Local
It’s veto time!
Jim Gibbons, aka “The Gov,” put his foot down Monday and vetoed a bill that would have suspended tax breaks for energy efficient building projects, which was pretty damn green of him! However, he left a loophole for the Legislature to come back and revise the bill (read: change it back using slightly different words), but the intricacies of that are more than we at LasVegasWeekly.com care to pack into our brains this early in the morning. Of course, it comes as no shock that some companies with major projects underway slipped the noose. Apparently the Gov. was nervous about lawsuits. Well, as a great philosopher once said: It isn’t easy being green.
National
Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials, reports The New York Times. It should be noted that the Iranians are still the length of the fairway from having nukes or the ability to build them. But that doesn’t deter the Bush Administration one redneck-Texan iota, who say they won’t negotiate with Iran while they’re “doing nookala stuff.” As the Prez took his ball and went home he was allegedly heard to mumble under his breath: “Ain’t nobody in the world gonna have that kind of firepower on my watch -- it’s time the world was non-nookala,” at which time an aide pulled out a huge dossier explaining that the U.S. has more nookala weapons than time to fire them all off … and that buying them kept a lot of very big companies very happy. Bush then retired to the Oval Office, pulled out his crayons, and rewrote his upcoming speech about a totally nookala-free world.
Sports
Rebels land a big one
As in certain other areas of life, in basketball, size matters. On Monday, the UNLV basketball team got themselves a big one: 7-foot-tall Beas Hamga (don’t ask us how to pronounce it, we don’t know either), is graduating high school a year early and coming to Vegas to play hoops with the Runnin’ Rebels. Hamga, who is originally from Cameroon, thumbed his nose at storied programs such as Kentucky and Indiana to come have fun in the sun. A strong shot blocker and rebounder, the mail on the big guy is that he’s going to develop well offensively also. Hamga originally committed to Iowa -- which LasVegasWeekly.com believes is in some other, more boring part of the country -- but heard that the chicks are better in Vegas. Their standard-issue, six-inch-heels also played into the equation.
Gossip
Welcome to Nevada, Mr. Girls Gone Wild
The guy who parlayed Spring Break into a voyeuristic institution will soon be appearing in another kind of institution right here in the Silver State. Joe Francis, the 34-year-old chief of “Girls Gone Wild,” swears up, down and sideways that he’s literally “freaking out” in the Florida jail where he’s doing 45 days for criminal contempt. Enter the infamous psychiatric report: that beloved document of wrongdoers who want to do a little better while they’re behind bars. Joey’s angle? He wants an “expeditious transfer” to Reno where he’s about to be arraigned by the feds for tax evasion. Apparently Francis was keeping a little too much in the kitty from what he was making by filming … kitty (we aren’t allowed to say that other word). Appropriately, he’ll be flying to our part of the world on ConAir. LasVegasWeekly.com has been unable to substantiate the rumor that Nicolas Cage will be co-piloting the aircraft. But you never know …