Top of the Fold

• NYC exempts pros from vaccine mandate: Money talks. New York City’s newly elected Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday carved out a special exemption from the city’s ongoing COVID vaccine mandate that applies to professional athletes and performers. “Today I signed an emergency executive order expanding the performance exemption to the private employer vaccine mandate,” Adams declared. He explained that he made this “tough” decision in an effort to “move this city forward” and to help New York recover “from economic devastation” specifically related to the city’s large tourism industry. While NBA player Kyrie Irving, who plays for the Brooklyn Nets, has not been allowed to play in home games this season due to his refusal to get the COVID vaccine, what may have been the bigger factor in Adams’s decision was the upcoming baseball season. Nearly two-thirds of Yankees players remain unvaccinated, as well as 10 players on the Mets. Imagine all the revenue the city would lose if the Yankees were not able to field a team for 81 home games.

• Arizona, Oklahoma become the latest states to protect girls’ sports: On Thursday, the legislatures of Arizona and Oklahoma passed bills that ban biological males from competing in female sports. Both states’ bills were sponsored by Republican lawmakers and now head to their respective governors’ desks. If signed, Arizona and Oklahoma will join Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Iowa in instituting laws protecting female sports. Earlier this week, the Republican governors of Indiana and Utah vetoed similar legislation, though in both cases it appears that the GOP-controlled legislatures will override the vetoes.

• USA Today can’t define “woman”: One of Big Tech’s leading “fact-checker” outfits, the goons Silicon Valley uses to justify censoring conservative content on social media, is USA Today. However, in the latest demonstration that “fact-checkers” are actually leftist thought police, USA Today asserted that “science says there’s no simple answer” for defining the term “woman.” The Leftmedia rag was responding to widespread condemnation of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s supposed inability to offer a definition for the term “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.” It is objectively true that the definition of the term “woman” both scientifically and linguistically refers to an adult human female possessing certain biology and XX chromosomes. That this is a bridge too far for Brown speaks to her being committed to a radical leftist ideology. Likewise, USA Today is willing to discard facts in order to run damage control, concocting a ridiculous fabrication that “science says there’s no simple answer.” Hogwash. This is an example of a reality-defying ideology undermining basic definitional terms in order to assert a fantasy as reality. The great irony here is that if, as USA Today claims, “woman” is difficult to define, then how does one know that Jackson is a woman? If words don’t mean anything, then there can be no real communication nor any real knowledge.

Headlines

• U.S. announces new Russian sanctions, plans to admit thousands of Ukrainian refugees (NBC News)

• Biden warns of “real” food shortage following sanctions (Fox News)

• Army approves reduced physical fitness standards for women and older soldiers (The Hill)

• Rent has jumped an insane 17% since last year and is now the most expensive it’s ever been (Not the Bee)

• LA’s population dropped by 176,000 in first full year of pandemic (KABC)

• NBC News is doctoring photos of Lia Thomas to look less masculine (The Federalist)

• Supreme Court mum on health of Clarence Thomas; Stephen Breyer thinks “he’s fine” (Washington Examiner)

• Governor Ron DeSantis signs financial literacy bill to support Florida’s students (FLgov.com)

• Policy: The war in Ukraine: Troubling lessons for Taiwan (AEI)

• Humor: Kindergartener granted PhD in biology after correctly distinguishing boy from girl (Babylon Bee)

• Related humor: Ketanji Brown Jackson loses 140th consecutive game of “Guess Who?” (Babylon Bee)

For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.

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