanauer care about overtime pay for people who make less, much less, than he does?

"Ironically," he writes, when "you earn less, and unemployment is high, it even hurts capitalists like me." That won't surprise Making Sen$e readers who've heard his brand of "middle-out economics." Closing the income gap wouldn't just benefit the middle class; a stronger middle class is the source of economic prosperity for everyone, he thinks. Watch him make that argument to Paul Solman below.

A Texas grand jury declined to indict two former Jasper police officers who were caught on video assaulting a woman inside the police station last year.

The Beaumont Enterprise reports white officers Ricky Grissom and Ryan Cunningham will not face criminal charges for the May 5, 2013, incident in which they were recorded slamming a black woman's head into a desk and dragging her across the floor.

Overhead surveillance cameras recorded the violent assault of Keyarika Diggles.

The case became a centerpiece of the ongoing racial tension in the Texas town, according to The Texas Observer.

Among the troubling aspects of the case was that the officers arrested Diggles for little more than unpaid parking tickets the day of the assault. Diggles had reportedly been paying down her debt to the city and owed only about $100 the day the officers showed up at her door to arrest her.

In July, New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked unarmed black man Eric Garner to death, in broad daylight, while a bystander caught it on video. That is what American police do. Yesterday, despite the video, despite an NYPD prohibition of exactly the sort of chokehold Pantaleo used, and despite the New York City medical examiner ruling the death a homicide, a Staten Island grand jury declined even to indict Pantaleo. That is what American grand juries do.

In August, Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown to death in broad daylight. That is what American police do. Ten days ago, despite multiple eyewitness accounts and his own face contradicting Wilson's narrative of events, a grand jury declined to indict Wilson. That is what American grand juries do.

In November 2006, a group of five New York police officers shot unarmed black man Sean Bell to death in the early morning hours of his wedding day. That is what American police do. In April 2008, despite multiple eyewitness accounts contradicting the officers' accounts of the incident, Justice Arthur J. Cooperman acquitted the officers of all charges, including reckless endangerment. That is what American judges do.

In February of 1999, four plainclothes New York police officers shot unarmed black man Amadou Diallo to death outside of his home. That is what American police do. A year later, an Albany jury acquitted the officers of all charges, including reckless endangerment. That is what American juries do.

In November of 1951, Willis McCall, the sheriff of Lake County, Fla., shot and killed Sam Shepherd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man in his custody. That is what American police do. Despite both a living witness and forensic evidence which contradicted his version of events, a coroner's inquest ruled that McCall had acted within the line of duty, and Judge Thomas Futch declined to convene a grand jury at all.

Casey Kressin was having a life-threatening asthma attack early Sunday morning when the car he was riding in was stopped by a police officer for running a red light in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

Kressin's girlfriend was rushing him to the hospital to get medical care when the unidentified police officer pulled them over (video below).

After the officer realized Kressin was having an asthma attack, the cop called for an ambulance, which got to the scene too late.

"It was about six minutes later that EMS arrived on scene, and they took him and transported him to the hospital, and he was later pronounced deceased," Chippewa Falls Police Chief Wendy Stelter told WEAU 13.

"What the officer was thinking was that this man was sitting there and I am going to keep him calm until the ambulance arrives," added Chief Stelter. "The officer feels that he did what he should have done, and I support him in that. Yet the family has lost a family member, and that's sad."

However, keeping someone "calm" during an asthma attack is not the type of care they need.

On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to return an indictment for the police officer who put Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a chokehold shortly before his death. A different Staten Island grand jury was less sympathetic to Ramsey Orta, however, the man who filmed the entire incident.

In August, less than a month after filming the fatal July 17 encounter in which Daniel Pantaleo and other NYPD police officers confronted Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, a grand jury indicted Orta on weapons charges stemming from an arrest by undercover officers earlier that month.

Police alleged that Orta had slipped a .25 caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice's waistband outside a New York hotel. Orta testified that the charges were falsely mounted by police in retaliation for his role in documenting Garner's death, but the grand jury rejected his contention, charging him with single felony counts of third-degree criminal weapon possession and criminal firearm possession.

In Garner's case, on the other hand, jurors determined there was not probable cause that Pantaleo had committed any crime. A medical examiner ruled Garner's death homicide in part resulting from the chokehold, a restraining move banned by the NYPD in 1993.

The use of grand juries in high-profile police killings has attracted increasing scrutiny after such juries declined to indict both Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri this summer, and now Pantaleo. While the famous saying goes that a grand jury could "indict a ham sandwich," it's become clear that they also give much more leeway to police officers.

St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch's objectivity was regularly called into question throughout the Brown case. Critics argue that the close cooperation between law enforcement and prosecutors may make them more hesitant to bring charges against police officers.

A small community of Christians in Canada left the body of a deceased member for six months trusting God to resurrect him from the dead. The Crown found no criminal intent and the grieving widow was ordered to seek public health counseling.

The unusual case was resolved on Monday as Kaling Wald, 50, pledged guilty to failing to notify the authorities of her husband Peter's death.

The 52-year-old, who suffered from diabetes, got a leg infection sometime in March. But he refused to go to hospital, trusting God to cure him. Eventually the disease took over and he slipped into coma and died sometime around March 20, according to the agreed statement of facts read out in court.

Mrs. Wald covered the body with two blankets, the head with a toque (beanie), padlocked the bedroom door and sealed vents to keep the decomposition stench from the house. She believed her husband would be eventually resurrected from and return to his family.

"We were trusting God. We thought, 'OK, Lord, you know better,'" Wald told the Hamilton Spectator after the court hearings.

The corpse had been lying upstairs for six months before the sheriff had arrived to evict Wald, her six children aged between 11 and 22 and seven adult friends from their home in Hamilton, Ontario, due to failure to pay the mortgage.

The sheriff discovered the body, which by that time had been partially eaten by rodents and decomposed badly enough that it could not be identified by a photo.

Due to the mummified state of the body, a toxicology test could not be conducted, but the pathologist stated that the death was "likely due to natural causes."

After a wave of protests and massive backlash, a Fort Lauderdale judge has temporarily suspended the city's recent ban on feeding the homeless in public places.

Broward Circuit Judge Thomas Lynch on Tuesday suspended the enforcement of the ordinance that forbids people from feeding the homeless in parks and other public places in the city. Specifically, the local law limits the location of outdoor feeding sites and requires groups providing food to supply portable toilets. The decision is valid for 30 days pending mediation, reports AP.

Judge Lynch's ruling comes in response to 90-year-old homeless advocate Arnold Abbott's lawsuit challenging the ordinance. The World War II vet and retired jewelry salesman has been feeding the homeless at the city's beaches with his group, Love Thy Neighbor, for the last 23 years.

"We're elated the judge has entered the stay," Abbott's attorney, John David, was quoted as saying in the Sun-Sentinel, Ft. Lauderdale's main daily, on Tuesday.