You’ll want to look up to the sky tonight in NYC.

Global collective Projecting Change will put on a light show above the East River with 1,000 drones on Friday and Saturday nights to kick off Climate Week.

RECOMMENDED: Catch the Empire State Building sparkle in red, white and green after sunset tonight

You can see the series of drone shows after sunset along the East River near the UN building, viewable from either side of the river, depending on the weather. You can monitor any changes to the shows on social media (X, formerly Twitter, Facebook and Instagram).

The drones are meant to “inspire, educate, unify, and activate” about the climate crisis and other important environmental campaigns, according to the Projecting Change. The shows coincide with the 78th United Nations General Assembly and the UN-Secretary-General’s Climate Ambition Summit and SDG Summit and are meant to send “a strong message to world leaders.”

“Art has the power to shift cultures. We urgently need to drive change at scale—to redesign our human systems to be in alignment with nature, and respect all life,” said Projecting Change CEO Christopher Lejeune. “Our children’s survival and all future generations of life on Earth depend on it.”

At the end of each show, you can scan a QR code in the sky to see the Drone Show’s associated campaigns and take part in a unique contest hosted by TMRW, an initiative that aims to empower humanity towards an inclusive and sustainable future through the use of AI to imagine what that future could look like. (If you enter, you can pitch your creative ideas for objects, inventions, places and environments that could contribute to a sustainable future). The AI system developed by TMRW could then generate visuals of your ideas.

* This article was originally published here

If you haven’t had your first pumpkin spice latte of the year, first off, what are you doing? Secondly, you actually might want to hold onto your wallet until you hear this…

A new study from MagnifyMoney shows that pumpkin spice products have increased in price, with an average tax of 14.5%. More specifically, for iconic annual pumpkin spice products like a Starbucks PSL, coffee drinkers can expect to pay an 18% pumpkin spice tax. The Seattle-born coffee company charges $1 more for the seasonal drink in comparison to its Caffe Latte.

To calculate the average pumpkin spice tax, MagnifyMoney collected data from 62 grocery products (31 pumpkin and 31 non-pumpkin) across Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Target. In terms of coffee retailers, they gathered numbers on 18 products (nine pumpkin and nine non-pumpkin) from Blank Street, Starbucks and Dunkin.

MagnifyMoney has been researching the topic since 2017, and this is the first year the tax is in the double digits. Between 2017-2020 the pumpkin spice tax increased by 10%. The average pumpkin spice tax was 8.8% in 2020.

Interestingly enough, the largest markup for pumpkin spice-related products is for pumpkin spice pretzels. Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Spiced Teeny Tiny Pretzels cost 50 cents an ounce, yet their Honey Wheat Pretzel Sticks cost 19 cents an ounce. That’s a 161.1% difference!

And though it seems pumpkin spice products launch earlier each year, Google Trends data shows that people’s interest in the seasonal flavor hasn’t reached its peak in years. Searches for a pumpkin spice latte in August 2022 were 18% lower than they had been in their peak, which was August 2018. MagnifyMoney suggests that its early release and accessibility may be cause for its drop in interest.

When comparing which states were most interested in pumpkin spice lattes, the West coast had significantly more searches than the East coast. The study believes this could be credited to seasonal FOMO since much of the West coast states like Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico don’t have an actual fall season in terms of temperatures.

So with this tax, does it mean we need to give up on our love for the seasonal flavor? Hell no! There are many ways to still enjoy your pumpkin spice fix. MagnifyMoney encourages you to comparison shop, budget for your fall preferences, and keep an eye out on discounts.

Discover more findings from the study here.

The post You May Love Your PSL, But You Sure Won’t Love This Pumpkin Spice Tax appeared first on Secret NYC.

* This article was originally published here

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is challenging efforts by former President Donald Trump to disqualify the Washington judge presiding over the case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s team wrote in a court filing late Thursday that there was “no valid basis” for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to recuse herself.

Trump’s lawyers filed a long-shot motion earlier this week urging Chutkan to step aside, citing comments she made in separate sentencing hearings related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that they say taint the Trump proceedings and call into question whether she has already prejudged the Republican former president’s guilt.

In one such hearing, Chutkan told a defendant who was sentenced to more than five years in prison that he had “made a very good point” that the “people who exhorted” and encouraged him “to go and take action and to fight” had not been charged. Chutkan added that she did not “make charging decisions” and had no “influence on that.”

“I have my opinions,” she said, “but they are not relevant.”

But the Justice Department said the Trump team had taken Chutkan’s comments out of context and failed to show that she harbored any bias against the former president, who lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and falsely claimed the election was stolen from him.

The Justice Department said the statements the Trump lawyers had cited show the judge simply doing her job — responding to, and rejecting, efforts to minimize their own culpability by pointing the finger at Trump, who had told his supporters to “fight like hell” at a rally shortly before the deadly Capitol insurrection.

Chutkan did not say, prosecutors wrote, that Trump was legally or morally to blame for the events of Jan. 6 or that he deserved to be punished.

“Although the defendant tries to claim otherwise, the Court’s statements about which he complains are core intrajudicial statements — statements that the Court made while performing its official duties, in direct response to the arguments before it, and which were derived from knowledge and experience the Court gained on the bench,” the prosecutors wrote.

They added: “As such, to mount a successful recusal claim based on the cited statements, the defendant must show that they display a deep-seated animosity toward him. The defendant cannot meet this heavy burden.”

Trump’s motion is unlikely to succeed given the high standard for recusal. A similar effort to seek the recusal of a judge in a separate New York prosecution he faces was unsuccessful.

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Follow Eric Tucker on X at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP.

The post The Justice Department says there’s no valid basis for the judge to step aside from Trump’s DC case appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here