The US senator has been recovering at his residence after being hospitalised following a fall on June 14 – as calls mount for the 84-year-old to provide proof of his capacity to serve

Video footage has captured the moment US lawmaker Mitch McConnell is wheeled onto the Senate floor for the first time in months.

McConnell, 84, had been recovering at his residence after being hospitalised after a fall on June 14 and case of pneumonia, he said in previous comments provided by his office.

Advertisement

The Republican senator was seen on Monday, September 14, when his colleagues reconvened on Capitol Hill after a five-week recess.

His office remained largely quiet for most of the day.

He has stayed out of the public eye since his fall and his office previously said that the Kentucky Senator would continue his physical recovery at home while working on official business.

Advertisement

McConnell has not participated in any interviews or made any public appearances since he was first hospitalised, but he has released three written updates on his health and two photos of him and his wife, which were distributed through his staff.

This has done little to quell speculation and pressure, with some calling for him to resign.

In July, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, called on McConnell to “provide proof of his capacity to serve, or resign.”

‘What I really want is to be a mom. That’s my next starring role.’

Those were the words of Lady Gaga, speaking to late-night host Stephen Colbert in October last year. Nearly 12 months to the day, she is living out that dream with her first child.

Gaga, 40, has welcomed the baby with fiancé Michael Polansky, 42, after disappearing from the public eye for nearly five months.

Now, exclusive new photos obtained by the Daily Mail show the pop megastar looking every inch the Hollywood mama as she disembarked a private jet in Los Angeles on Sunday.

Cradling her baby, the Born This Way singer wore an elegant trench coat, full-length gown and towering heels. And she had even found time for a blowout, with her bleach-blonde hair looking perfectly coiffed. 

Perhaps that had something to do with her retinue of staff, seen in the photos carrying a car seat for the baby and even one of Gaga’s French bulldogs off the plane and into a waiting SUV on the tarmac.

Gaga’s glamorous get-up was a striking contrast to her low-key new mom look just days ago, when she was spotted in Northern California in pajama pants and her baby tucked into a front sling.

‘She has been in full nesting mode and has never been happier in her life because being a mother was a very large goal, even more than becoming a successful musician,’ a source told the Daily Mail.

The Born This Way singer wore an elegant trench coat, full-length gown and towering heels

Looking every inch the Hollywood mama, Gaga disembarked the private jet

Advertisement

A staff member was also seen carrying the baby’s car seat as the new family made their arrival

Gaga, 40, welcomed the baby with fiancé Michael Polansky, 42, (above) after disappearing from the public eye for nearly five months

New dad Polansky, who began dating Gaga in 2019, carried a backpack as the couple arrived with their newborn

‘This is a dream for her, she is in heaven and relishing every moment.’

That newfound happiness has played out largely behind closed doors, with Gaga keeping a notably low profile in recent months as she prepared for life as a parent with Polansky.

The singer’s retreat from the spotlight has also fueled whispers that she and Polansky may have already tied the knot, though Gaga has not commented publicly on either a secret wedding or the arrival of her baby.

Since her sold-out Mayhem Ball world tour wrapped in April, she has been laying low at her new $10 million mansion in Marin County, California, where she and Polansky are said to have been enjoying their family bubble away from the cameras.

Her social media presence has slowed, too, with the singer largely sharing promotional posts for her makeup brand Haus Labs every few weeks rather than giving fans any glimpses behind the scenes of her personal life.

‘The baby is a few months old and she has been a mom for a while, she just kept the baby news quiet,’ the source said. ‘She has been able to do so because she has mostly been at her new home in Marin County, which is extremely private.’

But Gaga’s first public outings with her little one were not about making a splash, the source insisted – they were simply the result of a doting mom refusing to spend a second apart from her baby.

‘She never leaves the baby, only if she runs out for a quick errand. She is there in the nursery all the time because she doesn’t want to miss a moment,’ the insider said. ‘She holds the baby all the time because she wants to bond.’

