April Corbin Girnus, Nevada Current

Two Nevada gaming giants are featured in a new report calling out excessive CEO pay at large corporations.

The “Executive Excess” report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Inequality.org analyzed what the organizations have deemed the “Low-Wage 100” — the S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median wages. Combined, these companies last year paid their CEOs on average 538 times what they paid a typical worker, meaning for every $1 earned by a rank-and-file worker, the CEO received $538.

“All employees contribute to corporate profits, but too many of our country’s top-tier corporations are doing a spectacularly poor job of sharing the rewards,” reads the report, which noted the average CEO-to-worker ratio for all S&P 500 corporations last year was 268 to 1. ...

The Nevada State Public Charter School on Friday approved the opening of an Elko charter school that plans to use curricula from Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian private college with an outreach program “devoted to the revitalization of public education through the launch and support of classical K-12 charter schools.”

Nevada Classical Academy Elko was given the greenlight to open in Fall 2025. Enrollment will start at 113 students in kindergarten to third grade, then expand to 357 students in grades K-8 over six years. On its public website, the charter school describes classical education as having an “emphasis on moral character, civic virtue, and servant leadership” and notes it “is the preferred choice by a growing number of homeschool communities, micro-school pods, private schools, and public charter schools.”

But critics say that in practice “classical” curriculum pushes a sanitized version of the nation’s past that whitewashes history by downplaying the significance of slavery and treating racism as something that no longer exists. ...

Vice President Kamala Harris during a high-energy rally in Las Vegas on Saturday acknowledged the momentum of her recently launched presidential campaign but warned supporters that defeating former President Donald Trump will not be easy.

“We have 87 days until the election,” she told a packed crowd at the Thomas & Mack Center. “We know this will be a tight race until the very end.”

Saturday marked Harris’ seventh trip to Nevada this year but her first as the Democratic presidential nominee. The rally, which came roughly three weeks after President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Harris as the party’s nominee, was the final stop of a five-day, six-state tour designed to introduce swing state voters to her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. ...

A national civil rights leader is calling on Nevada to investigate a prominent Las Vegas businessman and Republican donor following allegations he repeatedly used racial slurs in the workplace and once pulled a gun on a Black truck driver.

The Rev. Al Sharpton wrote a letter to Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford calling for an investigation into Don Ahern, who made his name and fortune as a construction equipment tycoon and has become a prominent supporter of former President Donald Trump and other GOP candidates, including congressional hopeful John Lee.

Sharpton’s call for an investigation, first reported by The Hill last month, came in response to documents surfaced from a now-settled 2022 lawsuit brought by a former Ahern Rentals employee in California. Mark Townsend alleged Ahern as CEO “regularly and frequently” used the n-word and made discriminatory comments about other marginalized groups. CNBC reported on the allegations ahead of Trump’s most recent visit to Las Vegas, where Ahern co-hosted a private fundraiser for the former president with suggested donation levels ranging from $1,000 per person to more than $840,000 per couple. ...

The Trump campaign and its Republican allies on Friday filed a lawsuit challenging Nevada’s ballot receipt deadline.

Nevada law allows for mail ballots postmarked on Election Day to be accepted and counted if they are received by county election officials within four days. This year, Election Day is Nov. 5, meaning ballots postmarked on or before that date must be accepted and counted if they are received by election offices by 5 p.m. on Nov. 9.

Plaintiffs in the new lawsuit argue that practice violates federal law and as a result “valid, timely ballots are dilated by untimely, invalid ballots.” They are asking the court to block the counting of any mail ballots received after Election Day.. ...