CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 21, 2010 | By Maeve Reston
Smokers in Los Angeles lost another refuge Wednesday when the City Council unanimously approved a ban on lighting up in outdoor cafes, food courts and around the city's ubiquitous mobile food trucks. With the move, city officials are following the lead of municipalities across California, including Burbank, Beverly Hills, Calabasas and Santa Monica, which already ban smoking in outdoor dining areas. California law bars smoking inside restaurants and bars. The ordinance prohibits smoking within 10 feet of outdoor dining areas and within 40 feet of mobile food trucks.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 20, 2010 | By Maeve Reston
Smokers in Los Angeles lost another refuge Wednesday when the City Council unanimously approved a ban on lighting up in outdoor cafes, food courts and around the city's ubiquitous mobile food trucks. With the move, city officials are following the lead of municipalities across California, including Burbank, Beverly Hills, Calabasas and Santa Monica, which already ban smoking in outdoor dining areas. California law bars smoking inside restaurants and bars. The ordinance prohibits smoking within 10 feet of outdoor dining areas and within 40 feet of mobile food trucks.
NATIONAL
January 18, 2010 | By DeeDee Correll
The Paragon Theatre's artistic director, Warren Sherrill, has thought about staging "Agnes of God" for a while. Problem is, one of the key characters is a psychiatrist who chain-smokes. And in Colorado -- one of 25 states with indoor smoking bans -- actors can't light up on stage. The state Supreme Court last month found the 2006 smoking restriction constitutional, rejecting theater companies' argument that it infringed on their freedom of speech and stifled artistic expression.
SCIENCE
January 5, 2010 | By Thomas H. Maugh II
Smoking raises the risk of diabetes, but new research indicates that -- at least in the short term -- kicking the habit increases the risk even more. The problem is not really quitting smoking. It's the pounds most people pack on when they give up cigarettes, researchers reported Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Smokers who plan to quit should be very careful not to start eating more and thus gain weight, said epidemiologist Hsin-Chieh "Jessica" Yeh of Johns Hopkins University, the lead author of the study.
NATIONAL
January 3, 2010 | By Faye Fiore
The changing face of the Old Dominion can be seen in the stuff Jimmy Cirrito sweeps up off the floor of his bar every night. It used to be cigarette butts -- now it's gum. "I got Nicorette and Bubblicious and green and yellow and purple. It looks like a circus down there," said Cirrito, owner of Jimmy's Old Town Tavern in the northern Virginia suburb of Herndon, where patrons once smoked so much they burned holes in the curtains. Now they chew to fight the urge. It's been one month since Virginia became the first Southern state to ban smoking in bars and restaurants.
ENTERTAINMENT
December 16, 2009
ABBA, others in rock hall The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is opening its arms to welcome in ABBA, Genesis, the Hollies, the Stooges and Jimmy Cliff, but has given the KISS-off, for this year at least, to hard rock's most celebrated tongue-wagging, makeup-loving band. The Cleveland-based rock hall announced the 2010 inductees Tuesday. Its 25th annual induction ceremony will be held March 15 in New York City. Veteran music mogul David Geffen also will enter the hall as a non-performer, along with two of the Brill Building's most celebrated songwriting teams, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.
NEWS
November 26, 2009 | By Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler
For most people, the holiday season means spending time with friends and family. We invite them to our Thanksgiving table. We send them cards. We kiss them under the stars to usher in the new year. But we also get angry at them, deal with their demands and endure their opinions of one another. Amid all this stress, we may be tempted to abandon some of our friends or disconnect from some of our family. But that would be a mistake. We need our connections, good and bad. Every one of them.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
June 23, 2009 | By Corina Knoll
They've been coming to Urartu Coffee for months, and every day it's the same. They sit. They sip. They smoke. It's hard to explain, the men say -- there's just something about the taste of tar joining java. But Jack Kakoyan, 28, and his friends may soon stop meeting at their usual table, where they spend hours socializing in the sun.
HEALTH
March 2, 2009 | By Karen Kaplan
Pop quiz for teenagers: Are you more likely to die from smoking more than 10 cigarettes a day or from being obese? According to a new study from the British Medical Journal, it's a tie. Swedish researchers studied health records of 45,920 men drafted by the Swedish army in 1969-70 at an average age of 18 years, 8 months. Then they consulted Sweden's national cause of death registry and found that 2,897 had died as of Sept. 1, 2007.
HEALTH
February 16, 2009 | By Myra Neben
A good friend of mine was approaching her 49th birthday with trepidation. Why, I asked her, was she so afraid of 49? "My mother died at 49 of a heart attack. The same thing will probably happen to me," she said. Not likely, I replied. And we started to talk about her mother. Her mother was a child of the age before genetics, before cholesterol, before we knew the dangers of smoking, fat and salt. Her mother and her mother's mother cooked with bacon grease, lard and other ingredients that many of us eschew today.