By Steve Szkotak RICHMOND Something unusual is cropping up alongside the tomatoes, eggplant and okra in Scott Byars' vegetable garden — the elephantine leaves of 30 tobacco plants.

By Emery P. Dalesio RALEIGH, N.C.  North Carolina legislators on Wednesday put further distance between a past steeped in tobacco and a present focused on health care and research enterprises by approving a ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.

RALEIGH, N.C.  The North Carolina Senate has put off debate on a bill that would ban smoking at most work sites, restaurants and public places because some Democrats aren't sold on the idea.

For Clee Garrard, smoking helps relieve the tension from his job at the state prison in Sussex County. A new federal tax on cigarettes, however, is putting extra stress on his wallet. The pack of Newports he buys every other day now costs him 62 cents more. The federal tax on cigarettes jumped almost 160 percent Wednesday – and it wasn’t an April Fools’ Day joke.

VIRGINIA BEACH Gov. Timothy M. Kaine signed legislation Monday that bans smoking in bars and restaurants in Virginia, a state that first traded in tobacco nearly four centuries ago.

VIRGINIA BEACH Candy Mitchum runs Pinboys at the Beach on Laskin Road. The bowling center offers beer and snack-bar foods like burgers, hot dogs, fries, sandwiches. "You wouldn't, I think, come in and order dinner," Mitchum says, "unless you were bowling."

By EMERY P. DALESIO RALEIGH, N.C. North Carolina legislators have begun debating a ban on workplace smoking across a state that is still the country's largest tobacco producer.

Applies to general areas inside restaurants and bars, including restrooms, except in designated rooms. SMOKING PERMITTED - In rooms segregated from the nonsmoking area of the restaurant and ventilated separately so that cigarette smoke can't mingle with air outside the designated smoking zones.

Virginia, whose economy relied on tobacco for almost four centuries, will ban smoking in most restaurants and bars. Come December, it will be illegal to light up inside eateries unless they have an enclosed room with independent ventilation. Also allowed: smoking on open-air outdoor patios and at private clubs.

VIRGINIA BEACH If you got 'em, better smoke 'em now. That's what Willie Stewart and Michael Henry were doing Thursday afternoon when they heard the General Assembly had passed a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. They were in a bar, smoking.