Latest news with #Plexiglas
South China Morning Post
02-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
3 ways to escape the crowds in Thailand's Phang Nga
From 1,000 feet in the air I could see where the sea shallowed, allowing the white sand to shine through the water around Thailand's Panak Island, east of Phuket . That would be a good place to anchor a boat for a swim, I pointed out to the pilot. Koh Yao Yai's serpentine sand spit changes shape with every tide. Photo: Shutterstock Then, as he banked the small aircraft into a right-hand turn, I saw the serrated outline of the Phang Nga mountains poking through the haze to the north. A good place to go exploring with a 4x4 truck, we agreed. Advertisement And that was how my friend Torben Kristensen and I decided on three modes of transport as ways in which to explore this corner of southern Thailand . Each, in its own way, would allow us to escape from the crowds of tourists that claim the area's more accessible spots. By air Torben Kristensen, a newly minted private pilot, checking up the Zenith 701 STOL plane for take off. Photo: Cameron Dueck Exploring by air requires very little of me. Kristensen, a newly minted private pilot, was keen to take me up in the tiny ultralight he flies out of the Phuket Flying Club. Although the club offers joyrides to paying tourists in its four-seater Piper aircraft, the two-seater Zenith STOL CH 701 plane provides a more intense experience of Phang Nga Bay from the air. The sun beats down on the Plexiglas windscreen filling the cramped cockpit with a stifling tropical heat as we prepare for departure. Each movement we make rocks the aircraft as Kristensen completes his preflight checks. Exploring Phang Nga Bay in the STOL plane. Photo: Cameron Dueck Clearance for take-off comes over a scratchy radio transmission and we start to wobble down the grass runway. The aeroplane bumps once, twice – a little more throttle – three times, and then we climb into the air with the scream of an overworked engine.
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Nominee for South Carolina's top doctor toppled by lingering COVID anger
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina Senate committee rejected the Republican governor's nominee to be the state's top doctor after hours of hearings dominated by the state's response to the COVID pandemic. Just one of 13 Republicans on the Senate Medical Affairs Committee voted for Dr. Edward Simmer 's nomination to lead the new Department of Public Health — in contrast to the Republican-dominated Senate's overwhelming endorsement of Simmer in 2001 as head of the state's old public health and environmental agency. Thursday's vote reflected lingering anger over his handling of South Carolina's response to the pandemic. Simmer recommended people get the COVID vaccine, and he often wore masks well after the worst of the pandemic had passed, saying he wanted to protect his wife, who has a compromised immune system. Simmer defended his record, pointing out that in two years under his leadership of the old agency, South Carolina improved from 45th to 37th among U.S. states in overall public health measures and that COVID now takes up only a tiny percentage of his time. 'Sometimes a small amount of people can make a lot of noise. I think that's what we're seeing here," Simmer said. 'But I also hope you can look at my overall record, where we are going as a state." The Department of Public Health was created last year, and Gov. Henry McMaster nominated Simmer, a retired U.S. Navy psychiatrist, to run it. But the governor's support came with a backhanded knock on the federal government's COVID response 'He's not a Dr. Fauci,' McMaster said, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who advised Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the pandemic. Several Republicans aggressively questioned Simmer, reading aloud excerpts from his email in which he strongly encouraged people in 2021 to get the COVID vaccine and wear masks. Simmer said he was only following the best science at the time and said he never thought anyone should be required to be vaccinated. Sen. Matt Leber asked why Simmer didn't push back on schools buying Plexiglas barriers or grocery stores putting arrows on floors to encourage one-way traffic up aisles. 'Sometimes where there is chaos there is a vacuum of leadership,' Leber said. Simmer's critics both at the Statehouse and on social media have derisively called him a 'double masker' for wearing two face masks even after he explained that his wife has underlying medical conditions that make COVID especially dangerous for her. He was maskless for hearings both last month and on Thursday but said he 'will wear a mask again without hesitation if that is what it takes to protect the woman I love.' The lone Republican to vote for Simmer asked his colleagues to go back to 2020 and 2021 when many of them also organized COVID testing and made sure their constituents could find places with COVID vaccines. Sen. Tom Davis said punishing Simmer for what could only be known at the time was a terrible precedent. 'If he's guilty of some dereliction of duty in that regard, then I am derelict as well,' Davis said. The Senate's longest serving member, Republican Harvey Peeler, asked if Simmer would be willing to run the state Department of Mental Health if his nomination failed. 'Fauci blew up. You got hit by the shrapnel,' said Peeler, a senator since 1981. 'You talk to my constituents. They see you, they think Dr. Fauci.' The vote doesn't kill Simmer's nomination. But the full Senate, dominated by Republicans, would have to vote to pull it out of committee and send it to the floor. The only real mention of anything other than COVID during the hearing came from Democrats. One questioned him about how South Carolina was monitoring measles outbreaks in other states. A second asked about a mobile maternity care center set to hit the road in 2026. South Carolina is near the bottom in the nation in infant and maternity deaths and has a number of poorer counties where getting to the nearest obstetrician can involve at least a 50-mile (80-kilometer) drive.
