Live updates: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order; cities will keep restrictions in place

Democrats’ efforts to be watchdogs for the federal government’s coronavirus response limped into motion Wednesday with the first meeting of a special committee created to examine the pandemic.

Yet the open briefing, held via videoconference, largely served to highlight the frustrations and limitations that lawmakers, especially Democrats, have encountered this spring as Congress has struggled to stake out its role in addressing the pandemic.

The proceeding did not feature any current administration officials as President Trump has balked at cooperating, calling the House a “bunch of Trump haters.” It took place nearly six weeks after the panel was first announced, it covered the familiar ground of testing and treatments with former federal health officials, and it at times devolved into partisan attacks — particularly from Republicans who compared the oversight effort to the impeachment of President Trump and slammed Democrats for not highlighting the virus’s origins in China.

As the coronavirus pandemic has infected or killed millions, forced many more into isolation, and shut down entire economies, it may have also unleashed another crisis: one of mental illness, United Nations officials warned on Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called on leaders around the world to put mental health at the front and center of their responses to the virus, warning about the likelihood of a sharp rise in the number and severity of mental illnesses.

“After decades of neglect and underinvestment in mental health services, the covid-19 pandemic is now hitting families and communities with additional mental stress,” he said in a video message.

A briefing by the World Health Organization to the wider U.N. highlighted specific groups that are especially vulnerable: Children isolated from friends and school have been increasingly anxious, while domestic violence is on the rise, too. Medical workers dealing directly with patients and deaths, meanwhile, may suffer from increased depression and other mental health issues.

But Devora Kestel, who leads the WHO’s mental health department also emphasized that the crisis will cut across all demographics. People all over the world have grappled with the toll of physical isolation and fears of getting infected, losing loved ones, or dying themselves.

Lockdowns and other restrictions, meanwhile, have pushed millions into deep economic turmoil, as constant misinformation make people hopeless about how long the pandemic may last.

“The isolation, the fear, the uncertainty, the economic turmoil — they all cause or could cause psychological distress,” Kestel said.

The briefing urged policymakers to ramp up their funding to psychological services, highlighting the “essential” role of tele-therapy for front line health workers and preventive outreach to people at risk of domestic violence.

After four employees died of coronavirus, workers who prepare meals for United Airlines flights are demanding that the airline shut down a New Jersey catering facility.

Before the pandemic, roughly 1,000 people worked at the Newark Liberty International Airport facility, preparing food and drinks and removing garbage from planes. With most flights grounded, that number has been slashed to about 100, according Unite Here Local 100, which represents catering workers.

More than 40 workers at the catering facility have tested positive for coronavirus, according to the union. While it’s not clear if any of the employees who have gotten sick or died contracted the virus on the job, workers say that they want the kitchen closed and for employees to be given N95 respirator masks and three coronavirus tests a week.

A spokeswoman for the airline told the Associated Press that United has complied with many of the kitchen workers’ requests and disinfects the facility daily. Some common areas are sanitized every two hours and workers, who must maintain social distancing, regularly have their temperature taken.

The airline did not dispute the number of employees who have become sick or died from coronavirus.

Australia announced its biggest monthly jobs decline on record Thursday, as New Zealand announced a vast government spending plan to curb its own spiraling unemployment levels.

Though both countries have managed to quash widespread outbreaks, restrictions on business and daily life have prompted widespread economic turmoil and left eye-popping numbers of people out of work.

In Australia, nearly 600,000 jobs were shed in April, and the unemployment rate shot up to 6.2 percent, a five-year high, according to Reuters.

Monthly jobs data, the first official estimate since the shutdown went into effect, heralded a sharp reversal for an economy on its third decade of consecutive growth.

“This is a tough day for Australia, a very tough day,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a news conference, warning that the country must brace for more “hard news.”

Unemployment is expected to reach 10 percent, the Reserve Bank of Australia has predicted, even as parts of the country are set to reopen Friday.

In nearby New Zealand, meanwhile, government authorities proposed a $30 billion budget Thursday to cushion some of the country’s economic devastation, according to the Associated Press.

With the country’s jobless rate expected to rise from 4 to 10 percent by next month, Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s plan would create thousands of new jobs building homes and restoring natural wetlands.

A government subsidy effort aiding half of all New Zealand workers would also be extended to hard-hit businesses.

Although New Zealand entered the pandemic in a surplus, the new budget will cause national debt to more than double over the next three years — drawing sharp criticism from the opposition.