Another staff member was seen carrying one of Gaga’s French bulldogs

Advertisement

The singer was dressed to the nines in a gorgeous floral gown

The doting mother kept her newborn close as she made her stylish arrival

Gaga kept a low profile behind a pair of oversized sunglasses

For now, the native New Yorker (real name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) is said to be happiest hunkering down in the Marin County home, though she also owns a $22.5 million mansion in Malibu.

‘She wants to stay home, but she also has to travel and she really wants to spend some time in New York with her family so they can get to know the baby, so watch for her to go back east soon,’ the insider said.

Her new arrival comes after Gaga spent years fending off pregnancy speculation. The singer had been dogged by rumors since April 2024, when she and tech entrepreneur Polansky got engaged. 

That summer, footage emerged of Gaga performing at her sister Natali Germanotta’s wedding in Maine. One excited fan wrote on social media: ‘Lady Gaga randomly being pregnant and married.’

But the star swiftly shut down the claims, writing on TikTok: ‘Not pregnant – just down bad crying at the gym.’

Still, the notoriously private star has never hidden the fact that she longed for motherhood.

In a March 2025 interview with the New York Times, she said she was ‘excited to be a mom’ despite once having ‘a lot of apprehension about it.’

‘I’m also kind of at war with myself sometimes as I get ready to, hopefully, become a mom soon,’ she said. ‘Like, today is wonderful, but the whole day has revolved around me. There’s an incredible amount of narcissism in this.’

But any former apprehension appears to have melted away now that Gaga has welcomed her baby with Polansky.

‘She is also more in love with Michael than ever. He has been so wonderful, he has done everything to make her happy and feel safe. She feels like she won the lottery with him,’ our source said. ‘She says he is the perfect man in every way.’

‘She feels like she won the lottery with him. She says he is the perfect man in every way,’ a source told the Daily Mail of Gaga’s relationship with fiance Polansky; Above, in 2024

The pair began dating in 2019 after meeting at fellow tech entrepreneur Sean Parker’s 40th birthday party in Los Angeles. They went public that New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, before making their relationship Instagram official weeks later with a loved-up boat photo.

Polansky proposed on April Fools’ Day in 2024, while they were out rock climbing.

And while the star may now be enjoying a quieter chapter, her Little Monsters need not fear that she is about to hang up her microphone.

‘Gaga will make music soon, she can never not make music because her brain is always on songs, she is super creative,’ our insider said.

‘She has already written her baby some lullabies, she told friends. She is so creative that way. She sings to her baby all the time, of course.’

Representatives for Lady Gaga have been contacted for comment. 

By JAMIE BOYS, REPORTER

Published: 22:59 BST, 14 September 2026 | Updated: 23:15 BST, 14 September 2026

By DANIEL MATTHEWS, US SENIOR SPORTS WRITER

Published: 14:43 BST, 14 September 2026 | Updated: 23:04 BST, 14 September 2026

ESPN is facing calls to axe John McEnroe after he controversially pleaded for Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz to return to their best in wake of Alexander Zverev‘s US Open win.

Zverev sealed a second Grand Slam of the year with a four-set victory over home favorite Ben Shelton on Sunday.

The No 1 seed, whose service routine has sparked calls for a rule change, broke the hearts of a New York crowd who hoped Shelton would become the first American man to win a major since 2003.

But he was beaten 6-3 7-6 5-7 6-2 by Zverev and afterwards a clip went viral from ESPN’s coverage of the US Open final.

Advertisement

‘So the drought continues but the rebirth of Sascha Zverev also continues into 2027 – Down Under awaits, huh?’ lead announcer Chris Fowler said, looking ahead to the Australian Open.

‘Get healthy Carlos and Jannik!’ responded McEnroe, the seven-time Grand Slam singles champion who serves as an analyst alongside his brother Patrick.

This is how the commentary feed ended after the Zverev and Shelton US Open trophy ceremony.

“Get healthy Carlos and Jannik.”

