First, apologies for the lateness of this edition of the Weekend Reader. I have an excuse: I actually am on duty this weekend for Lookout Eugene-Springfield, and it’s a busy weekend.

So, before we get to the news about how the Trump administration is escalating its war on free and fair elections, would you like some good news? I am here to oblige:

First, did you see the various updates this past week on Luna, the arctic fox who was discovered wandering around Portland two years ago? (It’s illegal to keep arctic foxes in Oregon, so the working theory is that Luna was likely raised in captivity as a pet and either escaped or was abandoned.) Since her days being nursed back to health in Portland, she’s found a new home at a Wisconsin zoo, where she shares an enclosure with the zoo’s resident male arctic fox, Apollo, and two black bears. Before you wonder about the wisdom of pairing big bears with tiny adorable foxes, relax: It’s turning out well, and Luna sometimes will nip at the bears’ behinds when she wants to play. Which seems both adorable and dangerous at the same time. 

Fans of the Oregon State University football team (which, for all we know, could be ranked higher than a certain other Oregon team when the AP rankings come out Sunday morning) got good news Friday, when Jesse Legree, the team’s sensational freshman receiver, announced his plans to stay at OSU next season. This is refreshing in an era when teams from the Power 4 conferences routinely lure promising players into the transfer portal. And let’s be honest: That could still happen here, and it would be hard to blame a young player for deciding that he should accept a life-changing big-bucks offer. So my advice to OSU fans remains the same: Enjoy this season now. 

You probably know about Laika Studios, the Portland-based operation that specializes in incredibly detailed stop-motion animation. You probably also know that the studio’s new “Wildwood” is, by a considerable margin, its most ambitious effort. You might not have heard about Portland’s Unipiper, a real person who wears a Darth Vader mask and rides around the city on a unicycle playing bagpipes that have flames shooting out of them. The Unipiper makes a cameo appearance in “Wildwood.” If you read this New York Times interview with Travis Knight, Laika’s leader, you’ll learn about all of this. (A quick note to families: Although “Wildwood” is animated, it carries a PG-13 rating – for good reason, Knight says.)

See? I bet you’re sick of good news now. I cannot count the number of times in my journalism career a reader has called me to complain about how we never  published any good news. But now that we can look at internet numbers to determine how much actual readership any particular story receives, I can tell what stories get the most eyeballs. And, generally speaking, it ain’t the good news. (I personally believe the reason for that has been hardwired into our brains for millennia; buy me an adult beverage sometime, and I can expound on this theory at length – probably too much length, but you bought the beer.)

Let me shift gears quickly to offer this bullet-point roundup of just some of the ways the Trump administration escalated its war against free and fair elections this week:

• Trump’s Justice Department – which now essentially does his bidding – filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block certification of a Senate race in Alaska if the Republican candidate, a fellow named Dan Sullivan, narrowly loses. 

• The Justice Department sent a threatening letter to California election officials, asking that they assist in federal efforts to ferret out potential noncitizens on voter rolls – this, despite considerable evidence that noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

• The Justice Department told Multnomah County officials that it plans to send election monitors to that county to watch over the Nov. 3 election – a (very) thinly veiled threat. The federal monitors, of course, can watch the election proceedings just like anyone else – but, like anyone else, they cannot interfere. Let’s see if they understand that.

These are the days that test the souls of hardworking election officials. (God bless them.) These also, unfortunately, are days in which any kind of election glitch, as slight as it may be, runs the risk of getting blown out of proportion – which is why it was so disappointing to read an Oregonian/OregonLive story about how state election test data was accidentally exposed to the internet. The data – part of the routine testing that officials do every election cycle – was not genuine. No actual election results were involved. But this is exactly the sort of story that can undermine faith in our election process if you don’t know the context. So, no foul. But it would have been better if this glitch hadn’t occurred at all. 

A relatively new law that requires Oregon hospitals to proactively screen patients to determine which ones are eligible for financial assistance is working, proponents say. Hospitals are spending 2.7% of their operating budgets on free and discounted care, up from 1.4%. But hospital officials – particularly those from rural and suburban hospitals – warn that the measure has put additional pressure on already-strained budgets.

Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist – who understood years before newspapers did that classified ads were basically databases – has donated much of his fortune to journalism efforts. Lately, though, he said he was planning to pull back from news. In this email back-and-forth with Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab, he explains why, and he’s not completely off-base. 

I missed this story from Poynter last week: A new report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found that the pace of newspaper closures increased over the last year to roughly three a week. 

So what’s a publicly minded news outlet to do in these troubled times? Finland’s public broadcaster has an answer: “Puppy Live,” a round-the-clock livestream of a litter. Not unexpectedly, it’s become a huge hit: “Nothing bad happens in the puppy box,” one viewer explained. When I tuned in Saturday night, the puppies were all wiggly and climbing over each other, which I personally did not find all that relaxing. 

Finally, an update to an item from last weekend’s Reader, which reported the catastrophic flattening of one of the mailboxes in my neighborhood. I foolishly floated a suspicion that a Cybertruck might have caused the damage, but no: A reliable source tells me a contractor accidentally backed into them while momentarily distracted by his cellphone. The Postal Service has sprung for mailboxes in the downtown post office until a replacement can be installed. 

That’s all for this weekend. Next weekend brings the return of standard time. It’s possible I might have something to say about that.