Possible Olympic boycott - Texas power grid analysis - House passes Equality Act

The act amends the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and identity. It’s been introduced every year since 2015 by [Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I.], one of nine LGBTQ representatives. It first passed the House in 2019 by a 236-173 vote, including eight Republicans, but failed to get a hearing in the GOP-dominated Senate.
...
Opponents say the bill would impinge on First Amendment rights, particularly free speech and religious liberty. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, warned on its website that the Equality Act would “force employers and workers to conform to new sexual norms or else lose their businesses and jobs.”
...
The 224-206 vote was largely along party lines, with just three Republicans throwing their support behind the bill. A similar measure was introduced Tuesday in the Senate, where it faces an uphill battle, as a 60-vote threshold is required to bypass a filibuster.

Considering that Texas prides itself on energy production and independence, the sudden inability to supply enough energy following Winter Storm Uri represents a catastrophic failure: families froze, water infrastructure was incapacitated, and at least 80 people died. In the aftermath, some Texans received power bills equivalent to what they “would normally pay over three or four years.”

Finger pointing started almost immediately, with conservative voices blaming renewable energy, especially wind, and left-leaning voices clarifying that natural gas, the state’s dominant energy source, had lost far more capacity than any of the other power sources. Other critics cast doubt upon ERCOT — the organization that runs the state’s power grid — for a seeming inability to meet demand and protect Texas’s consumers both from the cold and unprecedented prices.

What actually happened in Texas? This week, The Factual uses 27 articles from 18 sources across the political spectrum to look for an answer.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, 45, has faced calls to quit since November over his handling of the six-week conflict between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenian forces over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and surrounding areas in which Azeri forces made territorial gains. But it was the first time the military had called publicly for his resignation.
...
Two former presidents released statements calling on Armenians to throw their support behind the military. It was unclear whether the army was willing to use force to back its statement. Pashinyan, a former journalist who came to power in a peaceful revolution in May 2018, says he takes responsibility for what happened but has refused to quit, saying he is needed to ensure his country’s security.
...
The loss of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh last year was a bitter blow for Armenians, who fought a war with Azerbaijan over the enclave in the 1990s which killed at least 30,000 people. Russia, which is traditionally a close ally and has a military base in Armenia, said it was alarmed by events.

The variant, which is called B.1.427/B.1.429, first caught the attention of scientists in November 2020 and belongs to a lineage – a branch of the coronavirus family tree carrying similar mutations – that is thought to have emerged in May. The variant has been detected in 19 countries, and all across the US, though limited surveillance has found it concentrated in California.
...
Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of San Francisco, California said she’s not particularly worried about B.1.427/B.1.429, or the variant that researchers this week flagged in New York. In both states daily deaths and hospitalizations are going down despite these new variants being in circulation, she noted.
...
Drug developers are now working to adapt vaccines to make them even more effective against these new, emerging variants. But all evidence indicates that the ones currently approved in the US have been, and will continue to protect people against the California variant.

A growing number of Republican politicians are calling for Biden to boycott next year’s games, or for the International Olympic Committee to move them out of Beijing. They cite China’s reported treatment of Uighur Muslims in the northwest region of Xinjiang, which the Trump administration designated a genocide.
...
[GOP Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida introduced] a resolution aimed at pulling the 2022 Olympics out of China. A group of Republican senators put forward a similar resolution earlier in February, and rights advocacy groups have assailed the IOC for failing to confront Beijing’s human rights violations.
...
The Biden administration has yet to decide whether or not the U.S. will boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the White House said Thursday. That response marked a slight shift from earlier this month, when Psaki signaled that the U.S. would not change its plans to participate in the quadrennial Winter Games.