A new law will go into effect on July 1 banning smoking tobacco indoors throughout the Netherlands. What this means for Amsterdam's historic coffee shops, where smoking tobacco laced with marijuana is more of the main draw, remains up for debate. According to reports, coffee shop owners say the new ban should not effect them because 'coffee shops' are a place where people go to smoke. They say it is preposterous for the ban to extend to their shops, just as it would be for food to be banned from restaurants, or alcohol from a bar.

A firm formed by Silicon Valley executives is trying to produce in commercial quantity genetically-modified bug waste that is similar to crude oil but cheaper, cleaner and renewable. LS9 Inc. is planning to build by 2011 demonstration-scale and commercial-scale plants that will produce the so-called Oil 2. 0, which is composed of excrement from altered industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli bacteria. So far, the company's laboratory can produce the biofuel in small amounts, enough to fill a beaker, but has yet to test a 264-gallon (1,000-liter) fermenting machine that can produce the equivalent of one barrel of the fuel per week.

The home and auto industries are two of the hardest hit sectors in the U. S. Rising foreclosures mark the housing sector, while closing car manufacturing plants are common in the auto plant. Given the parallel routes these two industries pass through, it is not surprising to hear American couples throwing in a used car as a freebie, just to unload on the market a debt-ridden home.

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of the mind-altering drug LSD, died Tuesday at the age of 102. Hofmann was a Swiss chemist who discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 by accident in 1938 while studying the medicinal ingredients in plants. One April day in 1938 a bit of LSD seeped onto his finger. That's when he discovered the psychedelic effects of the drug.

Police authorities arrested a local flower shop owner who was found to have been growing the illegal kind of greenery. Jeffrey Izard, 52, was discovered to have been cultivating marijuana in an apartment located right above the Kinzel Flower Shop. Officials said that the apartment, which was Izard's residence, contained grown plants, as well as equipment used to cultivate it.