“Please”

Advertisement

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/sUbWxJXQAa

— The Tennis Letter (@TheTennisLetter) September 13, 2026

John McEnroe is facing a backlash over his comments after Alexander Zverev’s US Open win

Advertisement

Zverev sealed a second Grand Slam of the year with a four-set victory over Ben Shelton

Both Alcaraz and Sinner have battled injury issues over recent months, with world No 1 Sinner missing the US Open with a knee problem, while Alcaraz returned at Flushing Meadows after more than four months out with wrist damage.

But McEnroe’s comments sparked fury among some fans, who accused the tennis legend of being ‘unprofessional’ and ‘belittling the sport.’

‘Sorry, this should be the final straw for John McEnroe,’ one supporter wrote. ‘Unprofessional, belittling the sport and stealing the spotlight from the champion and runner up seconds after victory.’

Advertisement

Another added: ‘McEnroe has to go. Carlos is healthy and he played, It’s not Zverev’s fault that Jannik’s knee doesn’t work. It’s his moment and he won fair and square… this is honestly pathetic.’

Others defended the 67-year-old, however, insisting his comments were part of a discussion looking forward to the 2027 season. ‘It’s exactly what most tennis fans are thinking,’ one said. 

It is not the first time that McEnroe has faced a backlash over comments he made at this US Open. He was earlier accused of being ‘disrespectful’ in the wake of Novak Djokovic’s first-round exit.

After Djokovic was beaten by world No 49 Mariano Navone, McEnroe joked that the Argentine would be ‘playing [his] second round on Court 21.’

Advertisement

We carry a map of our bodies around in our brains. It’s not a literal picture, but an organised pattern of brain activity. So, touch different fingers and different parts of the brain respond. Remarkably, this arrangement is highly consistent from person to person.

Known as the somatopic map, where somato means “body” and topo means “place” in ancient Greek, this is one of the oldest and most recognisable ideas in neuroscience. But we still do not fully understand why the brain has a body map, or how important its precise organisation is.

A new study by my colleagues and I looks at whether the brain’s hand map changes after surgical repair of a nerve in the hand. We found that it does, which could have useful implications for rehabilitation.

Touch your thumb, index finger or little finger and each produces a pattern of activity in the part of the brain involved in our sense of touch: the primary somatosensory cortex, or S1. Neighbouring parts of the body tend to activate neighbouring parts of the brain. The orderly spatial arrangement that this creates is what we mean by a somatotopic map.

It dates back to the 1930s, when Canadian-American neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield stimulated different parts of the exposed brain during surgery. This showed that different locations corresponded to sensations in different parts of the body.

Similar body maps have been found across mammals and are considered one of the fundamental organisational features of the brain. We can look at the spatial pattern of brain activity produced when different fingers are touched. In our study, it is this organisation of finger responses that changes after surgery.

When a repaired nerve grows back

Peripheral nerves – the network connecting your brain and spinal cord to the rest of your body – have an extraordinary capacity to regenerate. If one of the major nerves supplying the hand is cut, surgeons can reconnect its severed ends. New nerve fibres can grow back into the hand, allowing sensation and movement to return.

But nerve regeneration is not precisely guided. The growing fibres don’t receive instructions telling them exactly where to reconnect. They can therefore take different paths and connect with different parts of the hand from those they supplied before the injury.

Communication between the hand and brain can be restored, but the information reaching the brain may no longer have exactly the same organisation. Someone might touch their index finger but feel the sensation in the middle finger.

We know from experiments involving monkeys that nerve repair alters the brain’s hand map, changing the usual arrangement of responses to different fingers. These findings became influential in thinking about rehabilitation in humans, with some theories proposing that recovery might involve restoring a more normal hand map.

We used functional MRI to map brain responses to each finger being touched in 21 people who had undergone surgical repair of one or more major hand nerves, and compared them with 30 people without nerve injuries.

In people with repaired nerves, the normal organisation of responses to the different fingers was altered and more variable from person to person. The pattern resembled the irregular maps previously observed in monkeys after nerve repair.

