Gov. Mike Easley has just 40 hours to sign the last 35 bills.

After issuing his only veto Thursday on a corporate incentives bill, the governor signed 37 other bills into law preventing pension investment in the Sudan and allowing mixed martial-arts contests, among other matters.

He has until midnight Saturday to sign or veto the remaining legislation from this session. If he doesn't act on them, the bills become law without his signature.

Among the bills he hasn't yet signed: A reform of the state's landfill laws and the creation of a health insurance pool for children. (AP)

The legislature discussed a wide variety of bills.

A few of the miscellaneous bills will:  

Allow adoption agencies to act as go-betweens for adult adoptees, or their grown descendants, and the adoptees' biological parent.

Outlaw the execution of defendants under 18, bringing the state in line with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Give the Department of Cultural Resources responsibility for the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum.

Allow mixed martial arts matches in North Carolina once the state develops regulations for them.

Keep private the names of applicants to public universities and community colleges and stipulate that work papers for internal audits are public records once the audit is completed.

How did Rep. Alice Bordsen end up promoting mixed martial arts?

The Mebane Democrat said she originally wrote a bill that would make it more difficult to hold Toughman matches, a form of amateur boxing banned in 24 states. She said regulating the matches was putting a financial strain on state enforcers.

Rather than ban it outright, Bordsen said House legislators decided to make it more difficult to get insurance, hoping that would reduce the number of matches. But insurers said that would put a burden on them to write policies no one would buy.

She said she then heard about mixed martial arts as an alternative.

"It is tightly regulated, has real standards of sport and athleticism, has a low injury rate, is exciting but not as violence-craving as Toughman, and brings significant revenues to a community," she wrote in an e-mail to Dome.

But the Senate added Toughman fights back to the bill and sent it back to the House. Bordsen said the bill is now the opposite of what she originally intended.

Mixed martial arts could come to North Carolina.

The Senate unanimously passed a bill today that allows mixed martial arts matches, once the Alcohol Law Enforcement division of the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety come up with regulations for them.

The sport uses techniques from different traditions of martial arts, boxing and wrestling. Its godfather is Bruce Lee, who came up with a system called Jeet Kune Do in the 1960s.

Sen. Katie Dorsett, a Greensboro Democrat, said that the matches are "a new sport" popular in the military that "provides not only fun but fitness as well."

One colleague said the bill made him nervous.

"I'm kind of reluctant to even question this bill," joked Sen. William Purcell, "having seen this guy at the Finance committee the other day who could probably take care of five or six of us at one time."

The bill heads back to the House for concurrence.

Correction: An earlier post had an incorrect home town for Dorsett.