Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Mar 16, 2021

Fast food: In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Krispy Kreme is giving away free green-colored Glazed Doughnuts to all guests wearing green today and tomorrow (March 16th and 17th). The doughnuts are actually their Original doughnuts, just colored green.

Like you really care: Congrats to PIPPA MIDDLETON, Kate's younger sister, who gave birth to her second child --a baby girl-- yesterday. GRACE ELIZABETH JANE will be the baby sister to her two-year-old brother, ARTHUR. Of course, the name Elizabeth is the same as her grandmother-in-law, QUEEN ELIZABETH, and also her aunt Kate, who was born Catherine Elizabeth Middleton.

Casting call: Look for ELISHA “EJ” WILLIAMS to play the main role --the one FRED SAVAGE played in the original series in the upcoming “Wonder Years” remake at ABC. Variety reports the new series will be changed from the original and will show how "a black middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama in the turbulent late 1960s, made sure it was The Wonder Years for them, too." The original series ran on ABC for six seasons.

COVID update: You may have heard about the rumored link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots. The World Health Organization (WHO), however, says there is no evidence of a link, and has urged countries not to pause Covid vaccinations. So far, Germany, France, Italy and Spain have joined the Irish Republic, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria and Iceland. smaller nations in halting vaccinations as a precaution while checks are made. AstraZeneca says about 17 million people in the EU and the UK have received a dose of the vaccine, with fewer than 40 cases of blood clots reported as of last week. The company said those figures were "much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size and is similar across other licensed Covid-19 vaccines."

The European Medicines Agency also said that “many thousands of people develop blood clots annually in the EU for different reasons” and that the number of incidents in vaccinated people “seems not to be higher than that seen in the general population.”

Warning: Note sexual topic! Members of an Indiana University sorority are under investigation after the student newspaper reported some 50 pledges at the Delta Chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma were forced to take part in an activity called “blow or blow” --where they were told to choose between snorting a line of cocaine or a sexual activity (ahem!) with a man. The college paper also talked to women from the 2017 and 2019 pledge classes --the 2017 pledge class was told to strip naked and run into the woods; the 2019 pledges were forced to listen to drunk senior sisters who called them “sluts” and other insults during the sorority's Big Little Night, where older sisters get matched to a pledge.

Talk topic (of course): what's the weirdest thing that happened at your sorority (or fraternity)?

Not gonna happen: Yesterday the Catholic Church said they won’t bless same-sex unions since God “cannot bless sin.” The declaration was issued in a two-page explanation published in seven languages and approved by Pope Francis and basically said Catholic clergy do not have the authority to bless gay unions. The note also made the distinction between the church’s welcoming and blessing of gay people, which it upheld, but not their unions.