LOVE Island season 12 kicked off with a bang tonight as 12 couples got matched.
However, as a 13th Islander walked through the door it became clear that things will definitely become unlucky for one contestant.
Toni, Love Island’s first American bombshell, rocked up to greet Maya and the group as they gathered around the fire pit.
The 30-year-old presenter explained that Antonia – known as Toni – would be able to steal a partner away.
Out of the six couples — Shakira and Ben, Meg and Dejon, Sophie and Harry, Helena and Conor, Alima and Blu, and Megan and Tommy.
The stunning brunette from Las Vegas chose taxi driver Ben, leaving Shakira on her own.
Maya then revealed that because Shakira is now single, although she won’t be dumped from the villa tonight, she has 24 hours to graft and steal a boy from someone else.
Adding that she isn’t allowed to take Ben back from Antonia, she explained that if she doesn’t get chosen she’ll be packing her bags.
But if she does, another girl will be going home. Leaving the group with that cliffhanger, Maya teasingly suggested that the girls keep their “boys very close”.
Fans watching at home were left up in arms as they speculated over who will be going home.
One user wondered: “Shakira is probably going to pick Blu or Harry so Sophie or Alima will be first to be dumped tomorrow.”
Another person joked: “Hunger games type sh*t omg.”
While someone else fumed: “the first episode and Alima or Shakira are at risk and to top it all off it’s over an American.”
A fourth person swore: “I will riot if they dump Shakira tomorrow.”
Departures:
LOVE Island has kicked off it’s 12th season and the series is set for more drama than ever before.
In tonight’s episode viewers called for a lad to be kicked out as they begged producers to save his partner.
In a show first, Maya Jama decided to mix things up by letting the girls choose the boys without seeing what they looked like first.
The first six of the lads then walked into the villa and were instantly matched up with one of the girls.
During their intros, the lads made a number of interesting comments.
One of the most memorable was from Blu Chegini, a construction manager based in London.
Chatting about his background Blu revealed his mum owned a sex shop in Marbella.
He then bragged that he didn’t have to pay for anything from the shop as his mum gave him everything for free.
And after partnering with personal banker Alima Gagigo – fans had plenty to say about him on social media.
“Blu is actually very rude, need him out my villa asap #LoveIsland,” demanded one viewer.
Antonia Laites (BOMBSHELL) and Ben
Meg and Dejon Noel Williams
Sophie Lee and Harry Cooksley
Helena and Conor Phillips
Alima Gagigo and Blu
Megan Forte Clarke and Tommy
At risk – Shakira Khan
Another added: “Blu pack your bags, you’re going HOME.”
“Oh Blu needs to get out my villa save alima,” agreed a third fan of the show.
While one viewer said: “Alima going home? Blu sounds like he will do anything to get away.”
“That Blu guy does not sit well with my spirit. I want him gone. Sorreh,” agreed another.
For all the latest on Love Island keep up to date with our live blog.
Departures:
Have YOU got a story or an amazing picture or video? Email exclusive@the-sun.co.uk and you could even get PAID
NICOLE Scherzinger looked destined to end up on the showbiz scrapheap.
The singer and actress spent years in increasingly mundane talent show judging roles.
Then her much-anticipated return to music with The Pussycat Dolls ended in disaster when a row with the group’s manager in 2021 derailed their comeback for good.
But on Sunday night, the sexy US star, 46, cemented a major career U-turn when she was named Best Actress In A Musical at the prestigious Tony Awards, thanks to her powerful turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
Now, Nicole is the toast of Broadway thanks to her critically-acclaimed performance, and is being courted for a string of stage and screen roles — something she could not have dreamed of just a few years ago.
The star, who also won an Olivier Award for the role last year following the show’s run in London, said: “I want to do it all.
“I would like to do movies and movie musicals. I would like to build my own show. There are roles I would like to create.
“It’s validating and it’s fulfilling because I know that I’m on the right path. I know I’m back where I was born to be.
