The delicate situation of crime in South Africa

There are many stories comparing South Africa to a time bomb ready to explode from the deplorable conditions and slow genocide of the whites. The delicate situation of crime, corruption and poverty increasing throughout the land raises concern. 

 Crime in South Africa is out of control. 

 

Crime in South Africa is rated among the highest in the world and the recent roundup of criminal offenses that have occurred over last few days does not indicate any control over curbing the violent crimes.

A few crime stories that happened this week.

Man arrested for allegedly murdering his 1-year-old son in Zola

Gauteng: A 1-year-old boy that was reported missing, was found killed behind Shoprite, Zola. It is alleged that the boy was murdered by his father, put inside a sports bag and dumped in the reeds.

The father was arrested. He allegedly filed a missing person report before he was arrested. The suspect will appear at Protea court soon.

Alleged kingpins in illegal mining arrested in Mooihoek.

Limpopo: The fight against illegal mining has yielded a major breakthrough when two alleged kingpins were last night arrested by members the Organized Crime Unit.

The two suspects aged 40 and 62 respectively, where arrested after a sterling detective work that was launched immediately after the initial and subsequent arrests of nine suspects.

The Provincial Commissioner Lieutenant General Nneke Ledwaba commended all members who were involved in this major success.

Three wanted suspects arrested in Mthatha.

Eastern Cape: Police in Mthatha together with Eldorado Park Police, have arrested three wanted suspects aged between 26 and 38 years old for armed robbery and theft of motor vehicle.

The cases were opened this month of July 2017 at Eldorado Park Police Station and they are also linked to Ngangelizwe Police Station armed robbery Cas in Mthatha. The suspects were arrested at Nelson Mandela drive in Mthatha on 21 July 2017 at about 19h00 and handed over to Eldorado Park Police for further investigation.

 

Hawks confiscate drugs worth R1.3 million

Limpopo: Hawks’ Serious Organised Crime Unit and Crime Intelligence members conducted an intelligence driven operation on Friday which led to the arrest a 49-year-old suspect for dealing in drugs.

Hawks members received a tip off about a vehicle that was allegedly transporting drugs in Bela-Bela area and it was spotted and stopped in the area. The vehicle was searched and 4.6kg of CAT drugs with an estimated street value of R1.3 million were found.

The suspect is expected to appear in the Bela-Bela Magistrate Court on Monday, 24 July 2017.

 Evil spirit responsible for murder

 A 31-year-old Pretoria man walked into the Sunnyside police station just before midnight on Wednesday and informed the police that an evil spirit had ordered him to kill his mother.

A crime  few headlines

 

Two Traffic Officials arrested for corruption involving a R9000 bribe

Hijacking at Sasol garage close to Clearwater mall West rand.. 

Four men were arrested by members of Marshall Security for being in possession of an estimated R10 million in counterfeit goods

Ivory Park police spokesperson, Captain Bernard Matimulane said an argument between two drunk friends ended in tragedy when one of them was fatally stabbed with a screwdriver. He died at the scene.

Source - SA Police Services

In space, this is the age of reusability

Falcon 9 launch in March 2017.
SpaceX/flickr

Big plans are being made in space.

Investment banks want to mine asteroids for rare, valuable metals. Japan wants to build a solar power station. Billionaire tycoons want to build hotels in orbit for space tourists.

We could be seeing the start of an economic boom in space. But so far, none of these ideas have made it far from the drawing board. What’s holding them back?

Reusing rockets

First and foremost, it’s hard to make profit in space. Moving “stuff” (cargo, equipment and people) from Earth into space is an expensive process. This is because we haven’t learnt how to recycle rockets yet.

Since the launch of Sputnik started the space age 60 years ago, most of the spacecraft that have been launched are Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELVs), which only fly once. After delivering their payload, they either come crashing back down to Earth, burn up in the atmosphere, or simply remain in orbit as “space junk”.

Every time a new payload needs to be sent into space, a new ELV has to be built, costing millions of dollars. Imagine how much an Uber would cost if the driver had to buy a new car for every trip!

It might seem that the obvious solution is to reuse rockets. The idea of Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) isn’t new, but reusing rockets has proven tricky in the past.

The first real attempt at making an RLV was NASA’s Space Shuttle program.

The Space Shuttle fleet was meant to lower the cost of space transportation by being partially reusable. But rather than lowering costs, the program increased them. The complexity and risk of the Space Shuttle fleet made maintaining and operating them expensive. And when the 30-year program ended in 2011, it may have seemed like the argument for RLVs ended with it.

