Latest news with #Duma
LeMonde
2 hours ago
- Politics
- LeMonde
Russia sees push for return of official censorship
Sentences handed down to writers and artists, restrictions on the distribution of films, redacted books and limited internet access: the Kremlin has been relentlessly tightening its grip on the free circulation of ideas. However, it has yet to formally restore censorship as it existed in the USSR, which is currently prohibited by the Russian Constitution. On Wednesday, July 23, lawmakers in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, passed a law that, starting January 2026, will require film distributors to obtain a label from the Ministry of Culture certifying that the works they plan to release comply with "traditional Russian spiritual and moral values." Another law, passed the previous day, sets fines for internet users seeking "extremist content" online. Unenforceable in its current form because it criminalizes intent, which is hard to prove, this piece of legislation at the very least helps to foster a climate of fear and self-censorship. "This legal vagueness suits the authorities. Every Russian lives with the sword of Damocles hanging over their head. Fear drives people to remain silent. The Kremlin exercises arbitrariness whenever it can; the laws it enacts are insidious, which makes everyone feel they could be targeted," said sociologist Alexis Berelowitch.
IOL News
a day ago
- Politics
- IOL News
Transforming KwaZulu-Natal: MEC Sibuniso Duma's achievements in housing and transport
MEC Siboniso Duma looks back on his 400 days in office, heading the Human settlements and Transport portfolio in KZN Image: Supplied Transport and Human Settlements MEC Siboniso Duma characterised his first 400 days in office as a significant leap forward, which aligned with the key implementation of the Freedom Charter's principles. Speaking to the Daily News yesterday, Duma reflected on the collaborative efforts with traditional leadership, successful housing initiatives, and ongoing challenges within his departments. One of the crowning achievements Duma noted was the strengthened relationships with traditional leaders across KwaZulu-Natal, which came about through frequent engagements that ensured local support for government projects aimed at disaster responses. 'The Amakhosi have agreed to make land available for our responses to disasters,' Duma stated, which pointed to an important collaboration for future endeavours. Duma revealed that the Human Settlements department fully subsidised 7,976 homes, which positively impacted communities and ensured that over 900 building sites were established for public use. 'We built 5,030 houses for rural residents and provided homes for 464 vulnerable individuals, while also registering 1,638 title deeds for community members,' he added proudly. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad Loading Among the department's highlights, Duma lauded the acquisition of Montclair Lodge from Transnet for R33 million. This facility, which was set to be repurposed into government-owned transitional emergency accommodation for flood victims, featuring 268 rooms and a capacity for 600 individuals. The lodge was anticipated to house flood victims, from December 2025 or January 2026, which would provide a strategic response to seasonal flooding threats. 'This historic milestone will greatly reduce reliance on private facilities for emergency accommodations,' Duma explained, expressing optimism for the future. On the transport front, Duma announced a landmark investment of over R13 billion for developing the province's infrastructure, enhancing public transportation, and enforcing road safety in the upcoming financial year. This investment was not about roads only; but was a crucial portion of the government's broader plan to tackle poverty and inequality. However, Duma mentioned that a harsh reality was the department's budget constraints. Despite a monthly requirement of R1.1 billion to pay service providers, the department recently received only R800 million and, in the previous month, R560 million. 'This means our vision for a 30-day payment turnaround will be compromised,' he lamented, promising to engage with Provincial Treasury for a resolution. Seeking to stimulate local economies while addressing the needs of residents, Duma expressed his commitment to tackling delays in housing construction. 'We've reduced blocked housing projects from 68 to 15,' he said, while also addressing persistent local opposition to new development initiatives. 'There is a need for community understanding; the Not in My Backyard syndrome continues to hinder progress.' Despite these challenges, Duma emphasised the importance of partnership with religious and traditional leaders to create inclusive conversations around government programmes. Through prayer days and various forums, he aimed to empower communities to monitor the effectiveness of resources directed to them. 'We have noted the need to join hands; while we invest heavily in infrastructure and service delivery, engagement with the community is vital to ensure these resources reach those in need,' he concluded. DAILY NEWS
eNCA
2 days ago
- eNCA
Drunk KZN taxi driver sought after causing accident and fleeing
EMPANGENI - KwaZulu-Natal Transport and Human Settlements MEC Siboniso Duma has vowed to take tough action against drunk and reckless drivers who flee accident scenes. This comes after a major crash on the R34 between Empangeni and Eshowe, where an allegedly heavily intoxicated taxi driver caused a collision and ran away. READ: SA's road carnage | Probe into two KZN accidents underway The minibus, carrying family members traveling from Empangeni to eMasangweni, reportedly tried to overtake a Ford Ranger before clipping its rear and forcing both vehicles off the road and down an embankment. Duma says the driver's actions amount to a hit-and-run and could have claimed the lives of up to fourteen passengers. He wants the suspect to face prosecution and a sentence of up to nine years in prison or a fine of R180,000. READ: Truck driver in the N3 deadly crash on the run This is the second case this month involving a drunk driver disappearing after a crash. Duma is urging the public in Empangeni and Eshowe to assist police with any information that could lead to the driver's arrest.