“When you see the show, you see the real depths of me as an actor and as a singer.
“I want to encourage people to keep an open mind and an open heart.
“You never know where your unexpected dream opportunity is going to come from.”
Nicole has already had talks over a movie version of Sunset Boulevard and has been approached about returning to the West End in other productions.
But at the Tony Awards ceremony in New York, where she teared up on stage, she said: “This has been a very healing process for me.
“I always felt like I wasn’t living my full potential and full purpose. I was never happy with myself.
“It is because I knew I had so much more to give. And this role and this opportunity allowed me to give all of me. It’s changed my life.
“But it has been hard. It has not been an easy road.
“I am so grateful that I am able to connect to people on a spiritual and soulful level and I could make a difference in these people’s lives.
“That is exactly what we do it for. So I am thankful.”
Nicole had a number of theatre roles as a youngster, before joining the Pussycat Dolls and scoring a string of hit records.
She went on to release two solo albums and become a judge on shows including The X Factor and The Masked Singer US.
Her role in Cats on the West End from 2014 to 2015 was a success.
But she infuriated Andrew Lloyd Webber by pulling out of the show’s US run on Broadway just a week before rehearsals were due to begin.
He said at the time: “I mean, she’s crazy. But the American producers just took a view, ‘Well, fine, we’ll get somebody else’ because she’s actually not very well known in America. She’s much better known here.
“I’m furious because I really believe she’s the most fantastically talented girl and I went out on a limb to get her for the London Palladium here, and it makes me look like an absolute twot with them all.”
Despite their parting of ways, Nicole still credits composer Andrew with masterminding her success after he became one of her biggest supporters.
He wrote the music for Sunset Boulevard and championed her landing that role.
Thanking him in her Tonys acceptance speech, she said: “Andrew Lloyd Webber, it’s happened. It’s been such an honour to create with you.”
Nicole’s musical career has been a rollercoaster in recent years. In 2019, The Pussycat Dolls announced they were reuniting for a UK arena tour and new music. Their first single, React, broke the Top 40.
This has been 30 years in the making and I’ve been working and fighting for this my whole life.
Nicole Scherzinger
It seemed like things were finally on the up, but Covid repeatedly delayed their tour and, by 2022, the trek was axed amid a legal row between Nicole and the group’s founder, Robin Antin.
Those mainstream career choices put paid to her ambitions on stage and screen, and she has now said she felt blacklisted from the industry.
Opening up about her years-long battle to be taken seriously, Nicole explained: “Like so many people, I was put in a box.
“It is hard when you feel like, your whole career, you’ve been fighting to be seen and fighting to show what you’re truly capable of.
“Ten years back after The Dolls, I really wanted to go back to doing musical theatre stuff. It’s like where my heart is.
“And there was no path to do that. People weren’t even allowing me to be seen for filmed musicals and some live stuff going on.
“They just wouldn’t even consider seeing me, like ‘That’s going to be a waste of our time’. I was like, ‘They’re not taking me seriously’.”
But when forward-thinking theatre producer Jamie Lloyd, 45, eventually approached her with the life-changing role of Norma Desmond, her first reaction was to feel insulted.
The show, which also won Best Revival Of A Musical at the Tonys, tells the story of a faded and deluded 50-year-old film star who refuses to accept her streak of fame is over.
She then hires a screenwriter to help write a movie to relaunch her career, although it doesn’t go to plan and the production culminates with Nicole covered in blood on stage.
In a 2023 interview, recalling her reaction to being offered the part, the star said: “I was like, ‘Are you out of your mind?’. First of all, I still look great under bright lights.
“And isn’t that an older woman who is, like, an old relic? How does that even remotely have anything to do with me?’.
“I was, like, ‘Yo, this chick is crazy. I don’t want to play her. She crazy’.”
Before taking the part, Nicole had been working on relaunching her solo music career, although massive acting roles now beckon instead.
She said: “This is my childhood dream come true. I feel like I win every night when people tell me how my performances impact them.
