Free Talk Live

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Smokers have just one message for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council members: butt out of our business.

“We’re outside. We should have freedom to smoke,” City Hall Park smoker Harvey Forbes told CBS 2’s Magee Hickey.

By a vote of 36 to 11 on Wednesday the City Council approved a bill to ban smoking in all city parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas.

The Geneseo Village Board has passed a law that makes it illegal to smoke in public parks or in the village parking lot.

The law was approved just last week at a village board meeting. Smokers will not be allowed to light up at all four of the village parks, that includes Highland Park, which village officials say is almost always busy with people and sports.

Smoking will also be banned in the Downtown Municipal Parking lot, even if you're smoking in your car.

The fines won't be cheap, they go all the way up to $250.

SFO banned electronic cigarettes earlier this month and now the city is in the first stages of banning them. The plan is to fold them into the current smoking ordinance, saying that anything that looks, feels or functions like a cigarette is a cigarette and has to be banned from public places.

RALEIGH - Now that North Carolina's no-smoking law has taken effect, most bars and restaurants across the state have thrown away their ashtrays and herded smokers to outdoor patios.

But a few bars are openly flouting the new law, allowing people to puff away indoors as much as ever.

The ones doing so are hookah bars, and their owners argue that, because of a linguistic loophole in the law, the smoking ban doesn't apply to hookah smoking.

If you're a smoker, you're not welcome in Santa Monica.

That's pretty much the message the city of Santa Monica sent to smokers Thursday as a new law went into effect making it illegal for people to light up within 25 feet of any apartment building, window or vent., the Santa Monica Daily Press reports. The law is intended to prevent people from smoking on patios and balconies of apartments.

Iraqi government wants to ban smoking in public places.
"The purpose behind approving the draft law to fight smoking is to protect the people from the social, health, environmental and economic risks of smoking," said government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh in a statement.
Let freedom ring!
Maybe they should ban occupying foreign troops with guns first?

Hailey police officers won't be trying to bust anyone for smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own home from now on—not since the City Council adopted three weeks ago a lowest-police-priority ordinance with regard to misdemeanor marijuana offenses.

With much of the nation in the throes of a bloody drug war against violent cartels, more than 200 people gathered Sunday in a Mexico City park to smoke marijuana and demand its legalization.

The activists braved pouring rain to rally on the popular tourist drag of the Alameda to have a smoke-in protesting marijuana's illegal status in Mexico, reports AFP.

The new ordinance prohibits people from feeding the animals at urban parks and sets out fines for violators. Nobody can "feed, touch, tease, frighten, hunt, kill, wound or intentionally disturb wildlife in any city park," without authorization, the ordinance states.

Anyone caught running afoul of the law, however well-meaning his or her intentions, faces fines of up to $750 and jail time...