Steve Friess

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project's goal is to get something—anything—named for Reagan in each of the more than 3,100 U.S. counties. Obama? Well, there are some schools and a shaved ice treat. Here's why.

It was always an odd combination: Sin City and serious art. A decade ago, Las Vegas was full of brio about becoming the next Miami—a cultural mecca and art-tourism destination.

O.J. Simpson returns to court to defend himself against charges of kidnapping, assault and attempted robbery.

Did a frisky calendar get an LDS member excommunicated?

Las Vegas used to be a recession-proof oasis. Not anymore.

Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss shares her views on Spitzer, prostitution and payment rates.

Nevada prepares for its most meaningful caucuses

The last time O. J. Simpson was in Las Vegas, he spent his first night at the stylish Palms hotel-casino, and his last in the county jail. He's scheduled to return to Sin City this week for a pretrial hearing on his armed-robbery charges, and this time he might have trouble finding a good place to lay his head.

Presidential candidates come calling in Nevada city.

Billy Bob Thornton has a résumé any man would envy—Academy Award-winning American screenwriter, actor, as well as occasional director, playwright and ex-husband of Angelina Jolie.

At 80, Mel Brooks is revered as America's national ham, the class clown who amuses even the most humorless amongst us. Brooks is one of an elite few performers to have won at least one Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy, and lately he's been busy refreshing some of his older material for a new generation.

The program looked like "MTV Unplugged." There was Barry Manilow, performing six songs and chatting with an interviewer--for QVC. The TV shopping channel sold 43,000 copies of Manilow's latest album, "The Greatest Songs of the Sixties," along with a QVC-exclusive bonus disc, at $20 apiece.

China has tried hard to keep Han Dongfang from communicating with the Chinese people. The democracy activist was jailed for 22 months and then forced to leave the mainland for organizing protests associated with the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Shelly Berkley, a U.S. rep from Nevada, has identified a new Web threat: Yucca Mountain Johnny, a square-jawed cartoon miner created by the Department of Energy to convince the nation's youth that nuclear waste ought to be stored inside Yucca Mountain.

An estimated 31 million Americans are hard of hearing, so it seems intuitive that Apple would provide captions on shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "The Office" that it has started selling online.

Las Vegas hotel mogul Steve Wynn rarely gets 'em wrong. In the 1980s and '90s, the developer of such famed properties as the Mirage and Bellagio made Strip staples out of Siegfried and Roy and Cirque du Soleil.

Last week, stage legend Harvey Fierstein gave up the peasant garb of Tevye in Broadway's "Fiddler on the Roof" to head to Las Vegas. There he'll slip back into the outlandish plus-sized dresses of "Hairspray's mammoth mama Edna Turnblad, the role that in 2002 won him his fourth Tony award.

Standing on a desolate stretch of property dotted with sagebrush and litter 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss surveys the sexual frontier.

Do white supremacists have a real chance of running a slate of candidates across Nevada next year? Their new White Peoples Party, a subset of the National Vanguard (formerly National Alliance), a racist and anti-Semitic organization whose lineage can be traced to the American Nazi Party in the '30s, needs just 7,914 signatures by August 2006 to qualify for ballot access.

Used to be, old acts went to die on the Vegas Strip. Now, in the Celine era, there's not ever room there. So Hootie & the Blowfish are exclusive to... the Silverton?

Nevada brings to mind gambling, atomic testing and, maybe, Hoover Dam. So which image will adorn Nevada's entry into the U.S. Mint's state quarters program?

He's already played versions of himself in Martin Scorsese's "Casino" and on NBC's "Las Vegas," but now Sin City Mayor Oscar Goodman wants a star vehicle of his own.

Asashoryu, sumo wrestling's reigning champ, is a hotheaded athlete who dominates so completely and disregards traditions so brazenly that he's the fastest-rising star in the Land of the Rising Sun.

In this nation of ever-widening waistlines, it'll come as welcome news to some that there is finally a supersize toilet seat. The Big John is five inches wider than the standard 14-incher, handles more than 1,200 pounds and has a lifetime guarantee.

In this era of Web pop-up ads, it might seem that marketers can't get more intrusive. Yet in this month's Out magazine, there's an ad for HIV drug Reyataz in which readers hear a phone ring, then a male voice saying, "We're at the beach!" Across the page, two guys play backgammon in the dunes. "They are trying to find ways to literally reach out and grab the attention of the reader," says Ad Age marketing reporter Jon Fine.

Rarely do museums blow you away. Yet at the new Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, guests experience a simulation of an aboveground nuclear test--complete with trembling benches, explosive noise and a swoosh of air.

For people who have hearing disabilities, live theater is often a frustrating experience. As jokes fly by and lyrics are sung, viewers are forced to ignore what they've missed or pester companions for a play-by-play.

The Special Collections library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, houses, among other things, an impressive set of Dean Martin memorabilia. "We get many items that other special-collections people would find out of the ordinary," says director Peter Michel.

Some restaurant experts thought sommelier Andrew Bradbury was sipping too much vino a decade ago when he predicted he could make wine lists less intimidating by allowing diners to browse them at the table on a portable computer.

It's well documented that President George W. Bush was in a Florida classroom on 9/11 when chief of staff Andrew Card told him a second plane had hit the World Trade Center.