“We face a global economic and health crisis not seen since the Great Depression,” Robertson said, according to the AP.

When Ohio allowed nonessential offices to reopen last week, the state urged employers to let them know about any workers who didn’t return. That way, those people could be barred from receiving unemployment benefits.

But officials are now reconsidering — after a hacker came up with a code to overwhelm the state’s reporting website with false claims.

“No benefits are being denied right now as a result of a person’s decision not to return to work while we continue to evaluate the policy,” Ohio Department of Job and Family Services Director Kimberly Hall told cleveland.com on Monday.

The state had previously emailed employers with a link to a designated website where they could report employees “who quit or refuse work when it is available” due to concerns about the coronavirus. Those employees would then be subjected to a review process to determine whether they were still eligible for unemployment benefits, since state law makes it illegal to collect those funds while turning work down.

But many Ohioans and advocates for workers’ rights pointed out that people have valid and justifiable reasons for not wanting to return to work in the midst of a pandemic. On Friday, an anonymous hacker released code that would make it easy for anyone to automatically submit false data to the website, Motherboard reported. His goal was to flood the site with bogus claims so that the state would waste time figuring out which submissions were real, he told the outlet.

That plan appears to have been successful, because the web form is no longer active. Officials said Monday that they hadn’t processed any false claims, and had implemented additional security measures in response to the attacks. For now, though, employers are being told to report any concerns by email.

At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak — and for weeks afterward — there was one thing Americans could seemingly agree upon: Anthony S. Fauci.

Today, that’s considerably less the case. While Fauci retains the faith of a strong majority of Americans, opposition from Republicans has crept up steadily over the past month or so, as conservative media figures and politicians have increasingly called his advice into question.

Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) line of questioning Tuesday reflected an increasing conservative skepticism of Fauci — a skepticism that has grown over the past month in part thanks to people like him questioning Fauci’s advice. And a poll this week reinforces that this skepticism is slowly taking hold: The CNN poll suggests a significant decline in GOP regard for Fauci’s expertise, when measured against other similar polls of Fauci in recent weeks.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s government says it will lift a quarantine for hundreds of counties starting May 18 and will begin to gradually reopen the rest of the nation on June 1 as it seeks to emerge from the coronavirus epidemic.

The country has been on a nationwide lockdown for more than seven weeks, and businesses are eager to reopen. Analysts are predicting that the economy could shrink up to 10 percent this year — one of the most significant recessions in Latin America.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador cautioned that Mexico was headed for a “new normality” that would require safety measures to prevent major outbreaks of disease.

A Canadian zoo is preparing to repatriate two giant pandas because disruptions in the global supply chain have made it increasingly difficult to get fresh bamboo.

Er Shun and Da Mao were sent to Canada in 2014 as part of a 10-year agreement with China that was seen as a sign of friendship between the two nations, and currently live in the Calgary Zoo. The hungry pair consume nearly 90 pounds of bamboo a day, and almost nothing else.

Before the pandemic, the pandas feasted on fresh Chinese bamboo flown directly from Beijing to Calgary. When those flights stopped, the shipments were redirected to Toronto, then placed on another plane for the remaining 3,000-mile journey to Calgary. But before long, hardly any flights were taking off from China at all.

The zoo started looking for alternatives, but found nothing that would please the pandas, who rejected bamboo that had spent too long in transit or came from different suppliers.

“They don’t like the bamboo they get. They get fewer bamboo. The bamboo’s too dry,” Calgary Zoo President and CEO Clément Lanthier told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Zoo officials also worry that a second wave of coronavirus infections could make transportation grind to a halt, leaving the pandas in an even more dire situation.

“Forces beyond the zoo’s control could disrupt these remaining lines of supply at any time — and without warning,” the zoo said in a Monday statement.

The zoo has applied for permits to ship the pandas back home, and is asking the Canadian and Chinese governments to expedite the process.

MOSCOW — When Russian authorities ordered half-trained medical students into hospitals dealing with the covid-19 crisis, the students said they felt like raw military conscripts being sent into battle, barely trained to shoot.

At least 169 medical staff have died in Russia, according to a memorial list created by Russian doctors, in the absence of any national official count on the number of who died or fell ill from covid-19.

The growing fissures on Russia’s health system are just one part of a crisis that is adding more than 10,000 coronavirus patients a day — catapulting Russia into second place behind the United States in terms of cases.