“This has been 30 years in the making and I’ve been working and fighting for this my whole life.
“I cannot believe I won a Tony against an unbelievable category of (women). But I have come home (Broadway) and am back where I was born to be.”
By her side throughout her career redemption has been former rugby player Thom Evans, who she met when he competed on The X Factor: Celebrity in 2019.
They got engaged in 2023 and she thanked him on stage during her speech.
She said: “For my fiance Thom, who believes in me, when I forget to believe in myself.”
But her newfound popularity may mean an even longer wait is in store for their nuptials.
Asked last week if they would be tying the knot soon, Nicole said: “Yes, we will get married.
“We’re engaged to be married when I’m not working. Thank God he is so patient. We’ll get married back home in Hawaii, where my family is from.”
It clearly hasn’t been easy on either of them to have Nicole doing eight shows a week for most of the last two years, as she has changed her life for the part.
In an interview with Sirius XM in the States, she said: “I live like a hermit. I try not to do much.
“I still take my meetings and do work that I have to do and wherever they need me.
“I feel like every performance, I leave my soul and my voice out there on the stage.
“So I kind of live like a hermit. I don’t really do much. I just drink a lot of water.”
She added: “I train like an Olympian. Before I go on stage, it’s like I am a boxer and that is the level I have to get emotionally and physically ready.
“I train myself like a weapon. We are warriors.”
VLADIMIR Putin has begun deploying kamikaze drones that select their own targets using AI in a fresh assault on Ukraine.
The country now faces over 500 attacks every night, just days after Kharkiv was rocked overnight by a downpour of missiles.
Reports said the UAV-V2U is being used to close in on the northeastern city of Sumy, while Putin ramps up drone production and builds new launch sites.
It comes after Moscow fired more than 400 drones and 45 missiles across Ukraine in two days.
Some 70 units a day are now being made compared to just 21 last year, according to Ukraine‘s military intelligence.
This is largely thanks to help from China, the agency has said, as the UAV is “mostly assembled from Chinese-manufactured components.”
Beijing has repeatedly denied supplying drones or weapon components to Russia, whilst Trump and Biden have both hit China with sanctions to stop it getting access to computer chips.
Marking a new escalation in the war, the drones use camera images to navigate and AI to independently locate targets.
The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine said: “The key feature of the drone is its ability to autonomously search for and select targets using artificial intelligence.
“Its computing system is based on the Chinese Leetop A203 minicomputer, with a high-speed processor assembly built on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin module.”
This comes just hours after drones and missiles were launched at Kyiv as Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bombers were reportedly unleashed to rain hell on the infamous Snake Island in the Black Sea.
Moscow launched a massive strike on Rivne using its Tu-22M3 and Tu-95MS strategic bombers to hit Dubny airbase.
Squadrons of these fighter jets were targeted and destroyed last week in Kyiv’s daring Operation Spiderweb.
Another key Ukrainian military airport – Hostomel – was also attacked as Putin sought revenge for the humiliating attack.
Polish armed forces command said Nato fighter jets were patrolling due to “intensive air attack by the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory”.
Just days ago, Kharkiv was rocked overnight as 48 kamikaze drones, along with missiles and guided bombs, slammed into residential areas, according to the city’s mayor.
“We have a lot of damage,” Ihor Terekhov said.
More than 50 explosions rocked Kharkiv, with the mayor adding it was “the most powerful attack” on the city of the 39-month war.
In the latest terror strikes on civilians, 18 multi-story buildings and 13 private houses were hit and damaged.
In Kyiv, a dramatic tower block video filmed by a resident showed the terror of another Putin strike on civilians as flames from the exploding drone shot some 80ft up the building.
Three were killed and at least 21 wounded, including a six-weeks-old baby, and a 14-year-old girl.
A woman, 26, trapped under a slab of concrete was eventually freed three hours after the strike, and was seen being stretchered to an ambulance.
Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha described how hundreds of drones and missiles “rained down” on his country overnight.