USA Today
3 days ago
- Automotive
- USA Today
Which football helmet should you buy? It's not as simple as you think.
Which football helmets should I buy? It's what a Virginia Tech athletics equipment manager asked Stefan Duma, a faculty member at the university's department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics, in 2009. Duma's team had been working to better understand what causes brain injury. It had placed sensors in Hokies players helmets. It had simulated car crashes. The question seemed simple enough, until Duma and his colleagues delved deeper into it. 'We said, 'We don't know.' We can buy helmets and test because there's really no information available in what was good and what wasn't,' says Steve Rowson, who, as a graduate student, joined this little-known football helmet project that was about to take off. Duma's group simulated hits with a guillotine-like device that plunged a dummy headform down cables onto an anvil. 'We bought the helmets, and we saw huge differences," Rowson tells USA TODAY Sports. "But we also felt like everyone should have that information, so we developed the Virginia Tech helmet ratings based on that. And it was like the first independent, objective way of evaluating helmets.' The investigation that started in Duma's basement lab sparked a wave of discussion that would define standards used by youth, high school and college teams and expand to other sports. 'It wasn't like a pass/fail scale,' Rowson tells USA TODAY Sports. 'It was, 'Here are the best performers. Here are the next best. Here are the not so good performers,' and that really resonated with consumers. It was a little disruptive to the football helmet manufacturing industry.' Rowson is now director of Virginia Tech's Helmet Lab that has reached national acclaim for its testing and studies. It published the first independent safety ratings for varsity football helmets in 2011 and continues to ramp up the standard for what constitutes a five-star helmet. Just recently, it updated its rating system with new thresholds for those used in varsity and youth football and by bicyclists. 'The best helmets back in 2011 would be the very worst helmets today,' Rowson you ever wondered about the force of a hit to the head your kid sees in practice and in games, and how their helmets are tested to protect from them? Or how helmet recommendations are determined for various sports and age groups? We spoke with Rowson about the history of his lab, the methods and evolution behind Virginia Tech's STAR testing system and how it can help keep your athlete safe. What is the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab and how does it replicate impact? The lab is a collection of about 25 Virginia Tech faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students who study the forces that cause injuries all over the body and look for ways to prevent them from occurring. They consider over a million head impacts to develop football readings. As they learn more, they add test conditions or change methods. Sometimes, it's a complete overhaul. Their first varsity football helmet ratings were based on Duma's drop test. 'We were only considering linear acceleration in the head, and it's because there weren't really good methods to evaluate rotation of the head,' Rowson says. 'We didn't know how rotational acceleration related to brain injury really well at the time, but we knew enough about linear acceleration that it had a correlation to concussion risk. 'However, a few years later, we had new data to tell us how rotational acceleration related to brain injury, and we upgraded the football method to include both linear and rotational acceleration. We have a pendulum impactor, which pretty much looks like a big upside down hammer that swings down and then it hits a dummy headform that has a helmet on it. Think of a crash test dummy. That dummy headform has sensors inside it.' Helmet manufacturing has advanced, Rowson says, as the lab has. 'The amount of change that we've seen in helmet design over the last decade is probably more than we saw in the previous 30 years combined,' he says. Understanding the impact and distribution of hits I asked Rowson, who has a master's and Ph. D in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Tech, if he could come up with an analogy for the greatest impact a helmet sustains on a field. He did some math and got back to me with the following scenario: Head accelerations associated with concussion are comparable in magnitude to those experienced in unbelted car crashes at approximately 17 mph for college-level players and 10 mph for youth-level players. That's 100 times the acceleration of gravity for college players and 60 times for youth. However, damage from concussions can be cumulative. The lab tests helmets with the hardest hits as well as what Rowson calls 'everyday impact' players see on the field. 