WP as CMS: no posts matched criteria

Site-Map:
https://stevengpeterson.com/
https://stevengpeterson.com/projects/
https://stevengpeterson.com/portfolio/
https://stevengpeterson.com/wordpress/

I had an existing static site, and I want to use wordpress on the backend to help manage content. I can selectively pull WP posts onto the top-level main page but when I try to do it in the sub-dirs like ./projects/ it fails. eg: https://stevengpeterson.com/projects/?et2&et2_news

The root-dir, ./projects/ and ./portfolio/ each have their own (but nearly identical) index.php which includes a ‘news.php’ on the pages where I want WP posts to appear. news.php contains a WP loop. (copy of working version: https://stevengpeterson.com/tmp/news.txt)

In the case of https://stevengpeterson.com/projects/?et2&et2_news I have removed the category-filtering code (for now) so ALL posts should be showing.

em Does anyone have any clue why I can pull WP posts into pages in my web-sites root-dir but not into pages in other sub-dirs? em

NOTE:
The only thing really evil that i’m doing is using the ‘Domain Mirror’ plugin: https://mcaleavy.org/code/domain-mirror/ to mirror onto test.stevengpeterson.com

I will try disabling the plugin, but currently the mirror-site is in an equal state of working/not-working..

Thanks in advance for any help!
I REALLY need to get this site up, and this is holding it up.