Issue #8766: Initialize _warnings module before importing the first module.
Fix a crash if an empty directory called "encodings" exists in sys.path.
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 3e582cd..e68e5da 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -12,6 +12,9 @@
 Core and Builtins
 -----------------
 
+- Issue #8766: Initialize _warnings module before importing the first module.
+  Fix a crash if an empty directory called "encodings" exists in sys.path.
+
 - Issue #8589: Decode PYTHONWARNINGS environment variable with the file system
   encoding and surrogateespace error handler instead of the locale encoding to
   be consistent with os.environ. Add PySys_AddWarnOptionUnicode() function.