The government will want to send the right signals to investors in next week’s Budget. Reg Rumney looks at its options Will the Budget stimulate the already blossoming economy, depress it, or have no effect? Whether the March 15 Budget will be — to put it in economic jargon — contractionary, expansionary, or neutral is […]
LIVE shows and radio and TV will be governed by public indecency laws and the Independent Broadcasting Authority respectively. A new rating system for films and publications –including computer software — envisaged by the new Bill uses four categories. An XX rating bans the distribution of material that * Child pornography; * Explicit, prolonged sex […]
Clive Simpkins Years of recession and the new reconstruction-and- development-programme spirit have bred a healthy clutch of street intersection entrepreneurs — but buying from them is not for the incautious or the unwary. The bunch-of-flowers brigade are particularly slick operators. I recall a businessman friend of mine with all the Seigel-Sand-nous that comes from eastern-block […]
Gaye Davis A LEADING candidate for the post of Public Protector, Brian Currin, has withdrawn his nomination. The former national director of Lawyers for Human Rights told the Weekly Mail & Guardian he was no longer available as he had had to take other employment. He said he had not expected he would land the […]
OPERA: Coenraad Visser DONIZETTI’s comic masterpiece Don Pasquale fares very well in Pact Opera’s restaging of its 1990 production. Against the backdrop of Anthony Farmer’s beautiful sets and with the characters splendidly and sometimes zanily dressed by Lindy Grindlay, Neels Hansen’s production sparkles with many deft comic touches deriving from the music. Hanli Stapela is […]
Finance Minister Chris Liebenberg has walked a tax tightrope in compiling next week’s Budget. Reg Rumney reports Expect no boon from the March 15 Budget if you are in the higher income tax bracket. However, on the positive side, expect no rise in value added tax. Given the political opposition to this tax as being […]
Environmentalists have threatened to interdict the police minister unless he puts a stop to a Natal dagga-spraying operation, reports Eddie Koch A COALITION of civic organisations yesterday threatened to interdict Police Minister Sydney Mufamadi unless his commissioner stops the narcotics bureau from spraying large areas of KwaZulu Natal with a dangerous herbicide designed to stamp […]
In search of an outside perspective on Johannesburg’s much- mooted Biennale, Ivor Powell spoke to influential visiting ArtForum critic Thomas McEvilley As interviewees go, Thomas McEvilley is more than a little like a chess player: the strategy unfolds according to interior logics that are more telling in their totality than as individual responses to individual […]
Eddie Koch WATER Affairs Minister Kader Asmal this week instructed his officials to investigate pollution charges against the controversial Thor Chemicals factory in the kwaZulu/Natal Midlands. The minister’s move follows a personal inspection of the factory where at least two workers have died of mercury poisoning and scores of others have been exposed to dangerous […]
A new Bill before parliament, if passed, will bring South Africa in line with world standards of censorship. Gaye Davis reports CLAUSES barring hate speech or acts likely to incite racial hatred have been erased from a new censorship Bill which sweeps away the draconian rules of the past, allowing adults to think for themselves. […]