"For almost 25 years, Godie lived mostly outdoors and slept on park benches, even during subzero temperatures. She stashed her possessions..."

"... in rented lockers around the city. Her studio was wherever she happened to be — an alley, a bridge, atop a deli counter.... In the 1970s, she took hundreds of self-portraits in photo booths at the Greyhound bus terminal and in the train station. In these black-and-white snapshots — which she often embellished with paint or a ballpoint pen — she portrayed her many sides: a coquette; a Katharine Hepburn look-alike; a rich lady flashing a wad of cash; and above all an uncompromising artist whose work can be found today in American museums.... [A]t 60, [Godie] suddenly appeared on the steps of the majestic Art Institute of Chicago, declaring herself a French Impressionist who was 'much better than Cézanne.'... 'She lived in a fantasy world... In her mind she was a world-famous artist. And everything was about France.'... There were recurrent figures, including a woman in left profile with a topknot and bared teeth, the so-called Gibson Girl...; Prince Charming, or Prince of the City, a patrician figure with a bow tie and parted hair, often portrayed in front of Chicago’s John Hancock Center; and a waiter, a mustachioed man with sideburns, based on a real waiter whom Godie found handsome. Some of her female figures resembled the actress Joan Crawford. Other common motifs were birds, leaves, insects, grape clusters and hands playing piano. Godie sometimes wrote on her canvases too: 'Staying Alive' and 'Chicago — we own it!' appear with the frequency of personal mottos.... She reportedly earned as much as a thousand dollars a day, which she squirreled away in her shoes, underwear and hidden pockets of her coat. On brutally cold nights, she splurged for a $10 room at a flophouse."

From "Overlooked No More: Lee Godie, Eccentric Chicago Street Artist/A self-described Impressionist, she hawked her art on Michigan Avenue in the 1970s and ’80s and lived mostly outdoors. But her work is in museums" (NYT).

"The British man shot dead in the Texas synagogue siege was investigated by MI5 in late 2020, Whitehall sources confirmed to The Times."

"Malik Faisal Akram, 44, was the subject of a 'short lead investigation' for at least four weeks.... The authorities were already facing questions about why Akram was able to travel to the US, where he purchased a handgun, given he had a criminal record for offences including violence... Akram, from Blackburn, who once ranted about the September 11 attacks, was part of MI5’s pool of 40,000 closed subjects of interest.... The case was closed before it progressed to a full-blown inquiry involving intrusive techniques such as eavesdropping.... When he travelled to the US in late December, Akram was not on the Home Office warnings index, the watchlist that allows police at airports to intercept would-be passengers of concern. Sources said that it would be 'disproportionate' for someone assessed as being no threat to be on the list."

The London Times reports.

I'm sure you've read elsewhere that the rabbi engineered the escape — which involved throwing a chair at the armed hostage-taker. I like this justifiably proud statement by the rabbi, Jeffrey Cohen: "We escaped. We weren’t released or freed." 

"A newborn baby who was found abandoned in an egg box in Siberia during temperatures as low as minus 20C is doing well..."

"The baby girl was discovered by a group of teenage boys on a remote snowy road near the village of Sosnovka in Russia’s Novosibirsk region. She was wrapped in an old rag and there was a feeding bottle next to her. 'We thought it was a doll at first.... It was a shock.'... It was initially feared that she could have suffered frostbite and would not survive, but doctors warmed her up by carefully rubbing her arms and legs... The discovery came on January 7, the date that Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas Day. Anna and Dmitry Litvinov, whose teenage son was one of the baby’s rescuers, have said they would like to adopt the child, but they will have to wait to see if any relatives can be traced first...."

The London Times reports.

 ADDED: That's -4 Fahrenheit.

"And just two men, locked in a hut for six months of dark and cold, would probably kill each other, he concluded."

"So it would have to be one person alone. As the leader of the expedition, he felt obliged to assign himself to the job.... Once the sun set, on April 12, he would be stuck. No plane could fly in again until the sun returned in October.... Byrd at first took comfort in his routine of weather observations and in constantly rearranging his supply closets.... His cabin was buried in the snow, to present a low profile to the wind; the only way out was through a hatch in the roof.... On the page, Byrd’s voice cries out like the merciless Antarctic wind. He sits in his sleeping bag playing solitaire. He bangs around in the dark, fetching food and fuel from his storage tunnels.... He registers the ice crawling up the inside walls of his cabin, and the drifts of snow that cover him whenever he manages to lift the hatch to peer out at the weather and tend his instruments. Weakened by the carbon-monoxide fumes from his stove, he throws up most of his food. He stares at sleeping pills and wonders if he should take them. 'The dark side of man’s mind seems to be a sort of antenna tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions,' he wrote of a particularly bitter day early in June. 'I found it so with mine.'"

From "Self-Isolated at the End of the World/Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing" (NYT).