Walking Tall: Democrats in the Texas Legislature walked out on Sunday night, depriving the Republicans a quorum, and blocking the vote before the midnight deadline on a bill that would reduce voting rights.

  It was a dramatic but probably temporary victory. Gov. Gregg Abbott, a Trump Republican, said he would call a special session of the legislature to pass the bill. “Election Integrity & Bail Reform were emergency items for this legislative session,” Mr. Abbott said on Twitter on Sunday night. “They will be added to the special session agenda.”

  The Texas Republicans, as with Republicans in many states, are fighting phantom election corruption. What they’re really doing is making it harder to vote for people likely to vote Democrat.

Bang, Bang: Miami police are still looking for three people who got out of an SUV at a rap  concert early Sunday morning and opened fire, killing two people and wounding 20 in what appears to have been a targeted shooting.

  Surveillance video from an alley shows that it was just 11 seconds between the moment when the three shooters got out of their white Nissan Pathfinder and were back in it rolling away. It looks like law enforcement should be able to get the license number.

  There are a hell of a lot of guns out there. Recent research says that 39 percent of American households now own guns and there’s been a pandemic buying spree. Federal background checks, an indicator of gun sales, have been hitting a million a week.

  “Americans are in an arms race with themselves,” Los Angeles City Council member  Marqueece Harris-Dawson told The NY Times. “There was just as much a run on guns as on toilet paper in the beginning of the pandemic.”

  People who already own guns are buying more and first timers are strapping up as well. Preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic.

Viral News: Vietnam’s Health Ministry says it has detected a highly transmissible new variant of the coronavirus that has created another wave of Covid-19 infections in the country. Genetic sequencing indicates the new variant is a mix of the coronavirus strains first detected in the United Kingdom and India. The country’s health minister said the new variant is particularly contagious via air and that it replicates extremely quickly.

Wakeup Call: Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny asked a court yesterday to stop the hourly overnight welfare checks he’s been subjected to while held in a penal colony.

  Speaking by video link from prison, Navalny charged that he has done nothing that would warrant the authorities’ decision to designate him as a flight risk that has resulted in checks. He argued that the hourly night-time checks in which he is awakened every time “effectively amount to torture,” telling the judge that “you would go mad in a week.” 

  Navalny is the most prominent and evidently dangerous political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They once tried to kill him with a nerve agent. On his return to Russia in January he was arrested and sentenced to 2 1/2-years in prison.

  While Navalny risks his life for democracy in Russia, the blowhard American martial arts actor Steven Seagal, an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has joined a pro-Kremlin political party. He was granted Russian citizenship by Putin.

  Seagal says he interested in environmental issues. Maybe he can get the nerve poison out of Navalny’s body.

China Syndrome: The Chinese government, which until 2016 made it illegal for  couples  to have more than one child, has raised the limit again to three kids and is begging its young citizens to have children.

  China has 1.4 billion people, but the overall population is getting older. The labor pool is shrinking and threatening China’s position as a world economic power. But it’s not just a matter of hopping into bed. Chinse couples are worried about the rising cost of education and of supporting aging parents. It’s hard to get daycare for the children and work days tend to be brutally long.

The Spin Rack: Maryland and Montana are the first states to restrict use of genetic genealogy to catch criminals in order to protect the genetic privacy of the accused and their relatives. The DNA matching technique was used in 2018 to identify California’s Golden State Killer.  

The Obit Page: BJ Thomas, the upbeat singer who made a big hit out of the song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” originally recorded for the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” has died of lung cancer at age 78. He also did “Hooked on a Feeling,” a song about new love from that hit the Top 10 in 1968. — Actor Gavin MacLeod, who played the news writer Murray Slaughter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and Capt. Merrill Stubing on “The Love Boat,” has died at age 90. MacLeod was almost 40 when he hit it with the Moore show that ran for seven years starting in 1970. Only weeks after shooting the last episode, MacLeod was offered the lead role of Captain Stubing on “The Love Boat,” which ran until 1986.

Net Ball: Japanese tennis pro Naomi Osaka has withdrawn from the French Open after being fined $15,000 for refusing to answer questions at the post-match press conference after winning her first round. The four-time Grand Slam winner says she’s taking time away from tennis.

  Osaka said she has struggled with depression and had announced ahead of time that she would not face the press. “I think now the best thing for the tournament, the other players and my well-being is that I withdraw so that everyone can go back to focusing on the tennis going on in Paris,” Osaka said in a statement on social media.

  Apologizing to the press, she said, “I am not a natural public speaker and get huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media.”

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