On a sunny November day in 2018, hundreds of Wisconsin Army National Guard members crowded into the atrium at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. The soldiers would soon deploy to Afghanistan as “guardian angels,” providing security for U.S. and Afghan forces. Commanders and public officials took turns at the podium to wish them well.

Across Wisconsin, thousands of jobs are going unfilled as the economy rebounds from the coronavirus pandemic. A shortage of workers has been a long-standing problem in the state, one that's driven by the retirement of baby boomers, low birth rates, the loss of young talent and a failure to recruit workers from other states.

Mitchell Cremer always tried to make his younger sister's birthday special. A few years ago, Cremer and his sister, Maddie Neely, spent her birthday at High Cliff State Park, biking on the trails and eating sandwiches from Subway. Cremer died June 11, 2020, from a drug overdose at age 28. The day before he died, he was in a hospital, where Narcan was used to revived him from an overdose.

Our homes are our refuge, a source of safety and security, and often our biggest investment. But for more and more families in northeastern Wisconsin, that safety and security are undercut by a desperate search for an affordable home to buy or rent. One of every three households in the region struggles to afford basic needs: shelter, food, technology, transportation and health care.

It's easy to get caught up in the stats and numbers of the pandemic. Since late summer, the virus' spread through Wisconsin has accelerated, from hundreds of new cases per day to thousands. Deaths have followed the tide of new cases — up from a half-dozen a day in mid-September to more than 50 now.

APPLETON - About three months after hundreds of people gathered in downtown Appleton to protest the death of George Floyd, Outagamie County prosecutors charged two Black men with threatening police officers during those rallies. Activists assert the charges against the men are the Appleton Police Department's attempt to silence free speech in opposition of police and scare people from protesting law enforcement.

Delilah McKinney is scheduled to be released from the Robert E. Ellsworth Correctional Center, where she is serving time for theft and drug possession, in about a month. Her boyfriend, Steven Erato, is concerned she could contract COVID-19 in the meantime. Erato, who owns Eagle Nation Cycles in Neenah, worries about what would happen to McKinney, 40, and other inmates if they get the coronavirus.

WAUSAU – A Schofield man accused of rigging his apartment with homemade bombs and shooting three people at a cemetery had a violent criminal history and multiple contacts with local police before that day, the Wausau Daily Herald has learned. Henry Victor West's criminal record starts in the 1980s in Illinois and includes assaults on police officers and a threat with a firearm, yet police say he was able to get his hands on a gun he used to kill Patty Grimm, general manager at Pine Grove Cemetery.

RINGLE - Portage County's most wanted fugitive, Jeremiah Button, was sleeping in his homemade bunker the morning of Aug. 9 when his three-year run from the law came to an end. A hiker named Thomas Nelson was walking in the woods off the Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Ringle when he came across a shelter dug into the side of an embankment, according to a Marathon County Sheriff's Office incident report.

WAUSAU - Fifteen years ago, Nicole Ledin stood in a Marathon County courtroom, pleading with Judge Gregory Huber to spare her from jail so she could raise her daughter, Cierra. Friday afternoon, she again found herself in a courtroom pleading to Huber, but this time she was begging the judge to make sure that the man who killed her 21-year-old daughter would never be let out of prison.

When Josie Bartishofski was in first grade, she learned about wrestling by watching old videos of her dad on the mat in high school. When a flier got passed around at school that year looking for kids to try out a youth wrestling program, she was immediately interested in signing up. Twelve years later, the Wausau native, competing on the boys' team at River Falls High School, stood in the center of a wrestling mat in Chippewa Falls as a referee held her arm in the air, declaring her the winner of a regional championship match in the 106-pound weigh class.

WAUSAU – The Wausau baby sitter charged with killing a 2-month-old boy in her care tried to hide the infant's death from his mother and then went swimming at a Wausau hotel with her boyfriend and son, police say. She dressed the baby in winter clothes and strapped him in a car seat, pretending he was alive during a trip to McDonald's and continuing the ruse when she gave the boy back to his mom, court documents said.