Space Shuttle Atlantis undergoing maintenance at Kennedy Space Center in 2003.
NASA

Recovering and recycling

But proponents of RLVs were undeterred.

A few months after the final Space Shuttle flight, SpaceX, a start-up company founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk announced a plan to make its Falcon 9 rocket reusable. SpaceX began working on ways to recover and reuse the Falcon 9’s booster stage, the largest, most expensive part of the rocket.

Two years later, the company began trying to recover used boosters by having them make controlled descents into the ocean after completing their missions. After some spectacular failures, SpaceX successfully recovered a booster for the first time in late 2015.

Over the next 15 months, SpaceX recovered more and more boosters, building up a stockpile of secondhand rockets. But it still hasn’t reused any of them.

That changed in March 2017, when one of the recovered boosters was refurbished and used to launch a communications satellite. It wasn’t the first time a rocket had been reused – that honour will always belong to the Space Shuttle program. But unlike the Space Shuttle, the reused Falcon 9 was cheaper.

For the first time in history, recycling rockets makes good business sense.

Launch cost of medium-lift rockets.
Data from U.S. Federal Aviation Administration

Even without being reused, the Falcon 9 was already much cheaper than similar medium-sized rockets, as shown in the chart above. And it will only get cheaper with more reuse flights.

How is SpaceX’s competition reacting to these developments?

US rocket industry heavyweight United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has published a plan for reusing rockets. But even after the succesful SpaceX reuse flight in March, ULA CEO Tory Bruno remains sceptical about RLVs.

European rocket company Arianespace seems to be ignoring RLVs altogether.

The quest

Even if the traditional players in the rocket industry continue to ignore RLVs, SpaceX will not remain alone in its quest for reusability.

Other billionaires aren’t letting Musk have the industry to himself. Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, owns Blue Origin, a rival rocket company. The company is finishing testing New Shepherd, a small suborbital rocket, and plans to start sending passengers into space in 2018.

Blue Origin is also working on New Glenn, a much larger reusable rocket that will be able to compete with SpaceX directly.

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, also wants to send tourists on suborbital flights. Branson has founded Virgin Galactic, which will fly passengers on SpaceShipTwo, a reusable spaceplane. Hundreds of people have paid US$250,000 deposits for Virgin Galactic flights, which are slated to start in 2018.

At the same time, other groups from all over the world are setting out to prove that you don’t need to be a billionaire to play the RLV game. In the UK, Reaction Engines are designing the Skylon reusable spaceplane with with its innovative SABRE hybrid engine.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is researching a reusable sounding rocket. And the Indian Space Research Organization is testing a reusable Space Shuttle-like spaceplane.

In Australia, the University of Queensland is developing SPARTAN, a small RLV that uses cutting-edge scramjet engines.

Time will tell which of these efforts are successful but it’s clear that momentum for RLVs is building. RLVs bring with them the promise of low-cost space transportation, which could open up new worlds of opportunity in space.

The age of reusability has begun.

Matthew Richardson, Doctoral Candidate in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, University of Tokyo and Michael Smart, Professor of Hypersonic Aerodynamics, The University of Queensland

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Bleached girls: India and its love for light skin

In India, a light complexion is associated with power, status and beauty, fueling an innovative and growing market of skin-bleaching products.
Adam Jones/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Neha Mishra, Reva University of Bangalore and Ronald Hall, Michigan State University

“Let’s scrub out that tan” is a common refrain in beauty parlours in India, where girls grow up with constant reminders that only fair skin is beautiful.

From Sunday classified ads touting the marriageability of an “MBA graduate. 5-½ ft. English medium. Fair complexion” to elderly aunties advising young women to apply saffron paste to “maintain your skin whiter and smoother”, the signs are everywhere.

Even sentiments like, “She got lucky he married her despite her [dark] complexion” are still whispered around India in 2017.

Younger generations are now starting to push back. On July 7, 18-year-old Aranya Johar published her Brown Girl’s Guide to Beauty on Youtube. The video, a spoken-word poem containing lines like “Forget snow-white/say hello to chocolate brown/I’ll write my own fairy-tale” went viral, reaching 1.5 million viewers around the world in its first day alone.

Aranya Johar’s anti-bleaching poetry went viral.

