Opinion | The Durham report is a flop!

Now, ElGendy wants the world to remember Moussa, still languishing in unjust detention. His essay on the friend who saved his sanity during his captivity is novel-like in its twists of fortune and its scenes of laughter and tears that make for a fully realized Moussa.

ElGendy knows the power of such a story. “Remembering re-members,” he writes. “For a moment, at least, it can make one whole again.”

By the end of the essay, you feel as though you know Moussa. You can picture the backflips he was once known for, and his smile. He’s a friend, almost — and how can we sit back as a friend stays unfairly locked away?

We have been introduced to too many other friends this way. There’s Post contributing columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, detained by Russia for tirelessly defending democracy. He should be free.

There is Chinese dissident Xu Zhiyong, who before he was imprisoned wrote of the “ever-flowing river” of justice that would eventually reach China. He should be free.

There is Saudi women’s rights activist Salma al-Shehab, who should be free, and there is Guatemalan anti-corruption investigator José Rubén Zamora, who should be free, too.

Zamora’s son writes that, still, “my father stands tall and undefeated” — all 5-foot-9, 140 pounds of him.

You can see him, almost. Now don’t look away.

Chaser: The Editorial Board writes that a successful pro-democracy election could loosen repression in Thailand — if the military junta would stand aside.

John Durham presents the tray to the waiting crowd. Big, dramatic rattle of the cloche! “I hope you’re hungry …” — he reveals! — “for NOTHING.”

Durham, the special counsel tasked half a millennium ago (okay, four years) with investigating the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s possible role in it, has finally released the report on his work, which at great taxpayer expense uncovered, the Editorial Board writes, “next to nothing.”

No vast plot littered with misdeeds, just some flawed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications — which we knew about already. There aren’t even particularly good suggestions for reform, which the Board offers in the report’s stead.

Still, the probe was a propaganda victory, columnist Paul Waldman writes. No scandal? No matter. “Durham assembled a molehill,” Paul says, “which Trump and his supporters are desperately trying to claim is a mountain.” It’s pretty much the exact opposite of how Robert S. Mueller III’s report played out.

The Durham investigation’s mission was completed the moment it started, and no flop of a final report is going to change that.

From health writer Elisabeth Rosenthal’s op-ed raising the alarm that denials of health insurance claims are rising — and getting weirder.

Her data shows turndown rates that in some instances reached an eye-popping 80 percent in recent years, and the anecdotes she has collected are even wilder. One insurer’s letter informed a newborn baby that his neonatal ICU stay was denied because “you are drinking from a bottle.”

When health care is prohibitively difficult for many users to navigate — 499 out of 500! — it’s easy for insurers to get away with this.

But fortunately, infrastructure is already in place to fix this: Part of the Affordable Care Act tasks the Department of Health and Human Services with monitoring excess denials. Rosenthal writes that the department just needs to start doing it.

Have you seen any good climate movies lately? I don’t mean well-made; I mean ones in which something good happened — i.e., the characters did not lose toes to frostbite before being wiped out by a fire/flood/fungus/meteor.

Graphics columnist Amanda Shendruk tallied up a bunch of them from the past few decades and learned that — statistically — you haven’t! Most movies featuring climate change end in catastrophe.

That can be good entertainment, but it’s bad activism. Amanda writes that perhaps if we saw the saving of our planet on the silver screen, we might be inspired to action, the way positive depictions of, say, same-sex relationships or nights out with a designated driver moved those balls forward.

Chaser: Author Rebecca Solnit must agree; she wrote in March that we should think about climate change in terms of abundance, not despair.

• Humorist Alexandra Petri — channeling Speaker Kevin McCarthy — writes that resigning is the last thing George Santos should do!
• Ukraine is playing mind games with the Kremlin, journalist Anna Nemtsova writes. It’s working.
• The country should be celebrating its great progress against poverty, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels writes. But things are being made out to be much worse than they are.

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.

Milk isn’t covered, either

Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!