But don't expect it to fix whatever happened in Philadelphia last week.
Starbucks is facing heavy criticism after the manager of a Philadelphia location called the cops on two black men who declined to leave the coffeeshop when asked. Police arrested them, though Starbucks declined to press charges and they were later released.

Protesters briefly shut the store down on Monday, chanting "Starbucks coffee is anti-black! A whole lot of racism, a whole lot of crap!" Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson is currently in the middle of an apology tour, having appeared on Good Morning America, spoke with furious local politicians, and met with the arrested men. He also promised to implement implicit bias training so that Starbucks employees will be less inclined to discriminate against people of color. Indeed, Starbucks announced just moments ago that it would close 8,000 stores on May 29 in order to to conduct racial bias training.

Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in March, Facebook has been attempting to make a moral stand for your privacy, distancing itself from the unscrupulous practices of the U.K. political consultancy. "Protecting people's information is at the heart of everything we do," wrote Paul Grewal, Facebook's deputy general counsel, just a few weeks before founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hit Capitol Hill to make similar reassurances, telling lawmakers, "Across the board, we have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good." But in reality, a confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the two companies are far more similar than the social network would like you to believe.

The recent document, described as "confidential," outlines a new advertising service that expands how the social network sells corporations' access to its users and their lives: Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them based on how they will behave, what they will buy, and what they will think. These capabilities are the fruits of a self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed "FBLearner Flow."

One slide in the document touts Facebook's ability to "predict future behavior," allowing companies to target people on the basis of decisions they haven't even made yet. This would, potentially, give third parties the opportunity to alter a consumer's anticipated course. Here, Facebook explains how it can comb through its entire user base of over 2 billion individuals and produce millions of people who are "at risk" of jumping ship from one brand to a competitor. These individuals could then be targeted aggressively with advertising that could pre-empt and change their decision entirely - something Facebook calls "improved marketing efficiency." This isn't Facebook showing you Chevy ads because you've been reading about Ford all week - old hat in the online marketing world - rather Facebook using facts of your life to predict that in the near future, you're going to get sick of your car. Facebook's name for this service: "loyalty prediction."

"Jad" - @Jadinho123 - shows how the world has been lied to many times to create the current Syrian theater of war (courtesy Zerohedge)...

A closer inspection of America's relentless Russophobic propaganda campaign reveals that it isn't just the news media spreading hatred of Russia and Russians, but Hollywood as well.

America's unrelenting propaganda assault on Russia began by demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is routinely blamed for every evil that occurs under the sun, and according to the establishment media, there is nothing too evil that the Bond super-villain Putin cannot accomplish.

After initially approving 400 troops for President Donald Trump's border deployment plan, California Governor Jerry Brown has reportedly placed conditions on their use for immigration enforcement, angering federal officials.

Trump announced the deployment of the National Guard along the border in early April as part of a crackdown on illegal border crossings from Mexico. Until Congress approves funding for the construction of the border wall, the US president said, the military will help police the frontier.

The governors of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, all Republicans, have cooperated with the plan. Brown initially approved sending some 400 troops to the border, earning praise from Trump.

Nearly eight hours of rioting at a maximum-security South Carolina prison left at least seven inmates dead and 17 others injured, authorities said.

State officials defended their response to the prison brawl - one of the deadliest in America's recent history - amid allegations that officers did little to curb the violence early on and did not render aid as quickly as they could have.

Fighting began at one of the housing units at Lee Correctional Institution, as detention officers were conducting a nightly check-in, state corrections director Bryan Stirling said at a news conference today.

Two more fights erupted at two other housing units at Lee Correctional as well, he said.

The fighting triggered a standard response in which guards at each of the dorms left the housing units and called for backup, Stirling said. "They're outnumbered, so they're trained to back out of that dorm and call for support," Stirling said. "And that's what we believe they did last night because support arrived immediately."

Farms producing fur for the UK market have been exposed for caging animals in sickening conditions.

An undercover investigation in western Finland found dangerously overweight silver foxes barely able to move.

Other animals were found with weeping eye conditions and thick rolls of fur over their eyes.

And a farm in Ireland kept mink in such distressing conditions wildlife experts said they were bound to suffer "physiological stress and resort to self-mutilation and cannibalism".

It comes as the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee meets tomorrow to investigate the conditions of the global fur industry.

It has been announced that Art Bell has died in his home in the United States at the age of 72. Bell was one of the radio pioneers of the late 20th century and became the first major radio personality to explore topics that others simply would not touch.

His radio show Coast to Coast AM debuted in its classic format on US radio in 1988. The show began at a time when US talk radio was becoming increasingly deregulated in terms of political content controls, but while many used this opportunity to talk more politics, Bell did something different. Bell realised that there was an untapped reserve of intelligent, amusing and at times bewildering group experts and ordinary callers with an interest in the paranormal, government conspiracies, extraterrestrials, ghosts, space travel, apocalypticism, clairvoyance and political cover-ups of all of the above. What's more is that Bell's show was accessible even to sceptics or those with no particular interest in the topics he and his guests would discuss.

It was Bell's ability to take the 'unusual' and broadcast it to a cross-sectional audience that was one of the main areas of his genius. He was able to attract a combination of true believers who ate up every theory presented by his guests (including the contradictory ones), those who disbelieved everything (including guests who were traditional scientists) and most importantly those who were both educated and entertained by a combination of the enlightening, the absurd and the curious. Art Bell's show encouraged people to question everything and few could walk away from his broadcasts without questioning at least something they once thought they had figured out.

The Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill and Pope Francis have issued a joint statement in connection with the worsening situation in Syria.

The world community was informed about this by Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the department for external church relations of the Moscow Patriarchate.

He read out the text of the statement, in which both priests expressed their deep concern that the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East threatened to escalate into a global conflict. Spiritual leaders warn that the world has approached a dangerous line - the failure of international relations of different countries and the curtailment of cooperation.

Finally some real American journalism.

One America's Pearson Sharp visited the war-torn town of Douma outside the capital of Damascus, looking for evidence of a chemical attack.

What did he discover?

All the residents interviewed by OAN in Douma denied all the claims of any sort of chemical attack happening, and say it was staged to help jihadist rebels escape from an advancing Assad army.