Associated Press
03-04-2025
- Health
- Associated Press
Nominee for South Carolina's top doctor toppled by lingering COVID anger
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina Senate committee rejected the Republican governor's nominee to be the state's top doctor after hours of hearings dominated by the state's response to the COVID pandemic. Just one of 13 Republicans on the Senate Medical Affairs Committee voted for Dr. Edward Simmer 's nomination to lead the new Department of Public Health — in contrast to the Republican-dominated Senate's overwhelming endorsement of Simmer in 2001 as head of the state's old public health and environmental agency. Thursday's vote reflected lingering anger over his handling of South Carolina's response to the pandemic. Simmer recommended people get the COVID vaccine, and he often wore masks well after the worst of the pandemic had passed, saying he wanted to protect his wife, who has a compromised immune system. Simmer defended his record, pointing out that in two years under his leadership of the old agency, South Carolina improved from 45th to 37th among U.S. states in overall public health measures and that COVID now takes up only a tiny percentage of his time. 'Sometimes a small amount of people can make a lot of noise. I think that's what we're seeing here,' Simmer said. 'But I also hope you can look at my overall record, where we are going as a state.' The Department of Public Health was created last year, and Gov. Henry McMaster nominated Simmer, a retired U.S. Navy psychiatrist, to run it. But the governor's support came with a backhanded knock on the federal government's COVID response 'He's not a Dr. Fauci,' McMaster said, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who advised Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the pandemic. Several Republicans aggressively questioned Simmer, reading aloud excerpts from his email in which he strongly encouraged people in 2021 to get the COVID vaccine and wear masks. Simmer said he was only following the best science at the time and said he never thought anyone should be required to be vaccinated. Sen. Matt Leber asked why Simmer didn't push back on schools buying Plexiglas barriers or grocery stores putting arrows on floors to encourage one-way traffic up aisles. 'Sometimes where there is chaos there is a vacuum of leadership,' Leber said. Simmer's critics both at the Statehouse and on social media have derisively called him a 'double masker' for wearing two face masks even after he explained that his wife has underlying medical conditions that make COVID especially dangerous for her. He was maskless for hearings both last month and on Thursday but said he 'will wear a mask again without hesitation if that is what it takes to protect the woman I love.' The lone Republican to vote for Simmer asked his colleagues to go back to 2020 and 2021 when many of them also organized COVID testing and made sure their constituents could find places with COVID vaccines. Sen. Tom Davis said punishing Simmer for what could only be known at the time was a terrible precedent. 'If he's guilty of some dereliction of duty in that regard, then I am derelict as well,' Davis said. The Senate's longest serving member, Republican Harvey Peeler, asked if Simmer would be willing to run the state Department of Mental Health if his nomination failed. 'Fauci blew up. You got hit by the shrapnel,' said Peeler, a senator since 1981. 'You talk to my constituents. They see you, they think Dr. Fauci.' The vote doesn't kill Simmer's nomination. But the full Senate, dominated by Republicans, would have to vote to pull it out of committee and send it to the floor. The only real mention of anything other than COVID during the hearing came from Democrats. One questioned him about how South Carolina was monitoring measles outbreaks in other states. A second asked about a mobile maternity care center set to hit the road in 2026. South Carolina is near the bottom in the nation in infant and maternity deaths and has a number of poorer counties where getting to the nearest obstetrician can involve at least a 50-mile (80-kilometer) drive.
