Do a test. Make a standalone installation to a folder named "Opera Test" on your desktop. Test in that Opera but don't enable Opera Sync. Once you're sure everything works fine and news shows correctly, log into sync and sync settings. If you then have the problem, you know it's a sync issue. If that's the case, you can avoid (turn off) syncing of settings. Or, you can log out of sync, goto https://sync.opera.com/, log in and choose to reset your password. Then, in Opera, you can log back into sync, sync settings again and see if things start working again. But, reset sync if you encrypt your sync data with your Opera account. If you choose to sync with a custom passphrase instead, you'll lose access to your passwords in Opera.

If you want, you can goto the URL opera://settings/passwords, click the 3 vertical dots to the right of "saved passwords", and choose to export your passwords to a csv file. Then, you can goto the URL opera://bookmarks, and use the drop-down to export your bookmarks to an html file. That way, if anything happens, you can import them back if needed.