He wrote in a social media post: “Kharkiv had a particularly terrible night.
“People were injured and killed, and the energy infrastructure was also damaged.”
Sybiha added there were further strikes in the Donetsk, Dnipro, Ternopil and Odesa regions.
A JUDGE has dismissed actor Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit against Blake Lively.
The actress had accused Baldoni of sexually harassing her while filming the 2024 movie “It Ends With Us.”
Wayfarer Studios produced the romantic drama that Baldoni wrote and directed.
The film’s behind-the-scenes tension sparked months of speculation about drama between the two leading stars until Lively filed her lawsuit in December last year.
Today’s opinion is a total victory and a complete vindication for Blake Lively
Lively's lawyers Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson
Lively also accused Baldoni and his team of orchestrating a smear campaign to ruin her reputation – but Baldoni flipped the tables in a new federal lawsuit.
Baldoni then accused Lively and Sloane of creating negative publicity to drag his name, according to court documents obtained by The U.S. Sun.
He went on to counter-sue for $400m the following month alleging he had been defamed and that the damage to his reputation had cost him lucrative working opportunities.
The docs claimed Lively set out to make Baldoni the “real-life villain in her story.”
Baldoni accused Lively and Sloane of scheming against him to deflect from the actress being seen as “tone-deaf” during the press tour for the movie.
The actor said his co-star promoted her hair care and alcohol lines while doing press for the movie, which is about domestic violence.
In the suit, Baldoni said he and Lively started battling for creative control over the movie once they started shooting in May 2023. He included emails from the time to prove his point.
He also called out Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds and close friend Taylor Swift for getting involved in the project.
Meanwhile, Lively claimed in a lawsuit that Baldoni fat-shamed her, showed her nude videos and pictures, and spoke about a previous alleged porn addiction while on set.
She also claimed to have asked for “no more adding of sex scenes, oral sex or on camera climaxing outside the scope of the script approved when signing onto the project.”
The actress said Baldoni’s actions caused her and her family “severe emotional distress.”
U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman today dismissed Baldoni’s multi-million dollar lawsuit.
He said Lively’s harassment allegations were kept privileged after being made to a California state agency.
This meant they were shielded from the defamation claim by Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios, ruled the judge.
In a 132-page document, Liman also rejected Baldoni’s related $250 million lawsuit against the New York Times.
Liman said how Baldoni alleged Lively shared the privileged CRD complaint to the Times, while her husband Ryan Reynolds and her publicist made sexual harassment claims they believed to be true.
He wrote: “The Wayfarer Parties’ conclusory allegations that the Lively, Reynolds, and Sloane engaged in a conspiracy to defame the Wayfarer Parties by disseminating knowingly false statements cannot substitute for factual allegations supporting a plausible inference that this occurred.”
Liman added that the Times would never have been aware if the Wayfarer parties had planned a negative publicity campaign, even if it was never carried out.
“Freedoms of expression require breathing space, and a publisher must be permitted to publish the story that it believes in good faith to be before it,” Liman wrote.
The judge concluded the director could file a more detailed and concise lawsuit against the mum-of-four, if it was focused on contractual issues.
Lively’s lawyers Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson said in a joint statement: “Today’s opinion is a total victory and a complete vindication for Blake Lively.
“As we have said from day one, this $400 million lawsuit was a sham.”
And, Lively shared a statement on her Instagram after the decision was announced.
“Last week, I stood proudly alongside 19 organizations united in defending women’s rights to speak up for their safety,” she wrote.
“Like so many others, I’ve felt the pain of a retaliatory lawsuit, including the manufactured shame that tries to break us.
“While the suit against me was defeated, so many don’t have the resources to fight back.
“I’m more resolved than ever to continue to stand for every woman’s right to have a voice in protecting themselves, including their safety, their integrity, their dignity and their story.
“There are protections out there. Check out some of the incredible organizations below for some resources and information.”
The actress listed contact details for numerous lawyers in her post.
