Associated Press

One of two Wisconsin girls who repeatedly stabbed a classmate because she believed a fictional horror character named Slender Man would attack her family if she didn’t kill the girl lost an appeal Wednesday.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald took a giant step Tuesday toward seizing an open seat in Congress, easily defeating a surveying company owner in a Republican primary as the state navigated its second statewide election since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in March.

Updated on Wednesday at 12:31 p.m. CT

University of Wisconsin System administration will lay off an untold number of employees over the next two years as part of $10 million in cuts that interim President Tommy Thompson announced Tuesday.

The layoffs affect employees of UW System Administration only. The system's 13 universities are making their own reductions that were necessary due to a loss in revenue and state-ordered cuts due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Updated at 2:45 p.m. CT

The Big Ten won’t play football this fall because of concerns about COVID-19, becoming the first of college sports’ power conferences to yield to the pandemic.

The move announced Tuesday comes six days after the conference that includes historic programs such as Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska and Penn State had released a revised conference-only schedule that it hoped would help it navigate a fall season with potential COVID-19 disruptions.

A wide majority of Wisconsin residents support requiring masks to be worn in all public places as concern about the coronavirus rises, a new Marquette University Law School poll released Tuesday showed.

The poll was released on the same day that deaths from the coronavirus topped 1,000 in Wisconsin and positive cases grew to nearly 62,000.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said Monday that he has subpoenaed the FBI to produce documents to his committee related to the Trump-Russia investigation.

The Wisconsin senator also defended a separate investigation he is leading into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Ukraine, even as Democrats say the probe has the effect of amplifying Russian propaganda and as U.S. intelligence officials say they have assessed that Russia is working to denigrate Biden ahead of the November election.

A federal judge on Wednesday questioned whether it would be right to order an easing of Wisconsin's absentee voting regulations ahead of the November presidential election, saying the coronavirus might pose less of a threat to in-person voting by then.

Updated at 3:43 p.m. CT

Wisconsin Senate Republicans “stand ready” to strike down the statewide mask mandate that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced on Thursday, the GOP Senate leader said Friday.

The coronavirus forced another change in Major League Baseball’s schedule, bringing the league’s total to eight teams affected in the first nine days of the season.

Friday’s game between St. Louis and Milwaukee was postponed after two Cardinals employees tested positive for the coronavirus.

The league announced the schedule change hours before the game was to be played. It said the postponement in Milwaukee is “consistent with protocols to allow enough time for additional testing and contact tracing to be conducted.”

Herman Cain, former Republican presidential candidate and former CEO of a major pizza chain who went on to become an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, has died of complications from the coronavirus. He was 74.

A post on Cain’s Twitter account on Thursday announced the death. Cain had been ill with the virus for several weeks. It’s not clear when or where he was infected, but he was hospitalized less than two weeks after attending Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., in June. Cain had been co-chair of Black Voices for Trump.

Democrats will meet for just two hours each night of their national convention next month in Milwaukee, according to preliminary schedule for the event that has been scaled down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Joe Biden is expected to accept the party’s presidential nomination on the final night of the convention, which runs Aug. 17-20, the schedule released late Wednesday said. Biden’s vice presidential pick will be nominated Aug. 19 and is scheduled to address the mainly virtual gathering.