'They probably see that impact multiple times, and then, with our highest impact condition, not every player might see it,' he says. 'The ones who do are at risk of injury. The helmet influences how much force is transferred to the head during all those impacts. So if a helmet's too soft and too thin, it might not do great under higher impact energy or if it's optimized for high energy hits, it might do poorly at the low energy hits. So we have a comprehensive evaluation of it where you can't overdesign for really hard hit impacts or everyday impact.' No helmet is concussion-proof, the lab states on its website, and any athlete can sustain a head injury. It identifies the helmets that best reduce your chances. The Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk (STAR) score is calculated based on a helmet's performance in a series of impact tests that are sports-specific. Tests are weighted based on how often people experience similar impacts. The lower the score, the better the protection. Scores are assigned a number of stars between 1-5, with 5 stars being the best. 'Our ratings are representative of the average,' Rowson says. 'There is gonna be some in that (data) distribution who get hurt at really low head accelerations, and there's gonna be other people who don't seem to ever get hurt, even at high head accelerations, and that comes down to biological variance. Everyone has their own tolerance to head impact, everyone's material properties and their brain tissue's different. 'So it's kind of a predicted number of injuries for a given number of head impacts that we would expect to see on average, amongst a lot of people. We identify helmets that systematically reduce head acceleration and thus risk.' Coach Steve: Lessons to learn after suffering a concussion What's the difference between a four-and five star helmet? (Hint: They're both good.) Rowson says just about every varsity and youth football helmet they recently rated earned five stars. 'But that starts to dilute what a five star meaning is,' he says. 'The five star rating is intended to identify what the very best available protection is. And if every helmet that's being rated is five stars, it takes a little meaning away from that.'The ratings update rescales those areas to make the five-star winners truly standout performers. The new thresholds reduced the number of five-star helmets from 167 to 38 (bicycle), 33 to 11 (varsity football) and youth football (26 to 6). The lab still recommends any four or five star helmets. 'It's not just like everything got good,' Rowson says, 'it's they got good, but to different extents where we could identify meaningful differences.' Understanding helmet differences and unique risks According to Virginia Tech, varsity football helmets used to have corresponding youth versions, but there were often few differences between them. There was little data describing how risk differed for youth players. Today, the lab model for 'youth' football simulates a 10-to-12-year-old boy, the varsity model an18-to-24 year old male. 'A kid isn't necessarily just a scaled down adult,' Rowson says. 'Their head is bigger relative to their body than we see in a full grown male, their brain's still developing, and there's differences in kind of how they respond to a head impact. 'Every impact scenario we recreate in a lab is weighted based on how often a player is gonna see (it) on the field. We saw in our youth studies they don't hit their heads as frequently (and) when they fall to the ground, they have a heavier head and a weaker neck, and the helmet's pretty heavy relative to their body mass compared to an adult. So their helmet's more likely to follow through and strike the ground. So we see more side and back impacts in youth football than we do in varsity football.' As part of a groundbreaking 2012 study funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Virginia Tech researchers put sensors inside the helmets of seven players aged 7–8 years old for a season and measured their impacts. They found that 76% of the ones greater than 40 g (40 times the speed of gravity) and 100% of impacts greater than 80 g occurred during practices. "It was first data measuring head impacts in youth football players," Rowson says. Following the study, Pop Warner youth football outlawed drills that involved full-speed, head-on-blocking and tackling that starts with players lined up more than three yards apart, as well as head-to-head contact. According to The New York Times, Pop Warner officials said they were persuaded by data from the youth study that indicated the level of severity of some hits were similar to some of the more severe impacts college players experience. 