Sinfully decadent seating and farm-to-table cocktails entice one writer to see what all the fuss is about and whether its worth $28 for the premium experience

A new cinema opened in Manhattan last week. Its called iPic and it is a fancy cinema. We know this because the promotional material is so excessively florid it almost makes you not want to go.

According to its website, iPic prides itself on deftly combining the highest levels of comfort and service that turns an ordinary night out into an extraordinary escape.

It offers farm-to-table cocktails, whatever those are, and describes its seating arrangements as sinfully decadent.

Despite all this, it is actually good. Particularly if you dont really go to the cinema.

Like me. I dont really go to the cinema. I like films Titanic was good, wasnt it? but I get nervous ahead of cinema trips.

What if the seat is uncomfortable? What if I need a wee in the middle of the film? What if I need a drink in the middle of the film, then need a wee in the middle of the film?

Sinful decadence aside, a selling point of iPic is that it promises to take care of two of these three.

If you choose the premium section you have your own little two-seat area that closely resembles a business class airline pod. iPic describes them as over sized, extra-cushioned leather seats. They recline so that you are essentially lying down.

You dont have to worry about leaving to fetch a drink or something to eat, because iPic offers service at your seat. The menu includes filet mignon sliders and reuben croquettes. The drinks menu includes champagne, aged port and Coors light.

At iPic you do still have to leave the theater to go to the bathroom. But nothing in life is perfect.

Other cinemas do offer food-to-lap service, like Nighthawk cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But you arent necessarily cocooned away in a little pod. You run the risk of sitting next to someone you dont know.

The downside to sealing yourself off from the world is the price. It costs $28 for a premium seat. The cure for heightened sensitivity is expensive.

On Tuesday night, when I went to watch Deepwater Horizon good explosions I sat in one of the fancy seats. They come in pairs, with a little table in-between, a cubby hole to store personal belongings, and a pop-out drinks holder, like you might find in a Rolls Royce or a Toyota Camry. You can recline your seat again, a Toyota Camry offers this feature and you get a pillow and what I found to be a completely redundant blanket.

Other cinemas do reclining seats, of course. AMC does them. Although that doesnt necessarily make them a good thing.

I went to one such AMC to watch The Revenant in January. It was my first time in a fancy seat.

I flung it into full recline and was enjoying the experience until the bear started mauling Leonardo DiCaprio. At that point the combination of panting bear, bloodied DiCaprio, plus the diet Dr Pepper Id hastily consumed beforehand meant that lying flat on my back made me extremely nauseous.

There was no such drama this time. I kept the seat bolt upright. It was comfortable. I summoned a server and ordered a beer, although it was a little hard to hear the waiter over the sound of Mark Wahlberg being heroic. No one climbed over me to fetch M&Ms.

Maybe a better marketing pitch for iPic would be the cinema for the neurotic. Its a cinema that even people who dont like going to the cinema can enjoy. I might actually go again.

Even if I did have to leave to go to the bathroom.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/12/ipic-movie-theater-opens-new-york

Relentless poaching is decimating Africas elephants. But the worlds largest land mammal could have a powerful, new champion if Hillary Clinton becomes president of the U.S.

When asked by Ellen DeGeneres what her spirit animal is, Hillary Clinton had a surprising answer: the elephant.

Although the symbol of the GOP, Clinton spoke on the Ellen DeGeneres Show this May with rare passion about the need to protect real elephants from a poaching crisis that has killed at least 110,000 of them over the past decade, pushing the worlds largest land animals especially forest elephants closer to extinction.

I love the waythe matriarch of the family looks for everybody, I just have such a sense of connection to elephants and it just breaks my heart that they are being poached and murdered and babies being left to fend for themselves, Clinton said on a portion of the show that only aired on Facebook.

Clintons affinity for elephants is not widely known or reported. But during her tenure as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, she helped bring the issue of global wildlife trafficking out of obscurity.

International criminal syndicates are orchestrating the slaughter of many of the worlds iconic wildlife species and profiteering by marketing ivory, rhinoceros horn, and other wildlife parts in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, said Jorge Silva, a spokesperson for the Clinton Campaign. Many of the criminal syndicates have ties with, and are helping to fund, terrorist groups around the world, and also are engaged in human, drug, and arms trafficking.

Experts believe that groups like the Lords Resistance Army, Al-Shabaab and even ISIS may be in part funded by the illicit sale of ivory and other wildlife parts.

Clintons personal love for elephants springs out of a trip to Tanzania in 1997 as first lady. Her daughter, Chelsea, accompanied her, and since then mother and daughter have shared a passion for pachyderms. During the period, Bill Clintons administration opposed any opening of the ivory trade. Despite this, Cites began approving one-off trades in elephant ivory in 1999, 2002 and 2008. Experts have linked the current poaching crisis to the approval of these trades, especially the last one.

Clinton has also worked to combat elephant poaching through the familys foundation. In 2013, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton brought together various conservation groups to partner on a new $80 million programme to fight elephant poaching through the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).

Silva said that if elected president Clinton would amp up the fight against the illegal wildlife trade.

[She will] forge partnerships with the private sector and non-profit community to shut down the U.S. market for illegal wildlife products; deploy U.S. intelligence and enforcement assets to catch and imprison the kingpins that are controlling this multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise; raise the legal penalties for illegal wildlife traffickers; and impose trade sanctions when appropriate on nations that fail to crack down on the illegal killing and marketing of wildlife and wildlife products.

