Even the most casual survey of habits in New York will register that smokers are on the run No longer are ashtrays on desks in offices. Health advocates celebrated and they had new cause for celebration yesterday when figures showed an 11 per cent decline in the numbers of smokers in the city. When New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in all restaurants, bars and clubs early last year, critics called it unworkable and draconian. He acted as a lawyer for one of the seven in a child custody dispute He had nothing to do with their criminal case..

He has not been formally arrested or charged with any crime, and the LA Times reported disagreement in law enforcement ranks about the wisdom of taking him into custody before they had more of a case against him.The working theory behind his detention is that he gave the Madrid bombers explosives training. Mr Mayfield is an army veteran but no evidence has emerged of any training or expertise in handling explosives.Mr Mayfield is tangentially linked to a group of Islamic fundamentalists known as the “Portland Seven” who were sentenced to prison last year for conspiring to wage a holy war on behalf of al-Qa’ida and the Taliban. But, she added: “It’s not his fingerprint.” She and other family members insisted he had never been to Spain, had not left Oregon in two years, and had not been abroad since a family trip to Egypt in 1993.The Mayfields have garnered considerable sympathy in Portland, with the local newspapers noting a reported lack of certainty about the fingerprint match and urging everyone – government and ordinary citizens – to respect Mr Mayfield’s rights until the truth becomes clearer. US officials appear willing to concede that Mr Mayfield has no record of travelling to Spain, but suggest he might have done so in secret using false documents. He was a peaceful man and, despite his conversion to Islam at the time of their courtship and marriage in the late 1980s, not particularly religious, much less a fundamentalist.”If it is his fingerprint, then there’s a story there,” she said. The wife of a US lawyer detained last week as a material witness to the Madrid train bombings said yesterday that her husband had never been to Spain and that a fingerprint found on a bag of detonators at a railway station therefore could not be his. Asked by NBC’s in-house interviewer what he will be doing next, Hyde Pierce replied: “I think next would be time off, most likely followed by some work on the stage.” Sounds like a plan..

In the past two weeks Friends and Frasier have gobbled up news time, chat show time and advertising time like nothing before them.Frasier has racked up 31 Emmy awards over its lifetime, including a record-breaking five in a row for Outstanding Series from 1994 to 1998. The banter between Frasier and his neurotic brother Niles has reliably entertained over endless plot twists, romantic shenanigans and constant run-ins with their live-in father, Martin, played by John Mahoney.Grammer and David Hyde Pierce, who plays Niles, have both been earning in excess of $1m per episode but both have maintained side careers in the movies. Likewise, Frasier led the ratings for its timeslot last Tuesday, and we can expect similar audience enthusiasm tonight.NBC faces both a crisis and an opportunity here. The crisis is that it has lost two reliably popular shows in the same year, with nothing obvious to replace them. Dragging Friends and Frasier into yet more new seasons was no longer an option, because audience numbers before the final marketing push were dwindling and the costs of producing and distributing the shows were soaring, largely because of the inflated salary demands of their principal actors.The opportunity has been to invent a new genre in network salesmanship, which one might call the fine art of the finale.