Jose Pascual, a critical care doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, recalled those first, mad days treating the sick when he had little to offer beyond hunches and Hail Marys. Each new day brought bizarre new complications of the coronavirus that defied textbook treatments.

“We were flying blind,” he said. “There is nothing more disturbing for me as a doctor.”

Now, for the first time since a wave of patients flooded their emergency rooms in March, Pascual and others on the front lines are expressing a feeling they say they haven’t felt in a long time — glimmers of hope. They say they have devised a toolbox, albeit a limited and imperfect one, of drugs and therapies many believe give today’s patients a better shot at survival than those who came only a few weeks before.

The pandemic is posing multi-faceted dangers to children. Among them: New ways predators are grooming and seeking out children to sexually abuse online.

In Australia, investigators found predators on the dark web sharing a handbook specifically designed for how to manipulate children at home and increasingly online as a result of the pandemic, the Guardian reported. This came alongside a general increase in incidents reported to the country’s eSafety Office of child sexual abuse material, as well as a sharp rise in cases logged by the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, run by Australia’s federal police.

“Abusers see Covid-19 as a honey pot for them, with at-risk boys and girls spending much more time at home and online, often without supervision, and often while feeling isolated and lonely,” Australia’s e-safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told The Guardian.

In the past six months, from October 2019 to March 2020, the Australian federal police recorded a 123 percent increase in reports of child exploitation compared to the previous year, with an average of 1,731 reports per month compared to 776 before.

“More disturbing than the stats, perhaps, is that our investigators have also seen increased chat on forums on the dark web from predators talking about how with isolation measures in place, they have greater opportunities to contact children remotely to groom them for sexual exploitation, while others observe that they have more time to abuse children,” an eSafety Office spokeswoman told the Guardian. “We’ve picked up other users commenting that Covid-19 is bringing more youth online to platforms such as YouTube, vlog sites, online challenges and Omegle, creating more opportunity to groom them.”

Authorities have urged parents to talk to their children about online safety.

Other countries, including the United States, have reported similar trends, while worldwide reports of domestic abuse are also on the rise.

Bryan Marquard has spent years confronting death through writing about lives. As the obituaries editor at the Boston Globe, he has conducted thousands of interviews over the past 14 years — but never have the conversations been as affecting as now.

Never has he received such reader feedback or so many requests for stories. “There’s never been anything like this,” he said. “Across the board, every part of this job is more intense.”

The pandemic that has claimed more than 80,000 lives in the United States has put new focus on a time-honored but frequently overlooked side of the newspaper business. At a time when social distancing has forced us to abandon many of our usual grief rituals, obituaries and paid death notices have turned into important proxies for mourning. And their sheer volume on the printed page is a stark reminder of a disease that might otherwise be invisible for many readers.

TOKYO — It’s a struggle that Americans will recognize — a national leader desperately focused on the economy against a governor whose popularity has soared with attempts to bring the coronavirus under control.

Japan has its own version. Playing the role of President Trump is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whom critics accuse of dithering in the face of the virus threat in a mistaken attempt to evade economic pain.

The part of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) is played by Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, who has battled for a much more resolute response to the threat of covid-19.

Like Trump and Cuomo, the pair are long-standing rivals who have been forced to work as partners in the face of the coronavirus threat.

With Utah’s eviction moratorium set to expire Friday, the state is scrambling to launch a $4 million program this week to help tenants cover their rent payments.

Nevada is using $2 million from a state settlement with Wells Fargo for a renter assistance program, while the city of Austin is determining who is eligible for its $1.2 million program through a lottery. Philadelphia is offering struggling renters up to three months or $2,500 of help but has warned upfront: “Funding is limited. Not every applicant will receive assistance.”

Across the country, dozens of state and local programs have emerged to prevent a potential wave of evictions as the country’s unemployment rate reaches historic highs and moratoriums that prevent landlords from removing tenants from their homes begin to expire.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided with Republican legislators and struck down on Wednesday the decision by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s administration to extend a stay-at-home order intended to quell the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The 4-3 decision limits Evers’s ability to make statewide rules during emergencies such as a global pandemic, instead requiring him to work with the state legislature on how the state should handle the outbreak.

The justices wrote that the court was not challenging the governor’s power to declare emergencies, “but in the case of a pandemic, which lasts month after month, the Governor cannot rely on emergency powers indefinitely.”