Such a global crackdown may be necessary to save the worlds largest land animals from extinction. This year, the Great Elephant Census a thorough, groundbreaking survey across 18 countries found that populations of savanna elephants have fallen by 30% in just seven years. The news was even worse than many conservationists feared. But the situation is even more dire for forest elephants.

Inhabiting the thick jungles of Central and West Africa, forest elephants are more difficult to survey. But last year, scientists estimated that 65% of forest elephant have been slaughtered for their ivory since 2003. A number of recent studies have also argued that forest elephants are indeed a distinct species based on genetic, physical and behavioral differences.

The Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for its position on elephant conservation or the global wildlife trade, but its website mentions neither. This is not surprising given the website lists very few positions regarding any environmental issues, including making no mention of climate change although Donald Trump has claimed that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese.

In 2012, media leaked photos of Donald Trumps sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, taken during a big game hunt safari in Zimbabwe. In one image, Donald Trump Jr. stands next to an elephant he shot to death and holds up its severed tail. Cutting off an elephants tail is traditional in some African cultures where the hair is made into a bracelet.

A longtime trophy hunter, Donald Trump Jr. has stated that he would be interested in working in the Department of the Interior if his father is elected president.

The way our society treats animals is a reflection of our humanity, reads the Clinton campaign website. If elected president, Clinton also promises further action on wildlife and animal rights issues such as combating the overuse of antibiotics in farm animals, eliminating the consumption of horses and toughening regulations on puppy mills.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2016/oct/11/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-election-elephants-wildlife-extinction-poaching-trade

ACLU revealed Tuesday that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gave special access to Geofeedia, a controversial social media monitoring company

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have previously provided users data to a software company that aids police surveillance programs and targets protesters of color, according to government records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU revealed on Tuesday that the technology corporations gave special access to Geofeedia, a controversial social media monitoring company that partners with law enforcement and has marketed its services as a tool to track Black Lives Matter activists.

In response to the findings, all three companies have announced measures to cut off Geofeedias access to certain data streams, even though critics say the corporations need to adopt broader policies that prevent this kind of surveillance and data sharing.

The ACLUs past records requests in California have determined that at least 13 police agencies have used or acquired Geofeedia, a Chicago-based startup that has worked with law enforcement across the US. Emails between the company and police revealed that Geofeedia had developer-level access to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which means it could review streams of user content in ways that regular members of the public cannot, according to the ACLU.

The fact that third parties are making big money off of the sale and trading of our data with law enforcement is a huge problem and one that any social media user in this country or beyond should be disgusted and surprised by, said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, which has urged companies to end their relationships with Geofeedia. It clearly has a chilling effect on democratic protests.

Instagram had provided Geofeedia access to Instagrams API, or application programming interface, which is a feed of data from users public posts that includes their location, ACLU said. The photo-sharing service terminated access to the API last month, ACLU said.

The ACLU said Facebook allowed Geofeedia to use its Topic Feed API, a tool geared toward media companies and brands that enabled Geofeedia to obtain a ranked feed of public posts centered around specific hashtags, events or places. Facebook also ended this access last month.

Twitter provided Geofeedia with searchable access to its database of public tweets. In one email obtained by the ACLU, a Geofeedia representative told police it had a feature that covered Ferguson/Mike Brown nationally with great success, a reference to the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in Missouri.

Shortly after the release of the report on Tuesday, Twitter said it was immediately suspending Geofeedias commercial access to its data.

The revelations have further exposed hypocrisy in Silicon Valley where tech leaders have expressed praise for Black Lives Matter, yet appear to be helping a social media monitoring company that targets protests and aids police.

The companies have made strong public statements about supporting political and social movements, including Black Lives Matter, said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of California. Now they need to make sure their systems are living up to their commitments.

Cyril said the case highlighted the need for tech companies to actively protect users against the kind of surveillance that has disproportionately targeted communities of color.

Cutting ties with Geofeedia is an excellent first step, but the next step is making clear, transparent, accountable policies policies that the public understands about what your relationship is to the police and how and when they will use this user data.

Ozer added: The ACLU shouldnt have to do a public records act request to tell Facebook and Twitter what their developers are doing.

The ACLU previously found that Geofeedias marketing materials have referred to unions and activists as overt threats and that the company told police its product can help track the Ferguson situation. One California police department allegedly used the software to monitor South Asian, Muslim and Sikh protesters, the ACLU said.

A spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told the Guardian in a statement that Geofeedia only had access to data that people chose to make public, adding, If a developer uses our APIs in a way that has not been authorized, we will take swift action to stop them and we will end our relationship altogether if necessary.

A Twitter spokesperson noted that the company prohibits the sale of user data for surveillance and has a developer policy that bans the use of its data to to investigate, track or surveil Twitter users.

Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris did not address the specific allegations in a statement on Tuesday, but said the company is committed to the principles of personal privacy and has clear policies and guidelines to prevent the inappropriate use of our software.

That said, we understand, given the ever-changing nature of digital technology, that we must continue to work to build on these critical protections of civil rights, he added.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/aclu-geofeedia-facebook-twitter-instagram-black-lives-matter