Anyone who has ever dealt with law enforcement when they've been a victim of a crime knows that the wheels of justice move very slowly. For some, the waiting is too much to bear and when police - who are often more concerned with prosecuting people for possessing a plant - refuse to go after criminals, they take matters into their own hands.

When Lydia Lerma discovered that her son had been molested by a man who was living with her ex-husband, the crime devastated her. However, the insultingly low bail placed on her son's abuser was equally devastating as it allowed him to walk free for very little money. When police allowed Andrew Vanderwal to walk free after posting $750 bail, the family was doubly impacted. Worse still, Vanderwal fled to Mexico, escaping justice and infuriating Lerma, who then made it her mission to become a pedophile hunter.

Vanderwal had fully confessed to molesting Lerma's son. Yet even with a full confession, a judge set the bail so low he was able to get out of jail and go on the run. Vanderwal quickly found refuge south of the U.S. border, eventually settling in Cuauhtemoc, Mexico, which is where Lerma found him, almost a year and a half after police let a confessed pedophile walk free.

Vladimir Putin, the bear-riding Bond villain, is listening into your inane conversations about picking up milk from the shop or who is shagging who in the office... or so the mainstream media would have you believe.

According to sections of the British press - who, let's be honest, don't often get carried away like this - are insistent that Russia is about to launch a full-scale cyberattack on the United Kingdom... or they already have, depending on who you ask. And all because the UK, USA and France launched a missile attack against the Syrian Bashar Assad regime.

If you ask the Express, "Russia is 'SPYING' on THOUSANDS of UK households in 'RETALIATION to Syria strikes." Apparently, your home could become a part of a Russian "botnet," used to launch large scale cyber attacks. No explanation was provided as to what a botnet is though... but when you're whipping the British population into a fearful frenzy, who has time to explain?

Many, including Russia's President Putin, have asked why the US launched an illegal attack on Syria prior to the chemical weapons inspectors examining the site of the alleged chemical attack.

This popular question completely misses the point. The US attack on Syria is a clear and indisputable war crime against a sovereign country regardless of whether Syria used a chemical weapon in driving the Washington supported terrorists from Douma. No one acted to stop Washington's war crime. Some of Washington's vassals, such as Germany and Italy, refused to participate in Washington's war crime, but no one attempted to block it. The impotent UN Security Council, to which Russia is wasting its time appealing, the EU, NATO, Russia and China themselves did nothing to stop Washington's Nazi era war crime.

On Sunday, former Austrian Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst announced on instagram that she is HIV-positive.

In her post, she wrote in German, "Today is the day to free me from the sword of Damocles for the rest of my life: I have been HIV-positive for many years. This is actually irrelevant to the public, but an ex-boyfriend threatened me to go public with this private information and I will not give anyone the right to frighten me and influence my life in the future."

The post had 44,000 likes as of Monday evening.

The US president's decision to delay extending further economic sanctions against Moscow has pushed Russian stocks and currency higher. The new penalties were aimed at punishing Russia for its support of the Syrian government.

The RTS dollar-traded index had gained nearly three percent by 08:00 GMT on Tuesday, while the ruble-denominated MOEX climbed almost two percent, led by shares in Sberbank and mining company Norilsk Nickel. The ruble gained slightly against the US dollar and the euro.

Russian stocks are currently reeling from last week's plunge, when the ruble passed through its steepest slump since the middle of 2015. The currency slipped after the White House announced the toughest penalties against Moscow to date, targeting Russian businessmen and companies.

The Freedom Flotilla coalition has announced the preparation for a new campaign to break the siege on Gaza. The campaign will be launched from northern Europe in mid-May under the slogan "for a just future for Palestinians".

One of the vessels that will sail for the Freedom Flotilla was named al-Awda (Return) to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba and support the Palestinian refugees' right of return.

Zaher Birawi, a founding member of the Freedom Flotilla coalition, said that this year's campaign to break the siege will have special significance because it will be launched in conjunction with the peak of the Great March of Return in Gaza which demands the return of all Palestinian refugees to their lands from which they were expelled in 1948.

Birawi added that the ships will visit some European ports in addition to one Arab port, where solidarity events in support of the Palestinian people will be organized, before heading to Gaza.

He pointed out that the relatively small ships will be carrying dozens of public figures and international peace activists from over 20 countries, and are expected to arrive in the Gaza Strip early July.

Some Israeli soldiers who are posted to the Gaza border have reached out to Breaking the Silence, the dissident Israeli group that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to ban because it publishes soldiers' testimonies that are highly critical of the occupation.

Avner Gvaryahu, the head of Breaking the Silence, described the contacts during a panel at the J Street conference in Washington yesterday:

As long as there will be an occupation, soldiers will speak out. As long as we will continue to control Palestinians, there will be those people who say I have to take responsibility for what I did. And the numbers of soldiers who are coming are as high as they were ever, you know- even soldiers reaching out who are currently on the border with Gaza.

I later asked Gvaryahu if these soldiers are refusing to shoot, as B'Tselem, the human rights organization, has urged. "No, I said, some of them have reached out to us," he responded.

One person has died after a Southwest Airlines flight was forced to execute an emergency landing in Philadelphia, the US National Transportation Safety Board has confirmed.

Part of the plane's engine ripped off and damaged the jet. A woman was partially sucked out of the aircraft when the cabin rapidly depressurized, it is understood she was the fatally injured victim.

Flight 1380 took off from LaGuardia Airport at 10.27am local time, bound for Dallas. Less than an hour later, the pilot of the Southwest aircraft was forced to take emergency action due to engine damage.

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."