New York Times
01-04-2025
- New York Times
When Banksy Came to Red Hook and Made His Mark
Good morning. It's Tuesday. Today we'll find out about what happened to a 7,500-pound chunk of a wall with a Banksy installation from 2013. We'll also get details on a request from Mayor Eric Adams's lawyer for a federal judge to hurry a decision on whether to drop corruption charges against the mayor. A dark-colored van parked down the block from Vassilios Georgiadis's nondescript warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one evening in 2013. Georgiadis, a roofing and asbestos abatement contractor, noticed it because he was standing outside, smoking. He told the man who got out of the van that it was not a good idea to leave it in that spot. Tractor-trailers turning the corner too fast could clip the car, Georgiadis said. The man said he would not be there long. He said something about how he just wanted to run to a convenience store nearby for cigarettes and coffee. Georgiadis told him to pull into an empty space in the driveway outside the warehouse. The man did and headed off. The van was still there when Georgiadis left a little while later. Georgiadis worked at home the next day, and then took some paperwork to his son Anastasios, who spent the day on a roofing job on Staten Island, ignoring calls from his mother. When quitting time came and he dialed her number, she told him about calls from reporters who said that the elusive graffiti artist Banksy had put a heart-shaped balloon on the wall of the Brooklyn warehouse. The balloon was covered with bandages. 'I had heard about Banksy,' Anastasios Georgiadis said. 'I heard he was going around putting up pieces all around the city.' Even so, 'it did not immediately click' that Banksy must have been the man his father saw the day before. But once Anastasios Georgiadis drove by the warehouse and saw a crowd looking at the balloon, he figured that Banksy had installed the heart after his father had gone home. 'I had freshly painted that wall,' Anastasios Georgiadis said. 'I had a lot of people's graffiti on that wall' — the work of taggers less exalted than Banksy. 'Doing business, people see that, they don't like that, so I painted it over,' he said, adding that when Banksy came upon the big, blank wall, 'I guess he saw an opportunity.' At the time, Banksy was several days into a monthlong project called 'Better Out Than In,' which involved putting up new installations around the city. People who saw Banksy's works as targets soon found the heart in Red Hook. News accounts said that in all, graffiti artists had tagged it five times. As the crowd watched, a man in a white hoodie painted the tag 'Omar NYC' next to the heart and walked away. Anastasios Georgiadis said the crowd booed. He then hired 'bodyguards,' he said, to control the crowd and protect the Banksy. 'There were so many people, I put Plexiglas over it,' Anastasios Georgiadis said. 'Someone tried to smash it with a sledgehammer. It was a neighbor of ours. He didn't like the commotion, how everybody was there taking pictures.' He said the guards 'got in the middle and took the sledgehammer away from him.' Before long, Anastasios Georgiadis came up with a plan to remove a section of the wall with the heart intact. That 9-foot-by-6-foot chunk will be displayed in the Winter Garden atrium at Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan starting April 21. The auction house Guernsey's will sell it a month later. Some of the money will go to the American Heart Association in tribute to Vassilios Georgiadis, who died of a heart attack in January 2021. The chunk of the wall has been in a climate-controlled warehouse in New York since 2014, after a private sale did not pan out, Anastasios Georgiadis said. And the warehouse? It was demolished several years ago when he and a partner were looking to build an apartment building with street-level storefronts. That project got as far as the foundation. He said he had sold the project recently. Expect a sunny and breezy day, with the temperature in the high 50s. In the evening, expect a clear sky, with the temperature dipping to around 36. Suspended for Idul-Fitr (Eid al-Fitr) The latest Metro news Adams's lawyer asks a judge for a speedy ruling One of Mayor Eric Adams's lawyers wants the judge who could dismiss the federal corruption charges against him to hurry up. The lawyer, Alex Spiro, cited the Thursday deadline to file petitions for Adams's name to appear on the Democratic mayoral primary ballot in June. Spiro noted that the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the charges had been pending before the judge, Dale Ho, since mid-February. He quoted the judge's own words from a February court hearing: 'It's not in anyone's interest here for this to drag on.' Last year, the mayor pleaded not guilty to the five charges he faces, which include bribery and wire fraud, and his trial was scheduled to start on April 21. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan had pursued the case aggressively. But after President Trump was elected, his administration reversed course, asking Judge Ho to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning that the charges could be reinstated. The mayor courted Trump after the election in November and promised to cooperate with the president's crackdown on immigration. But he denied that the Trump administration agreed to drop the case in exchange for his help with deportations. The dismissal motion, signed by Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official, ultimately led to the resignations of Danielle Sassoon as the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan and at least seven other prosecutors in New York and Washington, including the lead prosecutor in the case against the mayor. Because Bove's motion put the Justice Department and Adams in agreement on dropping the case, the judge named an outside lawyer, Paul Clement, to provide independent arguments. Clement recommended that the case be dismissed but 'with prejudice,' meaning the charges could not be brought again. Service call Dear Diary: I called for a repair for my gas oven and was able to arrange a service call for late the next day. When the technician arrived at my Chelsea apartment, he was very careful to protect the floors. He put paper booties over his shoes while he was in the hall and carried his bulky tool bag into the kitchen rather than rolling it. He listened patiently to my diagnosis of the problem and to my offers to be helpful. 'I've got this,' he said, politely cutting me off and turning away to get to work. I went into the other room. About 20 minutes later, he called for me and demonstrated that everything was working before putting the stove back together. When he was done, he called me back again and explained the warranty. Then, as it was the end of the day and his last call, we started to chat. He pointed to a Rubik's Cube sitting on my counter and asked whether I minded if he picked it up. Not at all, I said. I didn't have a clue about how to do it and had acquired it only to see whether I could figure it out. 'I love these things,' he said. He proceeded to inspect, rotate and twirl the sides over and over while I watched. 'See, I've got this side,' he said, 'and now I've got to get this one.' It took him about eight minutes to finish. 'That's beautiful,' I said. 'Now teach me.' 'No,' he said, shaking his head. 'That would take too long.' Still, it was a nice bonus to an appliance repair service call. — Tom Sawyer Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
CBC
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
All becoming clear: Port Blandford artist creates portraits from Scotch tape
A new art exhibit at Gallery 59 in Gander, N.L., will have you thinking a little differently about office supplies. (In)Visible is an exhibit by visual artist Leslie Sasaki — who now lives in Port Blandford — made using Plexiglas, a boxcutter and Scotch brand magic tape. Sasaki peels out the strips, each layer adding a little more shade, as if it were a pencil. He says it's a way of exploring how people feel invisible in society. "The portraits are very fugitive or kind of fragile. As you walk through the space, they'll change a bit. They're very light-contingent, and that's sort of like people," he said. It's an art project that started almost 20 years ago when Sasaki was a professor at Memorial University's Grenfell Campus. He was experimenting with different materials, eventually making a self-portrait with tape. That picture has followed him to every office he's occupied since. While in Hamilton, Ont., Sasaki was asked to create an exhibit of tape portraits. But he wanted it to be much more. Along with making an image in their likeness, Sasaki sat down to talk with each person. "Tape attaches, it seals, it's used for labelling, but it also repairs. That got me thinking a little bit about the metaphor of being invisible," said Sasaki. He says creating the portraits is the easy part for him, and the most enjoyable part of the project was getting to know the people he recreated with tape. "Everyone has a story. It doesn't have to be the most spectacular, glamorous, sexy story ever, but everybody has a story and the sheer humanity, the everyday humanity of it, makes it amazing." The exhibit in Gander features eight portraits, some from the original exhibit in Hamilton and some new ones he's created since moving back to Newfoundland. "I think we all have different moments, where we feel a little overlooked, ignored," he said. In the decades since he made the first image, Sasaki says, he couldn't have imagined this project would still be going, and coming full circle, back in the province where it all began near one of his favourite art pieces. "I feel really jazzed that my work is here. And just over to my right is the Ken Lockheed mural, which is an amazing piece of artwork — a Canadian treasure, as far as I'm concerned."