She signed off her statement: “With love and gratitude for the many who stood by me, many of you I know. Many of you I don’t. But I will never stop appreciating or advocating for you. B.”
Lively is still seeking unspecified triple and punitive damages.
A trial has been set for March 2026.
This comes after Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, earlier this year launched a website releasing 168 pages of emails, text messages and WhatsApps between Baldoni and Lively.
Freedman defended his actions in court, saying: “Not to sound like a four-year-old fighting a four-year-old with ‘but they started it’ but once someone says something it becomes fact, there’s no way to fight against it.
“You start to lose things without the ability to have the court’s adjudication. This was not started by us.”
Meanwhile, in May, Taylor Swift was also dragged into the legal clash.
She broke her silence after being served with a document subpoena amid the feud.
The furious pop superstar’s team issued a statement after being ordered to provide evidence, which Baldoni’s team believes is relevant to the case.
A statement from an official Taylor Swift Spokesperson denied any involvement in the pair’s issues on the set of the movie It Ends With Us.
Her team claimed her loose link to the film – the use of her 2020 track My Tears Ricochet – was a way of dragging her name into proceedings to boost publicity surrounding the trial.
Lively’s representatives also attacked the subpoena, and claimed Baldoni’s teams were trying to turn a serious matter into entertainment.
SUNNY-side up eggs are out as a major recall is underway after nearly 2 million cartons were found to be contaminated with a dangerous bacteria.
Consumers are being warned not to eat runny yolks or sunny side up eggs, which may not get hot enough to kill pathogens.
California-based August Egg Company has recalled 1.7 million brown cage-free and organic eggs across several states.
The FDA confirmed the eggs are linked to a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis infections.
So far, 79 people have fallen ill and 21 have been hospitalized.
The outbreak stretches across at least nine states, including Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Washington.
Officials fear the recalled eggs may still be in home refrigerators.
The affected eggs were sold between February 29 and May 17.
A total of 29 branded cartons are included in the recall, such as Raleys, Simple Truth, and Sun Harvest.
Other brands include Clover, First Street, Nulaid, O Organic, Marketside, and Sunnyside.
The eggs were sold in stores like Walmart, Save Mart, Safeway, Smart & Final, Food 4 Less, Ralphs, and FoodMaxx.
27 out of 30 patients that were interviewed had reported consuming them before falling ill.
An inspection of the company’s processing facility confirmed traces of Salmonella at the site.
The bacteria spread quickly through contaminated equipment.
Salmonella causes diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, and fever.
Symptoms usually begin within six hours to six days after exposure.
“August Egg Company of Hilmar, CA is voluntarily recalling 1,700,000 dozen shell eggs processed at our California plant and sold to various grocery customers.
“This recall has been initiated due to possible Salmonella enteritidis contamination, which poses a health risk.
“With that in mind, we believe it is appropriate out of an abundance of caution to conduct this voluntary recall, as consumers may still have these eggs in their homes.
“It is important to know that when our processing plant identified this concern, we immediately began diverting all eggs from the plant to an egg-breaking facility, which pasteurizes the eggs and kills any pathogens.
“August Egg Company’s internal food safety team also is conducting its own stringent review to identify what measures can be established to prevent this situation from recurring.
“We are committed to addressing this matter fully and to implementing all necessary corrective actions to ensure this does not happen again.”
Source: FDA
Children, older adults and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk.
Customers can find the Julian Date printed on the short side of each carton.
A Julian Date is used in grocery stores and food manufacturers to indicate the day on which bulk products are packaged.
Recalled eggs have a Julian Date between 32 and 126.
Sell-by dates range from March 4 through June 19, depending on the shipment.
Officials have advised consumers to toss the eggs or return them for a full refund.
Eggs can become contaminated internally or when bacteria on the shell has penetrated inside the egg.
Experts say cooking eggs thoroughly, such as boiling or frying, kills the bacteria.
Salmonella cannot survive in temperatures above 140F.