Biden, Trump and the Beltway 

The Twitter Files, Parts 1-5 Twitter 
Virginia Dems Allow Harvesting Ballots From the Dead  Federalist
The Biden Bucks Blowout Supports Dubious Needs  City Journal 
Zuckerbucks-Connected Nonprofit Renews Election Grants  AP 
'Non-Binary' Nuke Aide Out After Alleged Luggage Thefts  Daily Beast 
Transport Sec'y Buttigieg's Portugal Vacay Amid Rail Crisis  Washington Free Beacon 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

Roughly 200 inmates are held beyond their legal release dates on any given month in Louisiana, amounting to 2,000 to 2,500 of the 12,000 to 16,000 prisoners freed each year, this article reports. The average length of additional time was around 44 days in 2019, according to internal state corrections data obtained by lawyers for inmates – and until recently, the department’s public hotline warned families that the wait could be as long as 90 days. 

In most other states and cities, prisoners and parolees marked for immediate release are typically processed within hours — not days — although those times can vary, particularly if officials must make arrangements required to release registered sex offenders. But in Louisiana, the problem known as “overdetention” is endemic, often occurring without explanation, apology or compensation — an overlooked crisis in a state that imprisons a higher percentage of its residents than any other in most years. The practice is also wasteful. It costs Louisiana taxpayers about $2.8 million a year in housing costs alone, according to department estimates. 

Nigerian Army Massacred
Children in War on Insurgents  
Reuters 

The Nigerian Army and allied security forces have slaughtered children during their 13-year war against Islamist extremists, a Reuters investigation found. Soldiers and armed guards employed by the government told Reuters army commanders repeatedly ordered them to “delete” children, because the children were assumed to be collaborating with militants in Boko Haram or its Islamic State offshoot, or to have inherited the tainted blood of insurgent fathers. 

Intentional killings of children have occurred with a blurring frequency across the region during the war, according to witnesses interviewed by Reuters. More than 40 sources said they saw the Nigerian military target and kill children or saw the dead bodies of children after a military operation. These sources included both parents and other civilian witnesses, as well as soldiers who said they participated in dozens of military operations in which children were slaughtered. 

Together, their estimates added up to thousands of children killed. 

In a separate article published last week, Reuters reported that since at least 2013, the Nigerian Army has run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion program in the country’s northeast, terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants. 

The Daunting Hunt
for Illicit-Drug-Making Chemicals  
Washington Post 

As Mexican cartels increasingly manufacture drugs entirely from chemicals, many of them arriving from China, seaports, airports and postal facilities have replaced jungles and remote fields as the focus of law enforcement efforts. Since 2007, for example, the Mexican navy has confiscated around 600 tons of “precursor chemicals” in the coastal town of Manzanillo –  famous for a young Bo Derek jogging through the surf in the movie “10” – making it a top entry point, this article reports:

Yet detecting the chemicals is far harder than identifying fields of coca or poppy plants. Thousands of shipping containers, filled with car parts, telephones, mattresses and other goods, are hauled in and out of Manzanillo each week. The illicit chemicals [used to make fentanyl and other drugs], which the smugglers often mask with false labels, are easily hidden in a vast sea of legitimate goods. 

Complicating matters further are Mexico’s weak institutions. López Obrador announced in 2019 that he was overhauling the Manzanillo customs office, where corruption had “reached an extreme.” … A bipartisan U.S. congressional report warned in February that the flow of precursors to Mexico “remains almost unabated.” It attributed the problem, in part, to China’s inability to regulate its fast-growing chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, and to corruption and an inadequate security budget in Mexico. But real progress against fentanyl could come only by addressing the U.S. appetite for the drug, the report said: “Failure to intervene in ways that appropriately reduce demand and decrease the risk of fatal overdose will almost certainly result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans.”  

Why Do One-Fifth of Americans
Struggle to Read?  
ProPublica 

Two of the left’s core beliefs – that individuals are not responsible for their shortcomings and that government can fix every problem with more money – inform this article about a real and troubling problem: “Though nationwide graduation rates have risen in recent decades, the number of adults who struggle to read remains stubbornly high: 48 million, or 23%.” This catastrophic fact could open a window to the failure of schools in the grip of powerful unions, the consequences of family breakdown, or a granular analysis of why some students fail to do the work. The article, instead, just blames society: 

In a nation whose education system is among the most unequal in the industrialized world, where race and geography play an outsize role in determining one’s path to success, many Americans are being failed twice: first, by public schools that lack qualified teachers, resources for students with disabilities and adequate reading instruction; and next, by the backup system intended to catch those failed by the first.  

What to do? Pour more money into the system which didn’t work for children to try again when they are adults:

The federal government provided roughly $675 million to states for adult education last year, an amount that’s been relatively unchanged for more than two decades when adjusted for inflation. It’s not enough, and states that oversee these programs are required to commit their own share of funding. A review of adult education spending found glaring disparities among states, with some investing more than four times as much as others for each eligible student. 

Would that work? The article does not cite any long-term studies demonstrating the efficacy of adult education programs. The closest it comes is some wishful thinking from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan about his Skills for Life program. “By the end of 2024, we’re going to be able to show definitively: Yes, you can fundamentally reduce poverty rates, raise literacy rates, raise income,” said Duggan, who believes this could be a model for other communities. “At least so far, we’re feeling very optimistic.” 

Ireland: For the Lost Children of Tuam,
Proper Burial at Last  
New York Times 

In 2017, Dan Barry reported a truly memorable story about the forgotten lives of the children born out-of-wedlock sent to live at the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland. The central mystery concerned the resting place of the hundreds of children who had died at the home, which closed in 1961, as only two were known to have been buried in the local graveyard. Barry reported that the nuns who ran the home, believing the youngsters were stained with sinful shame, had thrown many of their bodies into a disused sewage system. In this beautifully written follow-up, Barry details the ongoing efforts of Catherine Corless, the woman who had led charge to the woman who led the charge to discover the children’s’ fate. 

Resolution, finally, is near. Ireland passed a law this summer allowing for a mass excavation that will be among the most challenging of such projects ever undertaken. But a wary Ms. Corless, having prodded the government through years of bureaucratic dodges and delays, said that her work would end only when the country provides justice to the hundreds of children it long ago forsook. Her determination is driven in part by what forensic archaeologists found all those years ago: 

Small skulls. Tiny bones. A single blue shoe.