The homeless hero who handed a found backpack full of cash and travelers checks worth some $40,000 over to Boston Police will not walk away from his good deed empty handed.

During the tenure of billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg, the number of homeless people in New York City's shelter system has increased to more than 50,000, an all-time high. An astoundingly high percentage of those people have jobs.

A homeless man found a backpack filled with a large sum of money, travelers checks, and a passport outside a Dorchester mall in Massachusetts on Saturday and turned it over to police officers. He alerted Boston police in front of the South Bay Mall TJ Maxx store and gave them the bag filled with $2,400 in cash, $39,500 in traveler’s checks, and a Republic of China passport. The Good Samaritan, according to Boston police, could only provide them with his name and the address of the shelter where he is currently staying.

As part of its legal obligation to house the homeless, New York City "is paying to keep a record 2,684 households in apartments costing $3,000 a month." It costs just as much to house families in homeless shelters, but the shelters are full.

Lost amid the uproar over other Supreme Court rulings this week was this: yesterday, SCOTUS let stand a lower court ruling that said that the city of LA cannot just confiscate and destroy the possessions of homeless people. Homeless people may legally have things, huzzah.

First, watch the video. All of it. Especially from about 2:00 on.

In a complaint filed with the U.S. Justice Department, the Michigan ACLU says that Detroit police have been picking up homeless people from the popular Greektown neighborhood and dropping them off miles away, sometimes even outside of city limits. Homeless people have termed the practice being "taken for a ride," after police officers have repeatedly approached members of the homeless population and told them to get into vans. They are then deserted by the police, often far from any assistance, and told to never return to Greektown.

The city of Saratoga Springs, New York has a problem: homelessness. I mean, the problem is not that Saratoga Springs residents are forced to sleep on the streets—the problem is these homeless citizens are sleeping in City Hall. How are the city fathers supposed to conduct their important business of helping out Saratoga Springs citizens when those citizens are being all, like, dirty in their space?

Mayor Bloomberg believes that the reason behind New York City's staggering rise in homelessness is not because of the city's high unemployment or incredible inequality, but rather people (who would be in an income bracket very much like the mayor's) who take limos and private jets on their way to the homeless shelter.

A new report says NYC has 50,000 homeless people in shelters each night, up 61% since Bloomberg took office.

The largest California outbreak of tuberculosis in a decade is happening in Los Angeles right now, and the Centers for Disease Control has finally dispatched a team of scientists to help LA-area authorities try to control it. The locus of the outbreak, which involves a strain of TB unique to LA, is the city's notorious Skid Row, the small constellation of streets in downtown where Southern California's most downtrodden citizens—homeless people, prostitutes, heroin addicts, combinations of all three—congregate in such close quarters that a disease outbreak was probably inevitable. Since 2007, 11 people have died of TB in LA County, according to the LA Times. In the latest outbreak, 60 of the 78 cases reported to authorities were homeless people living on or near Skid Row.

New York City Michael "Mayor Mike" Bloomberg, the 20th richest human in the world, said this yesterday about his administration's policy of requiring single adults "to prove they have no other alternatives when they are seeking access to a homeless shelter," and of barring homeless families and children from city shelters during freezing weather "if officials determine they have an alternative place to sleep:"

Despite this winter actually acting wintry and cold, NYC homeless shelters have been turning away homeless families on freezing nights if they cannot prove they have nowhere else to go, the Daily News is reporting. Turning homeless individuals and families away has long been a practice of New York City's Department of Homeless Services, which relentlessly insists that you must stay with a relative or at some prior living arrangement if it is still available to you, leaving many homeless no choice but to sleep on the street rather than return to a bad living situation.

The next mayor of New York City will not be George McDonald, though George McDonald is running for mayor. That's OK. George McDonald is already better than any mayor has ever been at addressing the most obstinate social problems in this city's modern history.

Surveillance footage capturing a homeless man's death in the alley behind a CVS pharmacy in Chicago in 2010 was released today, showing several minutes of the attack in which store manager Pedro Villarosa held down and strangled 35-year-old Anthony Kyser while six passersby helped hold him down.

After a day of failed fishing, Sergio Alvarez was homeless and hungry in Malibu last month when he says he did what millions of red-blooded Americans do every year when they want some food: He killed a bird in order to eat it. What Alvarez didn't know is that while the type of pelican he strangled to death wasn't endangered, it was on the protected species list. The 30-year-old Alvarez was arrested on the spot, and now he's going to jail for two months after pleading no contest to misdemeanor animal cruelty.

New York-based marketing firm BBH is running what they're calling a "charitable experiment" this week at the South by Southwest tech and arts festival in Austin, Texas. They've outfitted 12 homeless men, and one woman, with equipment that turns them into walking 4G wireless hotspots. It's a simple, innovative solution to an important, pressing problem: lack of internet.

Good news for All The Single [Homeless] Ladies: the Manhattan state Supreme Court ruled today that, for the time being, unmarried homeless people do not have to prove they have no other housing options before entering a shelter.

A Cardozo student spent half a year living on the street because "I wasn't satisfied, my life just felt meaningless because I didn't have really any challenges." Noting that Neaderthals probably didn't experience boredom, he quit paying for his apartment and started sleeping on the street.

Did you have a spiritually rejuvenating weekend during which your loving family members and random kindly strangers helped to restore some of your dwindling faith in humanity? This video of a Chicago teenager punching an elderly homeless man should eliminate that new-found faith.