A new chapter in the Coffin Butte landfill saga — and, yes, “saga” feels like the correct word — comes March 3, with another hearing before Benton County officials. This time around, staff is recommending against approval of the expansion permit — this coming after last year’s 2-1 vote granting the permit. Cody Mann of the Gazette-Times has a story this weekend describing how county staff (and, likely, the commissioners as well) knew about something that, legally, should not have been part of the commissioners’ decision-making process: revelations about a pending environmental enforcement action against the landfill. The legal problem here is that those revelations are not part of the legal record on which the commissioners are allowed to make their decision. Mann does a good job of laying out the story — and here’s another good example of why public records are important. This entire saga is headed, sooner probably than later, to the courts — and this could be an important piece of the legal proceedings.

Are we at war with Iran this weekend? If you define “war” in part as running a number of bombing missions over another country, the answer clearly is “yes.” We’re in for a full weekend of breaking news reports from the Middle East, but if you’re looking for a piece that offers some broader analysis, I can recommend this thoughtful offering from The New York Times’ David Sanger.

President Donald Trump said, in his prerecorded message announcing the bombings, that his goal was to give Iranians the chance to overthrow their repressive government. If that made you think something like, “Oh, the president has a plan for Iran,” well, Anne Applebaum is here to set you straight.

The Weekend Reader urges you to pay attention to continued efforts to undermine trust in elections by consistently parroting false claims of fraud. (Despite statements from Trump and others, the actual amount of fraud in elections is infinitesimally small.) In his State of the Union address this week, Trump again parroted these false claims and urged Congress to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, which has cleared the House but which is stalled in the Senate. The bill would require voters — even in vote-by-mail states — to show ID before voting. The weird thing about the bill, as Marc Novicoff reports in The Atlantic, is that it’s much more likely to help Democratic candidates than Republicans. Even so, any attempt to block access to the franchise is bad for democracy — not that Trump worries all that much about democracy.

Oregon State University this week fired Wayne Tinkle, its men’s basketball coach, after 13 seasons. Tinkle will continue to coach the team until the end of the season. Oregonian/OregonLive sports columnist Bill Oram writes that Tinkle’s eventual departure was inevitable — but still has kind words about the coach. (Oram, by the way, is yet another product of the Montana Kaimin, the University of Montana’s student newspaper. We’re everywhere!)

Meanwhile, Oregonian/OregonLive writer James Crepea has pulled together a list of 11 possible candidates to replace Tinkle. Left unanswered is this question: Is the OSU job right now considerably better than the jobs that many of these candidates already have?

Tony Schick at OPB has a solid story about a judge’s ruling ordering narrow changes to hydropower dam operations on the Snake and Columbia rivers in an effort to protect salmon. The piece does a nice job of offering broader context and examining possible next steps.

Netflix walked away this week from its proposed deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, meaning that Paramount Skydance (or is it Skydance Paramount?) will almost certainly be the new owner of WBD, which includes the Warner Bros. movie studio along with CNN, HBO and other various TV networks. In this Atlantic piece, David Sims argues that Netflix has just saved itself a huge headache by not buying a company that flies in the face of what Netflix does. Meanwhile, the rest of us worry about how CNN and HBO will fare under the umbrella of Paramount Skydance, which also owns CBS, the network that pulled the plug — for still-suspicious reasons — on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” If Paramount thinks Colbert was rough on Trump, wait until it gets a gander at “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” (I can’t wait to see how Oliver will deal with this news on Sunday’s show.)

Romantic comedies are staging a comeback, and not just at the movie theater — they’re on Broadway stages and all over your streaming services as well, The Associated Press reports. As the director of the Netflix hit “People We Meet on Vacation” says: “It’s especially dark right now. And I think that people want to believe in love.” So, um, is this good news or not? And — wait — is “Heated Rivalry” a comedy? Discuss among yourselves.

And lest you think that’s too upbeat, here’s this item to take us home this week: A new study finds that people who use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and summarization features such as Google’s AI Overview for the news prefer to use those services rather than clicking on individual stories. These people understand that these news summaries may contain errors; they just can’t find the time to check out the originals.

OK, that’s too downbeat. Let’s end this week’s Weekend Reader with this animal story from The New York Times: It’s about a goldendoodle, abandoned at the Las Vegas airport by a woman who apparently was late for a flight and couldn’t find the time to deal with the paperwork required to fly with the dog. The dog eventually was adopted — by one of the officers who worked on the case.

What I’m reading: “Mother Emanuel,” Kevin Sack’s engrossing history of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — the site of the 2015 massacre where a 21-year-old white supremacist shot and killed the church’s pastor and eight other worshippers.

What’s I’m watching: “Bugonia,” which apparently is not a romantic comedy.

That’s it for this weekend. Hello, March! We could use some rain. Just saying.