The altered maps were not simply the result of weaker responses to touch. Quite the opposite: touching the repaired hand produced unusually strong responses in the relevant brain area.

The map changes could partly reflect how the regenerating nerves have reconnected in the hand. We didn’t directly measure those connections, however, and the unusually strong brain responses suggest that changes within the brain itself are also involved.

What does an altered map mean?

We still do not fully understand how the precise organisation of somatotopic maps contributes to perception and behaviour. Nerve repair gives a rare opportunity to study what happens when the normal relationship between the body and the brain changes.

We found that the map can change, but we did not find a clear relationship between the extent of that change and how well people could use their hands. People with more altered maps were not reliably worse at localising touch, nor did they show greater impairment on broader measures of hand function. That finding challenges a simple assumption: that a more “normal” brain map must necessarily be a more functional one.

Successful recovery may not require the brain to recreate its original map. Instead, the nervous system may learn to make effective use of a new relationship between the hand and brain.

À lire aussi :
New MRI method could help track Huntington’s disease and its treatments

That could also be important for rehabilitation. Recovery after serious nerve injuries is often incomplete, with people experiencing lasting problems with sensation, movement or pain. Understanding how the brain adapts as a nerve regrows, and why recovery varies, will require following people from surgery through nerve regrowth and rehabilitation, tracking brain maps alongside behaviour and how the peripheral nerves reconnect.

That could ultimately tell us two things: how changes in the brain relate to recovery after nerve injury, and something more fundamental about the brain itself. For all the history and importance of the body’s maps in neuroscience, we still do not know exactly what their detailed organisation is for. By seeing what happens when that organisation changes, we may have a powerful way to investigate that question.

He has previously admitted five counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault, six counts of assault by penetration and one count of sharing intimate photos or film.

He has now pleaded guilty to a further 45 charges, bringing the total to 60.

The further charges include 16 counts of rape, nine counts of assault by penetration, eight counts of other sexual offences, seven counts of sexual assault, four counts of attempted rape and one count of administering a substance with intent.

The man cannot be identified because this would risk revealing the identity of the victim, who has lifelong anonymity.

Charges include offences involving drugging, rape, sexual assault, assault by penetration, attempted rape and sharing intimate photos or film against his wife.

Assistant Chief Constable Rick Jackson said: “Our focus remains on supporting the victim of this horrific campaign of abuse through what is a very complex investigation.

“Specialist support continues to be provided to the victim at the centre of this case.

“If you are concerned you or someone you know may be affected by drug-facilitated sexual abuse, please know that you do not need proof, certainty, or a clear memory to be taken seriously.”

Police said they expect to make further arrests in the ‘coming weeks’

Two people have suffered serious injuries after reports of “violent disorder” in a Cambridgeshire town. Cambridgeshire Police was called to The Broadway in St Ives on the evening of August 29.

Officers received reports of “violence and criminal damage” in the town centre. Two men were taken to hospital with serious, but not life-threatening injuries.

Since the incident, police have arrested six people, with further arrests expected in the coming weeks. The people arrested were:

• A 19-year-old man from Hartford on suspicion of a public order offence;
• A 19-year-old man from St Ives on suspicion of a public order offence;
• A 20-year-old man from Huntingdon on suspicion of a public order offence and possession of drugs;
• A 29-year-old woman from Wyton on suspicion of a public order offence;
• A 19-year-old man from Whittlesey on suspicion of assault occasioning grievous bodily harm.

They have all been bailed pending further enquiries. A sixth man, from Chatteris, was arrested on suspicion of a public order offence. He was released without charge.

Detective Inspector Luke Pedlar, who is leading the investigation, said: “Violence and disorder of this nature has no place in our communities and we know this incident will have caused concern among residents, businesses and visitors in St Ives.

“Our investigation has progressed quickly and we have already made a number of arrests, with further enquiries ongoing. We are committed to identifying everyone involved and ensuring they are held accountable for their actions.

“I would like to thank the community for their support so far and continue to urge anyone with information, footage or who witnessed the disorder to come forward and speak to us.”