Sideswipe: Aug 1: Coffee art

Coffee art from The Falls restaurant in Henderson cheering on swimmer Lauren Boyle.

Apartment ban goes up in smoke

In Santa Monica, California, city officials were poised to pass strict rules that would have banned smoking in new apartment buildings and required smokers already living in apartments to register with their landlord. But the move failed after people realised it would also affect medical marijuana users. Advocates said the plan would have meant non-smoking residents could "live in their units free of the fear, and the health risk, that a heavy smoker will move in next to them". But a Los Angeles Times editorial said the ban went too far. "It makes sense to prohibit smoking in restaurants, malls and workplaces, where an individual choice creates a collective health problem. But it's an entirely different matter to regulate a person's legal behaviour inside his own home."

Heavy fines for idling buses

A private company that operates school buses in parts of North Carolina has agreed to pay $90,000 in fines and perform $348,000 in environmental projects to settle charges brought by the Environmental Protection Agency. The transgression? Allowing its buses to idle too long outside schools.

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30

The old daily mirror ...

Helen was redecorating her daughter's room and when she cleaned up the mirror to rehang it ripped off old, shredded brown paper on the back to see eight pages of The Post newspaper, dated October 30, 1918. "It is reasonably intact," she says. "I have been fascinated to read some of it and am sure it will be of interest to others, but not sure what to do with it from here. Anyone got any ideas?"

Blanket search for lost mattress

Shirleen writes: "On Saturday, July 28 my daughter and son-in-law were towing a trailer with a mattress and base from Hamilton to Morrinsville. When they arrived home the mattress was gone! They retraced their route but no joy. They had just bought the bed for a young Japanese student who would be staying with them for a while. You would have thought a queen-size mattress would be easy to find, but obviously some person decided it was a case of finders keepers. Or maybe they're just looking after it." Please contact Sideswipe if you have any information.