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 […]

Critical Consumer Pat Sidley NEXT week’s Budget will please citizens who have become secondhand tobacco consumers without their consent: the anti-smoking lobby is expecting a tobacco tax increase. This may be between 25c and 40c per pack of 20s. It may not be nearly enough, but at least it’s something. And if the past is […]

Will Kader Asmal’s new disciplinary committee be able to curtail the ‘corrupt and hungry elite’ that has put the ANC into a tailspin? Eddie Koch reports KEY members of the ANC are holding thumbs that a new high-powered disciplinary committee, headed by Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Kader Asmal, will be able to pull the […]

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 […]

Native tongue Bafana Khumalo ‘It’s the potency of black pussy.” She curled her lips around the words as if they were a choice titbit of a particularly delicious morsel. “It’s diminishing.” These words she spat out like a snake spitting poison designed to kill. I am a fly on the wall and I am viewing […]

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 […]

A hard-headed tycoon, a powerful sports politician, the Olympics , millions of rands at stake. Julian Drew looks at the battle over Cape Town’s bid to host the 2004 games IT was a battle that even the feisty and influential Raymond Ackerman could never win. ——————In the end his feud with Sam Ramsamy, president of […]

She is 20, and she’s the editor and chief pinup of a porn magazine that’s taking South Africa by storm. Anouk Mommer reports ‘Hi, I’m Satinder and … I will be editing all letters sent in by you, the South African reader. Please don’t hesitate to write to me to ask me about whatever’s on […]

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 […]

If Dance Umbrella’s contemporary ballets are meant to be populist, why, asks Stanley Peskin, do they continue to elude understanding? DANCE Umbrella is now seven years old, and during its formative years some bad habits have set in. In the case of children, there are absent fathers, working mothers, lost sons. In the case of […]