Smoking butted out of workplace

SHANGHAI: Local health authorities have extended smoking bans from public venues to all indoor workplaces as measures to clear the city's air of cigarette smoke by 2011 are ratcheted up.

Part of a three-year campaign to eradicate passive smoking and stage a salubrious World Expo in 2010, the latest initiative will rid all government buildings, offices, schools and hospitals of harmful passive smoke.

"All places with ceilings and at least three walls will be defined as indoor areas where smoking will be strictly prohibited," Li Mingzhu, director of the tobacco control office under the municipal health bureau, had said previously.