'We're like, 'Wow, all our hardest hit impacts are coming from this one (Oklahoma) drill,' ' Rowson says. 'And out of all the games we collected, we didn't see that kind of impact happen a single time. We're like, 'We don't think you should be doing this,' and the coach was really receptive. It was just a local youth football team, and it was a dad coaching who had that drill in there, because that's what he did when he was a kid.' A follow-up study of football teams comprised of players aged 9–12 suggested head impact exposure could reduce significantly by limiting contact in practices to levels below those experienced in games. Coach Steve: Why are boys sports declining? Former NBA star looks for solutions How helmet ratings differ by sport Their helmet research always starts in the real world, Rowson likes to say. They learn how people are getting hurt and they match those conditions - the speed at which they're hitting their head, where they're hitting their head, their acceleration profile – in the lab. With cycling, the researchers look at a fraction of the head impact points as football. (One hundred as opposed to over a million). They don't put a sensor on everyone because cycling is an individual sport and crashes are rare. Instead, Rowson says, they identify riders involved in crashes and collect their helmets. They buy the same helmet and start hitting it until they match the damage profile, then back calculate the location and velocity at which they hit their head. For snow sport, researchers have traveled to big events on mountains and set up cameras from various angles. Through video tracking, they calculated their head impact speed into the ground. The lab now has nine helmet ratings: Varsity football, youth football, flag football, hockey, bicycle, equestrian, soccer, snow sport, whitewater and polo. They'll be announcing rating programs for baseball and softball soon. 'Essentially, we're trying to cover all sports,' Rowson says. 'The ultimate goal is for us to be able to provide data to everyone on what's available.' The lab doesn't formally advise any leagues, but often, the leagues come to them. A full time faculty member is assigned to direct outreach, host tours, run STEM activities for kids and answer questions. The questions, it seems, come every day. 'Sometimes they're very technical, sometimes they're more general: What does this mean and how do we use it?' Rowson says. We know now from Duma, the Virginia Tech professor of engineering whom its football team sought out in 2009, how a seemingly innocent one can lead to a scientific explosion. Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons' baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here. Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@
IOL News
3 days ago
- IOL News
KZN MEC orders attempted murder probe after drunk taxi driver causes crash on R34
A drunk taxi driver collided with a Ford Ranger on the R34, forcing both vehicles off the road. MEC Siboniso Duma mandates attempted murder charges and zero tolerance on reckless driving. A drunk taxi driver collided with a Ford Ranger on the R34, forcing both vehicles off the road. MEC Siboniso Duma mandates attempted murder charges and zero tolerance on reckless driving. Image: Supplied/ KZN Dept of Transport KwaZulu-Natal Transport and Human Settlements MEC Siboniso Duma has ordered that a drunk taxi driver involved in a major accident on the R34 near Empangeni be charged with attempted murder, vowing to maintain a 'Zero Tolerance posture' on reckless driving. Duma confirmed that Road Safety Directorate teams, the Road Traffic Inspectorate (RTI) and district chaplain Fata Sipho Mbatha were on the scene after the taxi, travelling from Empangeni to eMasangweni with passengers from the same family, collided with a Ford Ranger and veered off the road 'According to the passengers, the taxi driver was heavily intoxicated and was driving recklessly. 'He attempted to overtake the Ford Ranger and hit the rear end causing the two cars to veer off the road down the embankment. The driver of the Ford Ranger corroborated this,' Duma alleged. Duma said he has instructed the RTI to work with SAPS to ensure the driver is held accountable. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading 'I have mandated our highly efficient and dedicated team from RTI to work with SAPS and press for attempted murder charges,' he said. He added that the driver must undergo a breathalyzer and blood tests, and if found over the legal limit they must arrest him . 'He must remain in custody until he is sober' and appear in court within 48 hours, said Duma . Get your news on the go, click here to join the IOL News WhatsApp channel. IOL News