Johar’s candid slam came just before Bollywood actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui used Twitter to indict the Indian film industry’s racist culture.

His post recalled the vehement pushback of actress Tannishtha Chatterjee, who was was bullied for her skin tone on live TV in 2016.

Though many Indians still feign ignorance about social discrimination based on skin colour, the country’s obsession with whiteness can also be violent. In recent years, fear of black and brown skin has also spurred harassment and attacks on African students living in India.

Why do Indians so hate their own colour?

The bleaching syndrome

Indian history offers some answers.

Throughout medieval and modern history, the Indian subcontinent has been on the radar of various European settlers and traders, including, from the 15th to 17th centuries, the Portuguese, Dutch and French. The subcontinent was invaded and partly ruled by the Mughals in the 16th century, and colonised by the British from the 17th century onwards until independence in 1947. All these foreign “visitors” were of relatively fair complexion, and many claimed to be superior.

Being subject to a succession of white(ish) overlords has long associated light skin with power, status and desirability among Indians. Today, the contempt for brown skin is embraced by both the ruling class and lower castes, and reinforced daily by beauty magazine covers that feature almost exclusively Caucasian, often foreign, models.

It’s been the dark man’s burden in this majority-non-white nation to desire a westernised concept of beauty, and post-colonial activism has not been able to change this.

Indian women, like all women, come in various shapes, sizes and, yes, colours.
Neha Mishra

According to a study we conducted from 2013 to 2016, 70% of the 300 women and men we interviewed reported wanting a date or partner with someone who had light skin. This colourism is what pushes so many Indians to lighten their skin, creating a phenomenon termed “bleaching syndrome”.

Bleaching syndrome is not a superficial fashion, it’s a strategy of assimilating a superior identity that reflects a deep-set belief that fair skin is better, more powerful, prettier. And it’s not limited to India; skin bleaching is also common in the rest of Asia and in Africa.

A thriving bleaching market

An inventive and growing market of creams and salves has cropped up to fill this demand, which now pulls in over US$400 million dollars annually.

Some of the most widely-sold products include Fem, Lotus, Fair and Lovely and its gendered-equivalent Fair and Handsome. Most of these appealingly named creams are in fact a dangerous cocktail of steroids, hydroquinone, and tretinoin, the long-term use of which can lead to health concerns like permanent pigmentation, skin cancer, liver damage and mercury poisoning among other things.

Various skin-lightening products are found across India and online, no prescription or restrictions required.
Neha Mishra

Nonetheless, a 2014 marketing study found that almost 90% of Indian girls cite skin lightening as a “high need”. These young women are willing to overlook the after-effects of bleaching, and the advent of online sales allows them to use these products in the privacy of their own homes.

Initially focused on feminine beauty, the fairness creams market now also caters to Indian men. Products marketed to men promise to fight sweat, give them fairer underarms and attract women.

Megastar Shahrukh Khan explains that the secret to win a woman’s heart is light skin.

And Bollywood stars with huge followings, including Shahrukh Khan and John Abraham, regularly endorse and promote skin bleaches.

Bleaching backlash

The brand Clean and Dry took bleaching to new levels in 2012, when it began heavily advertising for a new wash to lighten the vagina.

Clean and Dry intimate wash ad compares Indian vaginas and coffee.

This time, women had had enough.
In 2013, the activist group Women of Worth launched their Dark is Beautiful campaign, which was endorsed by the Indian theatre actress Nandita Sen.

With other feminist groups, the women compelled the Advertising Standards Council of India to issue guidelines in 2014 stating that “ads should not reinforce negative social stereotyping on the basis of skin colour” or “portray people with darker skin [as]…inferior, or unsuccessful in any aspect of life particularly in relation to being attractive to the opposite sex”.

This guidance is in keeping with the Indian Constitution, which provides for equality for all (article 14) and prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth (article 15).

Unfortunately, the law can do little to stop the subtler forms of racism and bigotry present in Indian society. And, to date, that vagina bleaching product is still on the market.

The “bleaching syndrome” goes far beyond skin colour, with Indian women also questioning their hair texture and colour, speech, marital choices and dress style, raising real concerns about female self-esteem.

As Aranya Johar rhymed on Youtube, “With the hope of being able someday to love another/let’s begin by being our own first lovers”.

Neha Mishra, Assistant Professor of Law, Reva University of Bangalore and Ronald Hall, Professor of Social Work, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.