Updated: 8:45 p.m. Saturday

An open note to our readers:

As you might have noticed, we were forced to disable our new commenting feature recently on northernstar.info because of unexpected vandalism. We are working to resolve this issue and will re-launch commenting shortly.

We have worked, however, to fix difficulties you may have noticed with our new service, NS*Swap, launched earlier this week. Everything is now functional with that area of the site.

We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the difficulties. Thank you for choosing the Northern Star as your primary source of news.